Glade Touch ‘n’ Fresh

Where to start? As I live and breathe, I literally do not know where to start. Everything about this redubbed, repetitive nightmare is wrong. It’s all wrong. Pwoar – it stinks! It’s all wrong.

Let’s go from the start. A small oriental lad sits on the toilet and we inhabit his childish thoughts. He wafts his hand across his face ‘ Pwoar! It stinks!’ he thinks. He’s clearly just floated a particularly rancid love-log. He follows this up with ‘quick, quick!’ as he reaches for one of the most unnecessary bathroom products the world has ever not required – the Glade Touch ‘n’ Fresh. This is a wall-mounted air freshener (which no doubt smells of sweetened diethyl ether) and the advert attempts to flog the refills, so that nobody befalls the same fate as this poor twat, who can scarcely breathe following the acrid dumping he’s flopped into the bowl, all brown and stenchy.

His mouth doesn’t move when we hear him think the existentialist angst-ridden lament: ‘it’s all gone, all gone!’. But  somehow his mother weirdly taps into his stream of consciousness and asks ‘what’s happening, darling?’. I presume it’s his mother as she refers to him so affectionately, but visually she’s about seven ethnic origins removed from him, so whoever did the casting should’ve been sacked, set ablaze or shot.

‘It’s all gone, it’s all gone’ he replies. How many times have we heard the word ‘gone’ by now? Too many. Then the voiceover reiterates. ‘Touch ‘n’ Fresh has all gone! It’s empty’.

How many times, you deaf bastards? It’s fucking empty, alright? EMPTY. Just like your pointless lives.

Moving on, to demonstrate the source of his pain, the young man passes a picture under the door of the Glade device with an arrow pointing to its emptiness, using the word ’empty’. Yes: empty. The fact he slides the picture in this way suggests he wants his mother to respect his privacy, but confusingly in the next shot we see her refilling it, with the little sod still perched atop the bog.

Does anyone actually buy this stuff? Even aerosol air fresheners are pointless and archaic, aren’t they? Can’t people just open a sodding window without buying more landfill-destined crap? Whoever’s buying this tat – it’s your fault this advert – an advert so bad you lose IQ points whilst watching it – it’s your fault this even exists. I hate you.

One Minute Review: ‘Emily, I’ by Scrabbel

If something is shit, it’s simply shit. Hey, no problem.

When something tries desperately to be witty, cool, ‘off the wall, ‘knowing’, and fails, then my blood pressure rises. After watching this video I was so enraged I was left spitting at my computer with my face all red and puffy.

Using bits of stop motion animation and live footage of this appalling group of wankers all being funny and wotnot by dressing as animals and ‘larking’ about- we are left with what is possibly the worst piece of crap ever seen in the history of mankind. To add insult to injury, some prick has spent a great deal of time on this bollocks. Take the animation for example, out of context it isn’t that offensive, in context it simply lends itself to underline the shit-flinging awfulness of the fucking video.

The band, a sort of partially dieted Magic Numbers, but far, far worse (and that’s saying something), they display vastly over-inflated egos which tower so far over their insignificant talents it makes me feel physically ill. The sickening cutesiness of their supposed image, the attempted nonchalance, the cunting costumes… I can’t do anymore on this. I need to fill my eyes with thick bleach in order to redress karma.

Oh – the song? Don’t get me started on that. Someone tell them the fucking 60s is over.

Music Video: The Girl Is Mine

When off one’s trolley it’s always tempting (for me anyway) to rifle about in Youtube for some old classics to haphazardly jaunt around the front room to. Usually these take the form of complete and utter drivel from the 80s like Eric Carmen’s hideously sublime ‘Hungry Eyes’, or perhaps Men At Work’s mindless plodalong ‘Land Down Under’. Essentially, if it’s shit, it goes on.

Once in a while, you mistakenly click on a fan video – meaning some lonely internet berk has spent time and effort piecing together a visual for a song. This can take the form of them singing into a hairbrush in person in front of a webcam, but occasionally it’s just a badly constructed series of stills enhanced using low rent special effects.

The above video is one of the most disturbing examples of the latter that I’ve uncovered during one of these drunken trawls through Youtube’s seemingly infinite treasure chest of effluents.

The girl in the video will be well known to anyone who purchased, borrowed or shoplifted a copy of the reputable, high-street sperm-pamphlet Mayfair at any point between 1996 and, I estimate, 1999. Her name is/was Veronika and she was on the front cover of the mag regularly, probably because she provoked fevered onanists to scribble rapturous appraisals of her large hooters after they’d kleenexed their pen-hands,  mailing their love-letters off to the mag in the hope their beloved would appear in the next issue. She was a very attractive jizz-model, it has to be said – in the mould of that overseas tit-carrier in American Pie. A lovely girl. It’s not entirely worrying for a heterosexual male to develop a two-dimensional crush on such a frequently disrobed glamour-bird, so long as the relationship is kept quiet – an unspoken love-triangle betwixt the glossy page, the right hand and the bachelor.

The song, as you probably know, is The Girl Is Mine – a weird collaboration between those two humbled titans of the music industry, Paul McPaul McCartney and Michael ‘Jesus-Juice’ Jackson. Both parties obsessively claim their right to an unnamed lady in an unintentionally amusing vocal scrap. After single-handedly removing usage of the word ‘doggone’ from the English language, they then indulge in a brilliantly rubbish spoken word segment (around the three minute mark).

When the two are juxtaposed as in the video I share with you today, the conglomeration of terrible music and creepy video takes on a life of its own. The girl they’re fighting over becomes Veronika, the familiar starlet of Brit grot mags.

It suddenly feels all sexual and perverse, as though Jackson and Macca are sharing a bedsit and sitting about in their off-white Y fronts, arguing over who gets to ‘date’ Veronika tonight, whilst tugging at either end of a dog-eared copy of Mayfair.

I can’t work out if this was made for a joke – if the man who created it was aware of what he was doing. I suspect and hope that he meant it sincerely, as this means it stands as an unironic testament to the web’s weirdness and Veronika’s unparallelled beauty.

One Minute Review: Visit Malta

 

The cheapest ad ever made? The ‘music’, possibly recorded in the canteen of the Malta Tourist board, sounds a bit like ‘Dreams’, the monotone nasal drone performed by that pseudo one-eyed nit Gabrielle, before lurching off in such wild directions of musical incompetence that I think it may have been written and recorded after work by the dinner ladies and Pedro, the potty mouthed Maltese cook with the limp and the built up shoe.

Now the graphics, we’re slowly drip fed still images of heroin-blue skies, LSD flowers, cocaine white beaches all punctuated by grinning orange pricks in garish Muumuus, all bordered off, like those postcards sent to you in June by Auntie and Uncle Dubious-Income who have an all round perma-tan and less taste than a darts player’s mantlepiece as the music shrieks and jumps in the background/your face.

In short, it’s fucking cheap shit; I’d no sooner go to Malta on the back of this advert than drop my testicles into a bucket of discarded hospital syringes.

One Minute Review: Activia

 

 Ooooooooh – Danone…

Nell McNell McAndrew, who as far as I can recall is famous for absolutely nothing apart from being inanimate and having a face that refuses to shift from an expression of gormlessness, wanders around a bright white set punctuated by a lot of green things – green fridge, bowl of green apples, green sofa etc… and tells us we can sort out our ‘bloated feeling’ by consuming Activia.

Next time this advert’s on TV, notice how much of the screen is taken up by green stuff. Everything’s bloody green. When it finishes, your eyes take half an hour adjusting. Norris from Coronation Street appears with his face in a lime green hue. Phil and Fern have got olive-tinted jowls. Saturday Cooks is submerged in an ocean of chartreuse.

It’s all too green. Too, too green.

GREEN.

Hugh’s Chicken Run

 

It’s only pertinent that I, Piqued, head up the fucking row – I mean debate – that has been brought to mine face by Hugh F Whitting-Wotsit over the past three evenings on Channel 4 (which, when I read, I hear it in my head as ‘ChA-NEALL fOOOR’ on account of this West Indian male announcer they employed back in the day. I digress) due to an ongoing discussion regarding a certain Mr. Bernard Matthews and his Chicken Kiev(s).

The premise is simple. Start two chicken farms, one a cuddly free range one, and the other a scene from a painting by Bosch/Breugal depicting hellish acts of (in this case, chicken) damnation – a battery shed.

From scratch the redoubtable Hugh FW cheerily goes about collating information/resources/experts in order to realise his dream of converting the straw-chewing bumpkins of Axminster to go free-range by demonstrating that shoving 50,000 birds into an area the size of a hankie isn’t a very nice thing to do (actually it’s 19 birds to a square metre) where they don’t have access to daylight to increase their growing time from chick to slaughter, which takes just over a month. Obviously the free range fellas are provided with their own five bedroom houses, top of the range Lexus, wide screen TV’s (three of) and a games room, with a full size snooker table and bar.

Hugh’s campaign got off to a bright start by recruiting some families who worked in the nearby allotments. After a brief period of doubt, he made them physically see the different ways of rearing chickens: the lot reclining on Chesterfields reading The Telegraph and other the poor sods pecking shit out of their dead mates’ arseholes in the dark. Apart from one fat cow called Hayley, all were converted tearfully on the spot.

But not all was well in the village. The locals (and really, this lot were a fucking good reason for never leaving London) barked and grunted paranoid abuse in the direction of Hugh and his campaign. Within hours, there were rumours that Hugh’s free range chickens cost ‘twenty pund’. The thick inbred cunts – sorry, did that come out loud? All this as Hugh tirelessly attempted to sign up shops to sell free-range produce. After a hilarious confrontation at the local Tesco (who up until this point had been totally uncooperative, as had the Co-operative, ironically) in which the manager thought Hugh had called him an arsehole, he began to make some progress.

Incidentally, in terms of the campaign having a long term and far-reaching sustainability, Sainsburys seemed to be by far and away the most prepared to assist Hugh’s Chicken Out campaign on a national level. We’ll see…

Overall, the programme was a success. This was due entirely to Hugh’s determination and enthusiasm for his campaign. He was obviously upset at the battery conditions he’d created in order to highlight his plight – on one occasion he was reduced to tears after having to dispatch yet another suffering creature from the intensively reared chicken shed and I noticed his language got all blue and rude due to his exasperation at the backward-thinking townsfolk and money-grabbing corporates as a symptom of his passion.

In all this, however, there was one major flaw, something that vegetarians understand, and for good reason. The bottom line, despite the way they were reared (though I maintain free-range rearing is paramount) is that all the creatures wound up being caught and knacked in the same way, carted off in cramped conditions, hung up upside down on a conveyor, stunned in electrified water and having their throats slit open by the sticker, all for the food industry. I do eat meat, I didn’t used to precisely because of the whole killing part and I am careful to make sure I eat free range/organic birds. But really, eating a free-range animal will always remain the lesser of two evils and no amount of campaigning will change that.

Oooh – look – Piqued just got all serious and deep. I’m off to KFC to recover.

The One and Only

I subjected myself to the latest talent show offering from the BBC over the weekend – The One and Only. And then, horrified, I found myself enjoying it.

After viewing fluff of this kind, your head tends to devolve into a kind of goo. It’s television sticking it’s head out of it’s own anus and saying ‘fuck you!’ to the viewer while spitting poo onto the carpet. But it’s so easily digestable and so simple to absorb, it rolls over you like a numb duvet.

Hosted by rentapillock, Graham Norton, Britain’s greatest tribute acts battle it out over eight weeks to win the title of ‘Britain’s One and Only Greatest Tribute Act’. Think of winning that title. It makes your balls-ache, your lips quiver and your bumhole do a squelch. Moist!

How far has TV come with this trend for bastardising that old-classic-that was-actually-always-shit, New Faces? I’ll tell you how far: TV has taken Stars in their Eyes and strung it up by its neck, nude. And now, having gently squeezed its balls in a threatening manner, he’s now got them gripped in his fist as New Faces howls with a guttural yelp.

I actually found myself rooting for one or two of the contestants. Rather than being auditioned on camera like some of the obviously talentless idiots on Cowell’s X Factor, we only see three of the best from each category fighting it out. And when you consider that these people might make a career out of a sprinkling of success in the competition (i.e. a few more pub bookings), it actually puts X Factor to shame. Michelle McManus, where are you now?

My favourite moment last Saturday was when lovable ginger wigga Moni fought off the competition to win the Lionel Richie category, selected by three members of Lionel’s fan club. That’s right. I was spiritually lifted on a Saturday night by a ginger man pretending to be an 80s soul singer. If you think too hard about that, you start eyeing up knives and regarding them as wrist-slitters rather than handy food-slicers.

On the other hand, I was gutted when the superfans selected the WRONG Rod Stewart. It was an ageist choice, based not on talent but on the hollow appeal of youth. I actually shouted at the screen.

‘YOU’VE GOT THE WRONG ROD’, I hollered, before running to the window and shouting my opinion to the world.

‘THEY’VE GOT THE WRONG ROD’.

So, as you can see, I’ve allowed myself to get too involved, too quickly. It’ll only end in tears, once this sublime honeymoon period has worn off. As it stands, I’m just looking forward to my next date with Graham Norton on Saturday night. Coo-ee!

Ho Ho Ho! Christmas Comedy

 

You are presented with a Christmas cracker. You pull it with your dear old mum. The cracker contains liquid dog shit that covers you and your mum in shit. You end up with shit all in your mouth, as does your mum. The shit then turns into a man made out of all shit and that. The shit-man bends your mum over and bum rapes her with his shit-cock. When he’s done, he wipes shit all over your mum’s arse then turns round and punches you with a big, shitty fist. The shit-fist bursts into a shower of shit and smothers your face in shit.

Christmas, you realise at this point, has turned to shit.

I’ve tried, but I can’t come up with any other way of describing the special Christmas edition of The Green Green Grass than the above passage. Maaaaaaaaarlene!

Then there was To The Manor Born, which achieved the magnificent feat of making you think you were watching a repeat of To The Manor Born on UKTV Gold. That’s not bad, considering this episode had never been aired before … yet it had … on UKTV Gold. Even though it hadn’t. Weird.

And it’s good to know that the likes of The Upper Hand, Goodnight Sweetheart and Birds of a Feather didn’t die in vain … because thanks to My Family, the flame of incompetent mainstream ‘comedy’ was burning bright this festive season. On The Up, Keeping Up Appearences, The Two Of Us, The Piglet Files, Three Up Two Down, and Brush Strokes – your legacy lives on!

And finally, Extras. Did you ever, in your wildest dreams, think you’d hear yourself say,

“Well it only really got going when Dean Gaffney showed up.”

No, neither did I.