Blue Lines / Worst Ads

My most hated advert has got to be the one sung to the tune of "Go West" by that bloke with the ridiculously broad West Country accent on the platform at Waterloo station - Ambrosia, wasn't it? Mind you, that was the first one that came to my mind and there are probably hundreds which evoke a similar feeling of revulsion in me.

These are indeed profoundly dangerous and depressing times in Britain. Fully agreed with most of what you say about the oil crisis, and the necessity of a good, strong government and Prime Minister *not* to give into instant, populist demands (I've long believed that giving into what the tabloids and phone-in shows are shouting for at one moment is the absolute antithesis of what a government is there to do). However ...

Your gut reaction is every bit as reactionary, absurd and unfounded as anything Hague and his acolytes could come out with. Of course there is racism in rural areas, but London has more than its fair share of far-right activism and intolerance of multi-culturalism, and rural Britain boasts more than enough radicalism and revolt in its history to balance the vision of these people (and show up the colossal lie, and shameful historical reductionism and revisionism, that they are perpetrating). The protestors - who I loathe passionately, partially for their selfish obsession with the car culture and partially for the way they give the rest of us in rural areas a bad name - do *not* speak for rural Britain, and there is actually no area where they are in the majority (just as there is not one place *anywhere* in Britain where the majority support foxhunting). I'm afraid, Tom, that you have been misled into your gut reaction by the mainstream media's misrepresentation and onesidedness, which is not something I'd have expected of you.

I have no particularly strong feelings about the Ambrosia ads. We had to analyse it in one training course: the main problem I can see is that it's flogging nasty rice pudding.

Anyway, yes, my gut reaction was absurd, Robin. I was putting it in as a contrast to the gut reactions of the 'great British public' precisely to point up the absurdity of going on "gut reactions" in the first place.

But what did you think of the REDESIGN?

Yes, I hate Ambrosia, but I hate bad West Country accents in adverts more :).

Of course your gut reaction was every bit as absurd as those coming from the right-wing press, and I appreciate that you posted it as a means of countering the absurdity and irrationality of *all* gut reactions. I can only reassure you, though, that it is very, very wrong.

Oh and the new design is excellent BTW :).

The Ambrosia advert is very good and even my Devon friends like it. The worst adverts at the moment are the Griff Rhys Jones ones for Vauxhall and the will-it-ever-go-away series of Standard Life (?) ads with that demonic child asking questions about personal finance. Both of them require me to turn over.

My other non-fave is the car one with a dinner party because I don't understand what's going on and this makes me cross

N. x

Even your Devon friends like the Ambrosia advert, Nick? You mean they actually *like* being laughably patronised, stereotyped and talked down to by the London-based advertising industry (and media generally)?

Depressing. While such attitudes remain, *nothing* will change in this country (and there are many things that *should* change).

Cheers to Robin for once again standing strong against anything which fails to portray rural Britain as a proud and vibrant hotbed of radical thought and intelligent action.

The Ambrosia ad is ridiculous of course, but then (as someone who grew up in Devon and who gets laughed at every time it is on the TV) I find it quite amusing. He's riding a cow. And it's been reclaimed by fans of the glorious Exeter City FC ("Oooh -AAAAAR! We are Exeter...") which makes it all the better. Maybe that's something to do with a sense of humour.

The mass media necessarily works on generalisations, and if it makes you fume so, my suggestion is you stay away from it. Portraying the people of rural Britain as peculiar folk with strange accents is hardly the greatest crime they commit. Apart from anything else, my direct experience of rural Britons, north and south, is that they tend to be peculiar folk with strange accents. And yes, I am including myself in that.

There may be a history of righteous revolt in rural regions, but I think if I were looking for radical thought these days, the very last place I would look would be to farmers.

It occurs to me that city-dwellers are also subject to preposterous generalisations, by the way. As are suburbanites.

Oh, and to say that all gut reactions are absurd is, in itself, absurd.

'Oos let the bleddy sheep out again? Get orf moi LAAAAAAND! Zyder armadilloes all round.

The whole BT/ET thing makes me puke. I'm not going to try and make the case that this campaign represents the defilement of a sacred work of art, or even that "ET" was a great film, but *come on*. Spielberg's original wrinkly creation was awash with a fair amount of schmaltz and manipulative hooey, but the mundane family scenes (rather like "Close Encounters") were pretty good. Now we get the Extra Detestable in a Brit family, his special powers devoted to brainwashing everyone into spending their entire frigging lives plugged into the phone network. Heh-heh - it's SO cute... "phone home", ET rhymes with BT... Jesus Z Christ On The Cross BEING Crucified, people get paid for this? Fine, let them dissolve their septa in a snowy fug of powdery profligacy and then BURN THEM.

One ad I love: the KitKat one with the dog-track hare. Now, that's comedy.

No, Tim, all gut reactions *are* absurd.

The mass media doesn't *have* to work on generalisations, it hasn't always, it's just got that way through laziness and neglect (Rupert Murdoch, Clive Hollick, Broadcasting Act 1990, Carlton, Conrad Black, John Birt, where do you fucking *start*?).

Of course most farmers don't hold radical thoughts *now*, but then they never ever did. The radicals were always the oppressed and fucked-over rural working classes, never the landowners, the squires, the masters of the feudal system. As somebody has written in the visitors' book at the Tolpuddle Martyrs' Museum, the ruling classes haven't changed.

I know the people you mix with, Tim. They are, to be quite honest, the sort of people who *do* find Devon inherently funny. I steer clear of them alright. I choose not to live in London, which is the only way to ensure you never encounter them.

Football fans, on the whole, play up to regional stereotypes in their chants (West Ham fans do the same thing for East London; no surprise then that the National Front magazine "Bulldog" was freely sold outside Upton Park for ten years). Maybe that's why I am, at best, an armchair football fan. They don't know how much they're letting their "own" cause down. No sense of humour? Maybe, but there are worse sins than having no sense of humour. I'd rather be a humourless, serious, campaigning, committed Student Grant any day than stand on a fucking freezing football terrace laughing and joking and convincing the visiting fans how backward everyone is round here.

Damn you, Hopkins :).

Excellent and readable blog, though :).

All the best, Robin (np: Jay-Z, "Come And Get Me")

I'm with Tim here...its called taking the piss....being from rural Ireland, I've gotten used to it...many rural politicians here have played on the thick, shit-arsed gobshite ticket and have proven to be a right bunch of devious money-grabbing bastards...Serves those Dubliners right..Anyway, is that bloody Jennifer Aniston...is she the 90's version of Farrah Fawcett or what?