Halifax

 

BASTARDS! BUTCHERS!

Will somebody please tell the scumbag, drug-addicted filth that runs our advertising ‘industry’ that the Halifax advertisments are NOT FUCKING WANTED. Is there anyone, honestly, who’s sat up in their chair when a new one comes on and said ‘Oooh, it’s a new Halifax advert … I like these’ as some tuneless fuck-knuckle who works for a bank butchers yet another hit record to sell a fucking mortgage?

The latest one features a fat, unattractive woman tearing holes out of Aretha Franklin’s Think. I saw it for the first time last night and was left wondering why the fuck the people who write these tunes (and they’re usually quite precious about these things) allow their lyrics to be butchered in this fashion? Surely it can’t be for the fucking money can it? Don’t they get enough royalties coming in when their songs are played every day on every music station in the world? Are they living in ditches, eating out of bins?

And what of their song’s reputation? Does it enhance a song in any way to be torn apart and reassembled for the sake of selling financial products? Is Rhinestone Cowboy (a song I’m inexplicably fond of for some weird reason) helped in any way when I find myself singing ‘Be a High-Rate Saver’ in the bath, as opposed to the more traditional ‘I’m a Rhinestone Cowboy’? I’m amazed any songwriter would allow their songs to be misused in this way.

And they’re just so awful! In the tradition of the B&Q adverts, they celebrate the talents of the talentless. If, for reasons that escape me, I want to hear some boggle-eyed goon mangle his mediocre way through Sex Bomb, I’ll go to a karaoke bar, thank-you very much. If I want to see an overweight woman dancing badly to a soul classic, I’ll go to You-Wouldn’t-Would-You night at my local cattle-market. If we must have these invasively dreadful pieces of crap foisted on us, can we at least have actors do it please? Because that’s their job.

Why hasn’t a senior Halifax executive turned round and said ‘Hang on! These adverts are really annoying … let’s stop making them’? Haven’t any of ’em got televisions for fuck’s sake? Don’t they have wives or children to ask, ‘Dad? Why do you allow these things on the television? Is it because you’re powerless to stop it, only following orders … like the Nazis?’

Please Halifax, no more! I will never, ever consider your bank for anything – not mortgages, not insurance, not savings accounts nor ISAs – because you’ve spent what seems like an eternity flogging a horse that was dead to begin with. Your advertising has failed, swine-dogs that you are – please stop before you commit the ultimate crime and bastardise Bohemian Rhapsody.