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Hello, it’s been a while. I popped out for nappies and forgot who I was for the last three years.

I looked at the hellscape of 2020 and I wondered what the point was. Also I became a Dad, therefore trading sleep, inspiration and cognitive function for eternal genetic slavery to a mini-me that is comfortably the most disorientating, exhausting and expensive thing I have ever done that resulted from having sex.

With a pandemic to add to the equation, everything else paled into insignificance, especially the new Windows Direct advert. But I sensed, like Batman coming out of a particularly long sulk, that I was once again needed. I looked around and, bafflingly, things were even more shit than they were when I was juggling a newborn, a full-time job, and a non-functioning N95 respirator the government had paid Michelle Mone £36m for. I rose from the couch, groaned at my bad back and promptly sat down again. And then I started typing…

With Christmas barely farted out onto the sofa of “I’m not ready to go back to work yet’, it’s tempting to think of the modern Tory Party as a particularly awful Dickensian construct playing out the worst update of A Christmas Carol yet. If it were a Dickens character it would be called Obadiah Slyme. The UK still feels like it’s trying to shrug off the deathly hand of its very own three ghosts of 2022, only this time instead of trying to make a miserable person happy, they were… well, you can probably see where this is going.

And what a trio they make. Johnson, the shambling old, sexually-incontinent duvet filled with pumps; Truss, the class dunce who think’s she’s actually headmistress; and Rishi Sunak, a man who embodies small dick energy by simple virtue of his height and, well, being a dick.

It’s perhaps no coincidence I started this blog in earnest in 2010 – and arguably it’s been more useful than the official opposition during that time. When Sunak and the last four Prime Ministers were asked whether they thought the Conservative Party had governed the country well over the last 13 years only 20% ‘somewhat agreed’ with that sentiment, with three of them going for ‘don’t know’ and a confused Truss simply writing “Liz Truss” on the ballot.

What’s this got to do with the adverts, then? For me it’s increasingly hard to distinguish where all the Bad Things start and end. Media, politics, war, Instagram, TikTok, OnlyFans, Jake Paul, Andrew Tate, Nigel Farage… we’re all advertisers now (also let’s pray that’s the last time we see OnlyFans and that braying, warm-beer-quaffing grifter mentioned in the same sentence).

Humanity seems fully signed up to the arms race of making everything baffling, unreal and terrifying because people are so much easier to control when they’re frightened (hello Verisure), stupid (hi Twitter) – or have literally no idea what to believe (that’ll be you, Asynchronous Warfare). The Northern Boys’ viral hit Party Time – with its exploration of rampant substance abuse, cheap sex and eventual suicide seems like the only sensible prescription for our current omnishambles.

Advertising – and what all the world’s lunatics gleaned from it – is the most obvious weapon used against us. Black is white, up is down and Suella Braverman isn’t a fictional witch made real whose only genuine enjoyment in life is the fanny flutter she gets when a migrant boat capsizes in the Channel. Our dystopia is real and it’s now – and we’re swallowing it down with lashings of Deliveroo, Amazon and that stupid Youtuber drink.

Well I’m not buying what they’re selling. And – at the insistence of at least 30 people – I’m back, pending fatherly responsibilities. Here are your worst adverts of 2022.

Asda / Elf advert

If spaff-drenched incels can convincingly AI Emma Watson’s face onto a spitroasted porn star, why on Earth can’t Asda do any better than a BBC-era Red Dwarf approximation of Will Ferrell talking awkwardly to some of their zero-hours-contracted staff while discussing Cif?

The concept here is not new: you remember this, you like this, so we’ll destroy it for you. But why must this stuff look as bad as an 90s advert that photoshops Ian Wright into a Martin Luther-King speech?

Will Ferrell has probably got a fucking packet, but can anyone muster the semblance of belief that the unnervingly tall Hollywood superstar could even set foot in one of Asda’s glorified meat raffles without chundering directly into the faces of anyone within a radius of 50 feet?

Santander advert – Bank of Ant & Dec

Is this the year lovable scamps Ant & Dec jumped the shark? The fun-sized TV hosts have endured a rocky patch of late, first with The One With The Forehead going public with his drink problems, and subsequently the twosome overseeing what looked like a post-apocalyptic version of perennial favourite I’m A Celebrity on a wet weekend near Rhyl. Still, having offal dumped on your head at an abandoned castle in return for a half a cabbage and a dead pigeon felt like invaluable prep for pandemic-ravaged, post-Brexit Britain.

The Geordie Geuo have been pretty careful to avoid advertising anything much over the years – beyond their hair transplants – no doubt being mindful of the value of their capital. In a poll of ‘most trustworthy celebrities’, Ant & Dec beat off competition from the likes of Captain Tom, the Ghost of Terry Wogan and even God. So the tykes must have thought long and hard before committing to this tortured Bank of AntandDec campaign, which sees them pretending to run a bank or something.

Santander says it has made customers 3% more likely to not brick their windows. The question is, is this the moment the country starts falling out of love with the Tyneside twerps? No-one stays at the top forever, after all.

Ant – it must be said – must be finding it increasingly hard to pull off the ‘cheeky youngster who is escorting your daughter to the Prom’ shtick, increasingly resembling a sad Toby jug topped off with a mound of sculpted chocolate ice-cream that’s adorning an out-of-reach shelf in a country pub. Only 25 more Jungles to go, lads.

Schofield / We Buy Any Car advert

I’m utterly impervious to the supposed delights of Phillip Schofield, a man I have detested since his broom cupboard days, when he ruled the airwaves as a frightening combination of hospital radio disc jockey and President of Plymouth University’s LGBT Conservatives club.

Schofield is, of course, one of those people you’re not allowed to dislike – much like Olivia Colman or Willy Wonka. But his reinvention as some sort of ironic television legend sticks in my craw. Whether he’s sharing a selfie with Boris Johnson, pretending to corpse over a carrot shaped like a cock on This Morning or being a knob to Carter USM I find the man deeply irritating. And that’s before the last five years of adverts for the much-hated WeBuyAnyCar (a company whose entire value proposition is that it pays you under the odds for your car) that pitch him somewhere between Yoda, Buddha and Eusebio.

Still, 2022 wasn’t all bad. Having jumped the queue to stare at a corpse, he was swiftly dumped by WeBuyAnyCar for a TikTok personality – perhaps the only job title more damning than ‘local character’. Schofield – or Supreme Lord Schofe as we will all be forced to call him in whatever Hellish dystopia 2023 has in store for us – has 4.4 MILLION followers on Twitter. Reflect on that and tell yourself we’re not totally fucked.

Ian Botham Revitive advert

With the quiet determination of a man intent on shitting over whatever’s left of his legacy comes Lord Beefy Botham of Brexit, lumbering across a field with all the elan of a concrete sumo wrestler. He’s here to extol – or not – the possible advantages of the Revitive Circulation Booster, a device that could stop your legs hurting. Or not.

Quite whether a man who is clearly morbidly obese is the best person to extol the advantages of Revitive is up to the company, though they might have expected him to deliver his lines with slightly more panache than an Ikea Billy bookcase. And to anyone who has followed Botham on Twitter, it’s certainly not obvious that he needs any help with blood circulation.

Marc Jacobs / Daisy advert

Is there a less deserving smugness that’s the unearned self-satisfaction of perfume adverts? They all give the impression of being on on a massive joke you’re not invited to be part of – and indeed they are. Because you could throw a dart into any of those shelves at the local B&M and hit a bottle that is more expensive by weight that enriched uranium. That’s the joke – there’s this smelly stuff you don’t actually want that costs more than a 2kg tub of Flora that you’re going to end up buying anyway. You’re not in on it because you’re the mark. The Marc Jacobs advert makes it explicit: they’re laughing at you.

I’m reminded of Matt Hancock – the man Harold Shipman would’ve aspired to be; the man who invented the most harrowing bushtucker trial of all, namely to be immunocompromised in a care home and then have hot Covid poured over your head – basking in the soupy embrace of I’m A Celebrity, nourished by the empty validation of telly-poll voters spattering all over his hairless, underdeveloped chest and childlike but still thinning pate.

You just know Hancock – a man up to his neck in stuff a lot more filthy than wallaby bell-ends – will take his meagre outback triumph and parade it as justification for his entire way of life, his party’s disastrous handling of Covid, a whole ideology. He’s never going to have that smile wiped off his face, no matter how unjust, how utterly unfair, that is. And that’s what makes this Marc Jacobs advert so infuriating. There will never be any comeuppance, not for Matt Hancock – and not for whoever came up with daisy, daisy, daisy or the hordes of idiots who exist in the whole wretched industry.

Domino’s advert

In this blog’s heyday the airwaves were packed with adverts that were explicitly designed to annoy. That trend seems to have largely disappeared, but there’s always one, eh? Domino’s Pizza – pound-for-pound the most expensive material in the known universe after anti-matter – fulfils the same function in my life as service stations and Wetherspoons toilets: usually something related to my stomach and only when absolutely unavoidable.

This alleged takeaway business, which seems largely in the business of delivering cold food matter incorrectly and several weeks late, certainly has chutzpah. In this latest advert featuring the infuriating Domino’s yodel – a sound even worse than listening to Julia Hartley-Brewer achieve orgasm – the company delivers some steaming hot pizza to three castaway guys at the mere sound of the summoning cry.

To anyone who has waited, fruitlessly, for their very expensive pizzas from this company to turn up only for it arrive colder than the icy heart of Dominic Raab and all squashed against one side of the pizza box like Harry Redknapp’s face, the yodelling adverts where piping hot pizzas show up faster than Tommy Robinson at a terrorist atrocity are like corporate trolling in ad format.

Hyularonic acid / L’Oreal advert

“It’s just a word made up to make shampoo important,” howls Simon Pegg in Spaced (still the definitive record of my life from 2000-2003) when Jessica Hynes mentions PRO-V. Look it up and Pantene has a web page swooningly describing how ‘Swiss doctors’ stumbled upon the miracle cure for, er, dirty hair in the 40s and now it’s used by every single female in the world, including Miriam Margoyles.

Fast forward to 2022 and we need a new PRO-V, in case we forget how important shampoo really is. It’s hyularonic acid, the secret weapon in encouraging 33-year-old women to shell out a monthly EDF Energy bill’s worth in dollar pounds in the hope that their personal trainer looks up from his Insta account while forcing them toward their 50th squat.

In this ad the phonetics of hyularonic acid are explained in just the same way the supposed health benefits aren’t by a collective noun of 30-40-something American MILFs who look a couple of drinks away from explaining exactly why Trump was right about the Mexican wall all along.

Arla milk advert

There’s a very good reason why we don’t tend to enjoy the sound of real people singing, and that reason is that is that most people are fucking shit at singing. But in these relatable times we’d rather hear a tone-deaf junior accountant from Runcorn hailing the dubious delights of washing liquid than, say, Hayley Westenra because few of us can imagine an opera singer puzzling over whichever setting on the washing machine might be cheaper than a holiday to the Llŷn peninsula whilst also ensuring their bra doesn’t bobble.

It doesn’t matter that ‘real people singing’ is a phenomenon less inviting than a Piers Morgan column on unisex toilets, because we’re all tired of experts now. So we have to suffer through these ‘real farmers’ guffing something even worse into the atmosphere than the stuff from their cows’ arseholes that will condemn us all to societal collapse. Thanks a bunch Michael Gove.

Halifax advert – Stand By Me

Remember when banks weren’t our friends? When they were like austere headmasters who would just as soon give you a slippering then lend you twenty quid? Frankly I preferred them that way – you knew what you were getting – rather than the gaslighting friend who pretends they actually like you, rather than being a useful crutch when their favoured pals are away on holiday.

The creepy ‘let’s hang out’ vibe of modern bank adverts is the most overt manifestation of the shameless dishonesty of describing a relationship that is more akin to serf and robber baron: the banks fuck our economy to make their bosses richer – and we pay for it. In that context these ads are akin to a emotionally manipulative fair-weather friend sliding into your DMs late at night offering empty platitudes and vacant promises of commitment that you’ll read in the full knowledge they will ghost you the second you suggest going out for a pint because your relationship has ended.

Lloyds advert

Again with the genuinely sinister bank adverts. This one for Lloyds has the gloss, the swelling music and the total lack of awareness of a North Korean vanity project – all it’s missing are a million goose-stepping soldiers, a nuclear missile and a dubious wig. Nevermind the fact that Lloyds’ recent history is sketchier than Kanye West’s, the bank seems under the impression it is about as beloved as David Attenborough to the British public rather than reality of, say, the bloke who runs P&O Ferries.

I’ll leave it to Craig Ferguson, over on Facebook, to sum up the utter ghastliness of it all: “…[T]he sheer, unadulterated psychopathy of a sterile, profiteering dead-behind-the-eyes monolith attempting to manipulate you into thinking it’s your friend. It’s fucking terrifying.”

Worst adverts of 2022 – vote

OK, I’ve done my duty. Now it’s over to you. Vote for the worst adverts of 2022.

worst adverts of 2022

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Well, did anyone think we’d make it this far? By which I mean 2019 full stop, never mind the annual rundown of the Worst Adverts Of 2019.

In 2016 I went a bit mad. Well, more so. Brexit, Trump and the Tories had done my nut in – and advertising seemed to small-fry in comparison. If only I knew what fresh horrors 2019 would bring. Not just climate change, cunts still running the world and the quite hideous face of Michael Gove, but the Peloton advert.

Adverts can be bad in a variety of ways. They can be naff, smug, simply annoying. They can desecrate your favourite thing, they can stick in your lugholes like a particularly annoying bit of earwax, they might make your bite the inside of your cheek in some reflexive, masochistic instinct.

I’ve never quite got there but I can totally believe that advertising has drawn people to physical violence, meted out on their hapless television like a punchbag made of plastic and whatever that gooey stuff they put in modern TV screens is.

But advertising is more than that – not simply annoying, stupid and intrusive. It’s an engine for acquisition, consumption, fear and anxiety. It sets unrealistic standards, unattainable lifestyles and promises you that if only you buy that Renault Kadjar you can be free of that gnawing sense of existential futility. We buy, so we are.

When we know that our world is on its last legs – thanks to all the things we buy, eat, throw away and burn – the role of advertising doesn’t seem like a vague irritant, it’s appears more sinister than that throbbing vein on Dominic Raab’s temple.

In that spirit I have collected what you told me were your most hated adverts of the year. Some housekeeping first: the Meerkats have been elevated to a grand hall of fame and many suggestions actually originated in previous years.

Needless to say everyone has their own personal gallery of Hell when it comes to the ad break: the Nationwide ads, Marks & Spencer Christmas jumper advert, Lorraine Kelly, Jet2, Chanel No. 5, Deliveroo were all in the mix too. Let’s just consider them consigned to a particularly obnoxious Pandora’s Box. And while Blue’s boiler cover advert is truly appalling, the primary emotion it evokes is pity.

So somewhere between you and me, we collected what I consider to be some of the worst adverts of the year. As ever the final decision is not mine, but yours. I have set out my arguments below – and in doing so probably saved myself thousands in therapy.

Now choose from the worst adverts of 2019 – in this batshit year it’s probably the only meaningful way to strike a tiny blow against the forces of despair.

Worst Adverts Of 2019

Muppets Portal advert

Portal is like something out of Black Mirror, so the fact it’s advertised by The Muppets just serves to make it more sinister – and even more like an episode of Black Mirror. We all know that Facebook wants to monetise and weaponise our own personal data against us and it’s bad enough when they know where you shop, your favourite films and most frequently-browsed categories on Pornhub.

But just imagine what Facebook will be up to with the videos it will deny Portal records, saves and mines for information, before admitting that it does, promising to do better and then keeps recording, saving and mining that shit anyway.

Setting up a Facebook-connected webcam above your TV set is basically the technical equivalent of inviting a Bluetooth-enabled Julian Assange into your living room to record everything you say and do, while paying for the privilege.

So bringing the Muppets into this just seems like a deliberate act of pure malice, like Donald Trump co-opting children’s fiction’s most famous asylum-seeker, Paddington Bear, to be the brand ambassador of his plan to build a huge wall to keep all the brown people out.

Fozzy Bear is a tech bro who is selling your browsing data; Bunsen and Beaker work in a Russian troll farm. And you thought the Cookie Monster was only interested in biscuits…

Muppets creator Jim Henson, of course, departed this mortal coil some decades ago, meaning his most famous and lovable creations have been whored out to anyone willing to throw enough money at the entertainment Borg Cube that is Disney – including dismal brandfucks such as Barclays, Three and Fucking Warburtons. The Muppets, by the handy virtue of not being real, have no say in the matter of course.

Annoying, a bit depressing? Sure. But matching kids’ TV things to tech-brands that increasingly control our lives and know more about us than we do is even worse – it’s tinged with genuine dystopia.

Peloton advert

When the apocalypse comes the Peloton Gang will be ready: poised on their stupidly expensive bikes, awaiting their instructions. These delusional sweat chiefs are clearly in training for such an event and will surely take to their bikes and rule the post-apocalyptic landscape, calves bulging and heads swelling.

“All hail the Two-Wheels!” will be the cry of the masses too stupid or unfit to be able to cycle for 60 seconds on full intensity. And from the Peloton Studio our new ruler will dispense inspirational soundbites, lycra sleeping bags and hot laser death.

Finally the true purpose of Peloton will be revealed and it will be like Day Of The Triffids or 28 Days Later, only with exercise bikes. We don’t know what it will be but something to do with anal probing seems likely.

In the meantime these people continue their journey to nowhere, knowing they are indeed righteous – and with a BMI significantly less than it was 18 months ago.

Aaron500, your life is a cruel veneer of success masking an empty abyss of a human being.

Just Eat advert

The Just Eat advert – indeed Just Eat’s entire business – is less of an advert and more of an imperative. Just eat. Now and always. Until your legs are so swollen with gout you won’t be able to escape the rising tides lapping at your door as you listlessly watch another rerun of Family Guy and masticate on another cold Domino’s.

Eating out used to be a rare treat, now it seems to be almost the default position for young people, many of whom seem to barely comprehend the concept of a gas stove, tin opener or cabbage.

We all claim to despise single-use materials but the growth in takeaway-to-your-door seems to be the ultimate expression of single-use living: use, discard, repeat – whether it’s Tindr or Just Eat. Somehow food has infected our brains, become an addiction – like the grubs that want to be eaten by birds so they can reproduce. It’s mind-control through our stomachs.

The fact all of these takeaway services – thriving on zero-hours contracts and the modern-day slavery plantations that many British takeaways consist of – take care to align the idea of fast food with watching television is, of course, not a coincidence. When the invasion finally comes we’ll all be so bloated and unfit the only resistance we’ll be able to threaten is a zero-star review on Tripadvisor. Just after we’ve ordered our latest KFC anyway.

Tom Hiddleston Centrum advert

Tom Hiddlestone is, of course, a sexual deviant who breaks into your house and gaslights you into thinking he’s your partner – and brambles with fried eggs is a perfectly normal meal. Don’t believe me? Simply watch this video, masquerading as an advert for multivitamin nonces Centrum but secretly a cry-for-help from the deeply disturbed actor.

Not really of course (although I am leaving the door open to this interpretation) – this is Hiddleston’s Japandering nightmare made real – an advert so ludicrous it’s designed only to be seen by foreign audiences who don’t give a crap if you delivered a landmark Hamlet at the Old Vic.

The Hidd, as he is not known, is of course one of those unthreatening actor types that make women go all fizzy in the knickers, so it’s a mark of this advert’s true awfulness that it manages to make him look less like the new James Bond and and more like a deeply awkward, creepy, shaggy-haired estate agent with a raging coke habit and erectile dysfunction.

• Read the original Centrum Adturd

Get ready for Brexit

“Get ready for death” struck me as about as useful, welcome and cost-effective as these ridiculous slogans, appearing in your eyeline more often than Claudia Winkelman for much of the Autumn. But get ready how? Do what, exactly? Start praying? Detonate your relatives? Build a new ten-lane motorway through Folkestone at the weekends?

Since we all knew Brexit wasn’t going to happen in 2019 they struck me – at a cost of one hundred million pounds – as rather wasteful, amounting to an already-debunked bluff: a man trying to play poker with a privet hedge using Whot cards.

Whatever you think of the politics of the matter, a campaign urging everyone in the country to prepare for things completely unpredictable, fundamentally unknowable and ultimately impossible was rather like expecting the British people to have a contingency plan for a gas giant hitting Wrexham.

Mariah Carey Walkers crisps advert

“Think Walkers Crisps; think Mariah Carey.” That’s at least how I imagine some addled exec pitching this ‘which American celebrity is available to advertise something about which they truly give zero fucks?’ televisual infected gland.

It’s now illegal to not like All I Want For Christmas Is You, a song by Mariah that represents the quintessence of her soulless brand of R’n’B and has now found its way into the Carols From Kings service. Mariah herself, of course, died sometime in the Noughties and now runs on cosmetic surgery, Evian and regular infusions of blood from Motown orphans.

So naturally she’s the obvious choice to advertise fried potato slices from Leicester, wheeled out to pretend she’s actually a nice person and would deign to dirty her fingers with something as vile as a Pigs-In-Blankets flavoured Walkers crisps. To watch her fingering one of the snacks is like watching someone trying to defuse a nuclear bomb, on which several people accidentally ejaculated.

At least you can imagine Gary Lineker actually eating crisps or Nigel Farage actually hating foreigners, but the notion of Carey eating mass-market British crisps is so fundamentally dishonest it’s like Greta Thunberg advertising Rustlers Double Decker Cheese Burgers.

Oral B advert

Is there a more gratuitous use of a jiggling lady arse and crotch than this advert for… toothpaste? Following painstaking study of this actress’s backside over multiple freeze-frames, it even appears her leggings are translucent – revealing a pretty skimpy thong. Eh?

Stick some of these shots into a 70s sitcom and it would appear on one of those You Won’t Believe This Cleavage And Racism! programmes that litter the festive airwaves on the less-visited Freeview channels. It’s only a surprise we don’t get a gasped “Tits!” as she works her breasts in some wholly dentally-relevant exercise that involves a close-up of her bristols wobbling up and down.

I think what annoys people most in this Oral B advert is the baffling claim that the lady in question “didn’t even know Oral B made a toothpaste”. Toothpaste being pretty much their entire raison d’etre, this seems akin to claiming you didn’t know the Nazis did fascism, The Daily Mail peddles hatred or Piers Morgan is responsible for more flatulence than a medium-sized dairy herd.

Over ten years of writing this blog I’ve come to realise that some of the things that annoy people most of all are dishonesty, treating the audience as if they’re idiots or what amounts to a kind of trolling via absurd claims. The Oral B advert ticks all three boxes: a dismal trifecta of advertising detritus more irritating than a lump of gristle between your teeth.

Lavazza Real Italian Coffee Advert

Sometimes an advert isn’t hideous, genuinely angering or deliberately irritating – it’s simply inept, poor, crap. In trying to stake some sort of claim to being the only coffee of note, Lavazza has thrown the kitchen sink at this messy advert that tries to make us believe that Premiership footballers care – or even know – what coffee is.

The very idea of ‘real Italian coffee’ is, of course, about as genuine as ‘proper English tea’ and it taps into a kind of tiresome snobbery that circulates around coffee, wine and whiskey. And we’ve gone properly bonkers over coffee. Buy some from any outlet these days and you’re basically paying more by weight that you might for gold, caviar or enriched uranium.

Quite what the sort of people who might spend €200 imbibing 17 espressos in an Italian cafe – the equivalent of drinking a tasty eggcup of coffee grounds the consistency of tar, more potent that injecting ketamine into your eyeballs – might make of instant coffee is anyone’s guess, but I have a feeling they might repeat the words ‘real Italian coffee’ with rather more puzzlement or contempt.

One reason I do like this Lavazza advert is it that its unintentional hilariousness reminded me of an intentionally hilarious compilation along very similar lines from the excellent Harry Hill. Picture them mouthing an incredulous ‘ear cataracts?’ and you’ll probably be a lot happier.

Amazon advert

An advert attempting to reposition one of the most famous hideous employers since the Roman army into a place of rainbow dust, pixie farts and beatific joy is one of the most sinister rebrandings since social media dickheads turned Auschwitz into the backdrops of their latest #livingmybestlife Instagram posts.

The sheer brass neck – not to mention brass balls, brass spleen and brass nipples of this – bears some consideration: Amazon is under fire for multiple deaths of its contract workers, not to mention repeated suicidal crises and numerous workplace injuries at its sweatshops piss-strewn “fulfilment centres”, described by one former worker as “isolating colon[ies] of hell where people having breakdowns is a regular occurrence”.

Amazon, as we all know, contributed £87.50, some cardboard boxes and a DVD boxset of Young Sheldon in UK taxes during 2019, despite earning over twelvety trillion dollarpounds per second. So its reimagining as a purveyor of festive delights via a workforce who would only be too happy to work for free, such is their devotion to transporting GHD hair-straighteners to your door, is a work of such obscene propaganda that George Orwell momentarily came back to life, gave a Christmas lecture on the redundancy of his entire body of work and threw himself into an Amazon carboard-shredder in protest.

It’s not simply a bad advert, nor a mere body blow against human decency, it’s a kind of evil so pure it should be confined to a jar and guarded by a gang of priests in a church crypt. And that’s before I get to that fucking singing kid.

OK, you’ve heard my thoughts. It’s over to you. Choose from the worst adverts of 2019 below – and may God have mercy on all of us.

Vote: worst adverts of 2019

The post The Worst Adverts Of 2019: Vote appeared first on AdTurds.

“I’d like to thank you all for joining us this morning. As you all know, the situation is grave. First we’ll have the minutes from last month and then we’ll move on to this month’s agenda. Oh, hello John, we heard the traffic was bad. Grab a seat. Nice tie… Oh, what’s…?”

“Oh, this? Just my tiny tube of Pringles for lunch. It fits snugly in my breast pocket so I can access it whenever I want.”

“I see. Well I hope you won’t be eating your reconstituted potato snacks while we discuss how a no-deal Brexit will severely impact on our…”

*CRUNCH*

“John, I really don’t think this is the time or place to be…”

*CRUNCH*

“John, seriously, we’re going to have to lay people off. The business will be decimated. 99 years in the industry and we’re facing an existential threat. It’s highly inappropriate to…”

*CRUNCH*

“Put it away at once.”

“I’m sorry it’s just like the advert says once you pop you can’t stop . There, I’ve popped it back in my breast pocket where it belongs now.”

“John I can’t concentrate with the moustachioed face of Julius Pringles peering over the seam of your breast pocket. I really don’t think it’s a good idea…”

*CRUNCH*

“… to put a tiny tube of any potato snacks in the breast pocket of a suit when you’re going to work – in fact I can’t conceive of any situation whatsoever when it might be wise to match a suit jacket with a novelty starch-based snack – whether you intend to eat them for lunch or not!”
“Sorry Anthony. I’ll turn the tube around so Julius isn’t looking at you.”

“Thank you. So the first item on the agenda is the compulsory redundancy of 50% of our workforce…”

…

…

…

…

*CRUNCH*

Watch: Vintage UK Pringles advert

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“Jacamo is for fat bastards”

This is a search phrase that repeatedly led readers to this blog, back in the day when it was possible to measure such things. And perhaps it is; Jacamo has never shied away from deviating from the norm when it comes to body shapes – and I’ve no truck with that.

But whether that was ever true or not, that was certainly the perception. And that’s not all. Jacamo has been a byword for cheap, mainly bad clothes made for gangs of deeply unfashionable men who skipped straight from their Mums buying their clothes to “that looks OK” online clothes shopping. In this way I guess it performs a vital public service for men theoretically old enough to live independently but not sufficiently decrepit to be on the radars of any age-related charities.

The recruitment of Andrew Flintoff – a good cricketer who has enjoyed a bafflingly successful television career, mainly by virtue of apparently being a cheaper Paddy McGuinness – or being a noted purveyor of dressing-room banter, evinced by his pained friendship with Robbie “Sav” Savage – did little to convince that Jacamo customers were not the sort of people sustained by a diet of chicken takeaways, whey protein and Jeremy Clarkson books.

And now this. Men doing men things. Count ‘em: playing the guitar; having tattoos and facial hair; going to the football… my guess would be that you’ve hit about 90% of Jacamo’s audience with that particular hit-list of homogenous demographic traits. Factor in a Ladbrokes app on their phones and you’d expect smashed the jackpot to laddish smithereens.

And buying your wedding clobber from Jacamo? The pathos is almost unbearable – like buying a Festive Bake for your Christmas dinner or sending a Page 3 girl a Valentine’s card.

As it is we get to see these absolute chiefs walking into a church wearing various shades of washed-out colours like a packet of Refreshers, having psyched themselves up appropriately to “own their moments”.

I tire of this apparently inexhaustible drive to make us imbue every second of our lives with almost unbearable importance. In an age where we are literally driving ourselves to mental ill health because of our fear of missing out, sentiments like this are like pouring petrol on a particularly dumb bonfire made of fast fashion, grilled sauce-smothered chicken and Instagram filters.

I urge you to reject this concept of owning the moment – or even a shitty, lavender-coloured v-neck vest. Enjoy the moment instead. It’s perfectly possible to do so without getting into the zone before a fictional gig, like you never do anyway; cheer on the terraces of a sparsely-populated and mysteriously cosmopolitan football match, like no one ever does; or head into a waiting church full of people for an imaginary wedding looking like the interior of a 1990s hospital waiting room – as if you’re a bunch of extras from Hollyoaks.

I’d like to lay ‘Jacamo is for fat bastards’ to rest once and for all – because there’s nothing wrong with being fat, after all. And being a bastard these days is pretty much par for the course.

But judging by the desperate need for approval, instant gratification – not to mention acting and dressing like everyone else – Jacamo is certainly for sad bastards.

Buy an old pair of cords from a charity shop. Go for a walk. Head to the pub with a friend you haven’t seen for a while. Eat a cream horn. Deactivate your account. Have a really big, guilt-free wank.

There’s a healthier prescription for life in the 21st Century – and you can’t buy it online.

The post Jacamo Advert 2019: Own Your Moment appeared first on AdTurds.

“Ah, another day begins! Looks nice out. Hope Tom Hiddleston isn’t downstairs making us breakfast again!

“Just patter down these tasteful stairs and… oh God. How did he get in again this time? The locks changed, the bars on the windows…

“Is it too late to run upstairs and grab the Mace – or even jump from a first-floor window? Probably break our ankles but… shit! Tom Hiddleston’s seen us. Better play along or Tom Hiddleston’ll get angry. And cry. And start wanking too probably – like last time.

“Fuck! Tom Hiddleston’s got a fucking knife. OK. Stay calm…

“‘Heyyyyyyy!’ to you too, you fucking sicko. Jesus, will Tom Hiddleston ever leave us alone?

“‘Pop back and make you breakfast…?’ Christ, Tom Hiddleston really is nuts. Wonder how he escaped from prison this time. And how did he find us?

“What’s that Tom Hiddleston’s got on that plate? A fried egg on top of vegetables and fruit? Pretty fucking weird – but at least it’s not Tom Hiddleston’s own severed toes with a sprinkling of Tom Hiddleston’s pubes like last time.

“Pepper on top? Whatever you say. Best to not upset Tom Hiddleston. Wait – there’s probably crushed-up sleeping pills or Rohypnol in this stuff. Better pretend to eat while secretly feeding it to the dog.

“The dog… where is the dog? Wait, the knife. The knife in Tom Hiddleston’s hand. Oh God…

“Maybe that’s why Tom Hiddleston’s looking so regretful – almost like he’s trying to apologise for something…

“Shit, listen to what Tom Hiddleston is saying – he gets upset when we don’t play along. Just pretend to be Tom Hiddleston’s wife and listen very carefully to what Tom Hiddleston is-.

“What the fuck? Is Tom Hiddleston speaking Chinese? Shit – this is new. Do we have to pretend to be Chinese now?

“Centrum, what’s that? Probably best not swallow whatever that is or we’ll be waking up in a cellar dressed in leather chaps and chained to a wall again.

“Jesus, the way Tom Hiddleston keeps rubbing his hands like he’s Lady Macbeth – and that furrowed brow. And those eyes – eyes that have seen too much. Those hands that have closed around so many elegant young necks…

“‘A bit busy for the next few weeks’. Oh God, what’s Tom Hiddleston got planned? Something involving saws and scalpels probably. For weeks. Where’s Tom Hiddleston going to take us?”

“Wait, is Tom Hiddleston going? OK this is our one chance to get Tom Hiddleston out of here. Just play along with Tom Hiddleston’s twisted domestic bliss fantasy and we might just get out of this alive.

“Mess about with Tom Hiddleston’s collar a bit – it will soothe his murderous sexual desires. Could we gouge Tom Hiddleston’s eyes out while his defences are down? Maybe crush Tom Hiddleston’s windpipe?

No, no – his bloody, eyeless face twisted in a mask of hatred as he rages, sightless, around the kitchen swiping with that carving knife is too horrible to contemplate. He looks calm. We just have to get Tom Hiddleston outside the door and we’re safe…

“Tom Hiddleston’s… Tom Hiddleston’s actually going. Argh, he’s reaching back to drag us out of the house, into the back of his blood-soaked pick-up, away from the lovely house and safety!

“What the fuck? Tom Hiddleston’s actually gone?!

“We’re safe! Safe from the sex dungeon, safe from the needy passive aggression of his twisted psyche! Safe from the endless degrading acts Tom Hiddleston makes us carry out to satisfy his perverted desires!

“Finally safe from Tom Hiddleston!”

Watch: Tom Hiddleston Centrum advert

Tom Hiddleston Centrum Advert

The post Tom Hiddleston Centrum Advert appeared first on AdTurds.

This Samsung Galaxy Advert for the new S10 phone might not be quite so hideous, were it not for the robotic rendition of Que Sera Sera – Doris Day’s reminder from the past that you life may be shit but there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

We also see a lot of grown-up kids in the future, doing all manner of wonderful things relating to technology – with barely any screaming, cannibalism or mindless violence due to the existential terror of man-made climate change that will surely kill us all.

Perhaps that’s why nothing in the Samsung Galaxy Advert looks remotely like Britain, in fact nothing like Europe for that matter. Perhaps some of the more upscale bits of America’s west coast, maybe south-east Asia. But certainly nothing as hideous as Stockon, Poole or Peterborough. Probably because the country will have been utterly destroyed by Brexit in the future we’re looking at. Or, more prosaically, because those town I mentioned are shit.

And what’s with the little kid on a tricycle roaming around the house? Is this advert doing its best to evoke the mind-bending horrors of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining? She’s looking at a window that lights u with a cartoon character when he rides past – which is good, because the chances are all she’ll see are dead trees and more concrete in the near-future that Samsung is so keen to show us.

What else? A man using haptics to design clothes; another man using a stylus to create a tattoo. That’s it? That’s the bright new future? Same work, different tablet?

But wait, there’s a robot, drawing a tattoo on a woman’s shoulder. And as anyone who’s learned anything from horror films knows only too well, it’s probably seconds away from lasering a hole through the back of her head. Thanks, Samsung.

Next up – a same-sex couple snuggling up with an ultrasound attachment on their smartphone and admiring a scan of a baby that will surely be doomed to a short, brutish life due to the sea levels that will have covered most of mainland Britain in 50 years’ time.

And we end with a bunch of children gleefully killing something, in a reference to massively multiplayer online gaming. If you’ve ever seen the Black Mirror episode Men Against Fire you might recognise what a frightening vision of the future this amounts to. If you haven’t, well, still.

Augmented reality multiplied by stealth military training is a terrifying, hands-reach vision of a dystopian future. Yet here it’s a Samsung Galaxy Advert where technology = good. And that’s it.

There’s enough material for Charlie Brooker here to create a whole new season of Black Mirror. We should be terrified by the real and varied threats to our existence this advert cheerfully highlights. Que sera, sera; whatever will be, will be – it’s not worth worrying about it.

Instead we’re glumly staring at our phone while the world burns. And that’s the future we’re creating.

The post Samsung Galaxy Advert: Que Sera Sera – A Terrifying Vision Of The Future appeared first on AdTurds.

What would you do for a bag of Tu-dah? As those of us old to remember these Tudor Crisps adverts from the 70s and 80s know only too well – they are worth climbing a mountain for.

Tudor Crisps were, of course, a north-east brand – if you hadn’t guessed from these extremely canny ads featuring crisp-obsessed likely lad Terry – that featured unlikely flavours such as Spring Onion, Pickled Onion and Tomato Sauce.

AdTurds – who still savours flavour – still has fond memories of the Spring Onion Tudors. They were later joined by ‘something a bit special’ in the shape of the ridged Tudor specials, featuring even less likely combos such as Roast Beef & Pickle, Gammon & Pineapple and Sour Cream & Chives.

I’m not sure whether to believe the Wikipedia entry on Tudor Crisps, but other flavours apparently included some foul offerings as Fried Onion, Fried Tomato & Bacon, Hot Dog & Mustard and even Kipper. Kipper-flavoured crisps. Fucking hell.

All the ads feature Terry, first as a wily paperboy conning a younger mate to deliver his papers to the Dunston Rocket, an incredible 29-storey brutalist tower block, now sadly demolished, in Newcastle. In exchange of a “bag ‘o Tu-dah” of course.

Next Terry returns as a fully-grown, though still snack-crazed, man to see his old boss and learn about the new flavours offered by Tudor Crisps. Having scoffed his way through a bag of the specials, Terry reveals he’s not exactly making his way in the world – instead he’s a chauffeur. There’s more than a whiff of Clement & Le Fenais to these ads – and that impression is confirmed when we hear who’s doing the voiceovers at the end.

Next up on Terry’s crisp-orientated rampage around his old haunts is a young floppy-haired student, who gets exactly what he deserves for not displaying the local lingo by having Terry scoff all his crisps and leave him high and dry on the A1 hard shoulder. What a bastard.

Still, it’s hard to stay angry at Terry and soon he has a hot date. It seems some pyar canny Geordie rumpy-pumpy is likely to take place in the back of Terry’s Rolls. And what could be better than a shag in a limo with the Tyne bridge lit up in the background?

I’ll tell you what could be better – a bag of Tudor Crisps Tomato Sauce flavour. Sharon is, understandably, disappointed at first, probably expecting something involving sausage at least. But she soon relents – and her moans of passion soon give way to the unmistakeable sound of Terry’s salty morsels being enthusiastically masticated.

The message? Well, clearly the love of Tudor Crisps can lead to sociopathic behaviour – and even to passing up clear offers of penetrative sex. To be fair, they must be some bloody good snacks.

The Geordie references? Count ’em. First there’s the all-toon cast, including Allen Mechen (spotted in such Tyneside classics as Spender and later as a Geordie baddie in Brookside) as Adult Terry. Then the homely voiceover of James Bolam, aka Terry Collier of The Likely Lads (and sequel Whatever Happened To…). The numerous shots of Newcastle landmarks of course. And finally the soundtrack to these Tudor Crisps adverts – The Blaydon Races, a song probably incomprehensible to anyone born outside a 50-mile radius of Gateshead.

Sadly Tudor went the way of all things in the early 90s, lost in the product mix of Walkers. In a final indignity the Tudors blue Salt & Vinegar and green Cheese & Onion bags were made to bow down to the Walkers cognitively-dissonant reverse branding. A bit like Henry VIII making Catholic bishops recant their religion, only with crisp packets.

Anyway, here’s the full gamut of Tudor Crisps adverts. Watch them – and I challenge you not to feel like it’s nearing teatime on a Friday afternoon in between Batfink and Rainbow.

Watch all the Tudor Crisps adverts

The post Tudor Crisps Adverts – Adverts I Love appeared first on AdTurds.

When I asked which adverts are currently getting on peoples tits, people told me about this Carling advert. It wasn’t just getting on their tits, they said, it was rubbing itself over whatever genitalia they might possess. And not in a good way. So I was compelled to seek it out.

I’m a beer drinker but I can drink lager. On a hot, sunny there is, perhaps, nothing better than a good pilsner. But there are good lagers and bad lagers. And Carling is one of the worst, even if it is made in Britain.

Yes, the brewery at Burton draws its water from a deep artesian well, probably the best water in the country for making beer. But if you’re going to turn that water into something as foul as Carling you might as well pump in whatever seeps from the pooling tanks at Sellafield. We make a lot of nuclear waste in this country too, but I’m not sure that’s something to be proud of.

The days of those cheery, cheeky and genuinely funny “I bet he drinks Carling Black Label’ adverts are long gone. And more’s the pity. I don’t know why adverts for lager don’t even attempt to funny anymore – they seem to have been replaced with a try-hard earnestness.

In this new “Made Local” Carling advert we get one of the ‘roll-call’ ads that tries to be all things to all, well, people. Maybe the fragmented market and a new generation of supermarket drinkers make that inevitable, but it’s certainly been to the detriment of advertising.

Lager has rarely been sold on flavour or desirability. More the associations with nights in the pub, friends, good times. And that makes sense because the vast majority of lager is total shite.

Let me try and describe how Carling tastes to me: gas – as in the actual stuff that comes out of your hob – mixed with sugar and injected with, well, more gas. And more sugar. It makes you feel bloated, it will give you a stinking hangover and God forbid you try to drink the stuff unless it’s chilled to the point where most of its chemical-works flavour has been mercifully nullified.

In mainland Europe, America and beyond most people drink two schooners of beer and call it a bender. Here we’re gluttons for punishment. It’s not a sesh until we’ve drunk ten pints of the stuff, fallen over, been sick and then fallen over in the sick. And that’s on a Wednesday.

And, dear Lord, the associations. It’s fair to say lager has never had a great image, stretching back to the 80s, when it was invented by Margaret Thatcher and Jeff Banks. Whether because of the rioting, racism or just plain, good, old-fashioned bank holiday loutishness, lager would probably be placed probably somewhere between the E4 programme Coach Trip and the abuse of nitrous oxide on a list of How High Is Your Opinion Of This?

It’s possible to identify correlations between very unlikely things. One enterprising chap, for example, has tracked the geography of Pret outlets to Brexit voters. And a couple of years back YouGov opened up its vast database for nerds like me to play about with – from which I made the discovery that you can track how right-wing you are according to which car you drive.

It may or may not come as a surprise to learn that Land Rover drivers are the most right-wing on the roads, so much so they think Jacob Rees-Mogg is a lentil-wearing pansy and most specify Union Jack underpants, Katie Hopkins talking books and portable gallows with their pointlessly big cars that never go offroad (for what it’s worth Fiats are the most left-wing cars).

Which brings me back to Carling. Were I to place Carling somewhere on the Brexit spectrum I’d expect to hear it phoning LBC to start ranting about a No Deal. I’d imagine it shouting “You’re a traitor!” at Anna Soubry, in a hi-viz jacket, while streaming live on Facebook.

Which makes this Carling advert a bit puzzling.

I applaud the multicultural vision of Britain offered in this Carling advert, the inclusivity and outward-looking attitude. The rainbow laces (and the inclusion of Black Country Fusion – an “LGBT inclusive” team) are interesting. Obvious enough to those who understand what they signify, but probably sufficiently oblique that anyone who might spit their teeth out at the idea of say, scissoring, might just think ‘what a lovely colourful pair of shoelaces’.

Fair play to Carling – but I doubt we’re going to see two men having a kiss and a cuddle while sipping their fizzy pint of piss. This is the reason you scarcely ever see two men having a drink alone in any beer and lager commercials over the last 30 or so years – people might think they’re gay.

And we have some women in Anfield boxing. Good for them. And more life in the small towns around the country. I suppose the idea of is to herald locally-made stuff and apparently there’s a series of short films about these communities. But without context this advert just seems like another Great Great Britain! box-ticking exercise, not far off one of those lager / betting / fast food adverts that comes out when the World Cup is on.

Brexit casts a pall over everything these days. When HSBC brought out an advert about Brits being outward-looking people said it was too Remain-y. So too a vomit-inducing spot for British Airways that seems to think there are actually people out there who like Paloma Faith.

Meanwhile, this Carling advert has drawn accusations that it’s a tad… Brexity. It’s not really, but I can see how people of either political inclination can see patterns here. That’s what the EU referendum has done – everything’s binary now: Good or bad; black or white; leave or remain.

Either way my country seems to have gone completely bonkers in the last ten years – so for me this Carling advert – and all the rest of the ‘brilliant Britain’ ads – ring a little hollow.

It’s enough to make one turn to drink. As long as it’s not Carling.

The post Carling Advert: Made Local and The Pall Of Brexit appeared first on AdTurds.

And you thought the Brexit vote divided the country…. well, those shouty people outside Parliament have nothing on AdTurds readers. When I asked what the worst advert of 2018 was I might as well have opened the floodgates to one of those frightening ponds full of radioactive shit at Sellafield while standing directly in front of it. Because I don’t just have to pore over the torrents of frustrated fury – I have to watch all the adverts.

Talking of Brexit, people don’t like me to. Talk about Brexit, that is. And I get that. They probably come here to be amused (I’d like to think) rather than find someone else blabbing on about whatever the backstop is, Theresa May’s haunted-tree face and Jacob Fucking-Rees, Twatting-Mogg – a man who resembles a Staedtler 2B pencil that hates poor people in a suit and seems to have more punctuation in his name than most undergraduate essays.

But I think in this Sun Bingo advert, which you voted the worst advert of 2018, there is a metaphor for Brexit. People who are angry about leaving the European Union – whether because it’s happening at all, or might not happen, or isn’t happening fast enough – have projected all their dissatisfactions, their grievances, fear, anger and disgust onto Brexit.

It’s become an issue that I think has lost all meaning – it’s just something to transfer anxieties onto, all the grubby little things we think are wrong with the country, whichever side of the debate we’re on.

And that’s what this Sun Bingo advert is. It’s everything British people hate about Britain. It’s cheap, vulgar, stupid, ugly. It’s probably the sort of thing Brexiteers voted against and it’s everything Remainers think Brexiteers are. In that regard, the Sun Bingo advert has united everyone. If only Parliament could do that.

This is the awesome power of the Sun Bingo advert. An advert that looked at genuine monstrosities, such as either Diet Coke advert, and shat them. Either of them. Take your pick; either flavour, whether “Yurt It Up” or “Supergood“, has the potential to genuinely make adults cry.

I’m not even joking – I bet somewhere, someone was genuinely moved to tears of impotent frustration by how awful these adverts were. Some will say that having two Diet Coke adverts in the pack split the vote but what else was I supposed to do? It would be like not trying Goering at Nuremberg just because you’d also caught Himmler.

I could legitimately have included two Halifax adverts on the same basis, but the desecration of Ghostbusters just struck me as so obviously evil. Still, Sun Bingo triumphed. Just parse that. There was a worse advert in 2018 than the Halifax advert that crapped all over Ghostbusters for the sheer hell of it.

And, God bless them, Flo & Joan. I can’t bring myself to dislike them and I can only think how excited they probably were to be on an advert and sing their godawful song. Then again, if I had to listen to that song ever again I might wish any number of obscene things upon them involving that keyboard being turned sideways and inserted into an orifice even smaller than their tiny house. However, even they could not withstand Sun Bingo.

Sun Bingo looms over the country like a referendum that has torn the country apart. Only worse. At least, one way or the other, Brexit will be over one day. But no-one who has seen the Sun Bingo advert will ever forget it.

Like walking in on Richard Keys wanking, it can’t be unseen and we will never be free of it. Sun Bingo is the worst advert of 2018.

The post The Sun Bingo Advert IS The Worst Advert Of 2018 appeared first on AdTurds.