It’s been a while, but there has been a clutch of new mega-annoying adverts recently – mostly on the radio. As I’ve mentioned before, I listen to Planet Rock a lot. For anyone who might still be confused by that, they play rock music.
Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles
It begins with some bloke shouting over the noise of a busy factory, then cuts to what seems like 10 minutes of brain-numbing whispering by some stupid woman. To me, it’s like having a screwdriver rammed in each ear repeatedly. Thank God for the mute button.
KFC
A nasal London-accented street poet rattles on, and on, and on, and on… Ian Wright can get away with this kind of accent (even then, only just), but not this prat. KFC seems to have got it into their heads that their typical target customers are hoodies and chavs.
Co-op Funeral Care
Look, when I’m listening to the radio I want to be cheered up. After being pissed off in turn by Volkswagen and then KFC, absolutely the last thing I want to hear is about how someone’s dad was a crap accordion player before being told he sorted out his own funeral before he died. It’s depressing, and it isn’t going to get me anywhere near Co-op Funeral Care either now or in the future.
Macmillan
And after that, I don’t want to hear about bloody cancer, either. That’s even more depressing. There’s a time and a place for these things, but every sodding commercial break on Planet Rock is not it.
Heinz Soup (Again)
I’ve mentioned Heinz before, but their ad with that grotesque woman coming in out of the cold, having a bath, dressing like Ugly Betty, then getting tomato soup all over her lips has resurfaced. Where? On Angry Birds of all places. There is no escape from these damned things.
A new series of The Undriveables started on ITV this week. You can catch it for the usual limited period on the ITV Player (you’ll have to put up with the adverts).
This first episode featured an older guy who was actually pretty much typical of his age group, and who responded well to instruction once his faults were corrected. He passed his test after the week-long session. The episode also featured a middle-aged woman who was a different matter altogether.
Just the act of driving a car induced fits of severe trembling (and I mean she was in absolute panic). At one point, and for almost no apparent reason, she had to stop and be physically sick. In another segment she was driving perfectly well, then suddenly panicked and had to stop again. When she took her test it was abandoned. It appears that she hit a kerb hard, then went to pieces again.
As an aside, I once had a middle-aged pupil who simply couldn’t coordinate the clutch, brake, and gas pedals. She couldn’t steer a straight line and change gear at the same time. And whenever traffic lights changed suddenly in front of us she’d slam on the brake and stall the car. She had the attention span and spatial awareness of a gnat! I had tried to persuade her to switch to automatic lessons quite early on because of finances and these pedal issues – and it was clear that they weren’t going to easily go away – but she had bought a manual car already and was adamant that she wanted to pass a manual test. As a result, she was with me for over two years and took over 100 hours of lessons. However, near the end of that time I discovered that she’d sold the car and so I started on at her again about learning in an automatic, explaining that she was still a long way from test standard. I enlisted the help of her son, and we finally persuaded her. She took a further two years, another 100 hours, and 7 driving tests before she eventually passed (she’d still be taking lessons now if she’d stuck with manual). I calculate that she had spent over £5,000 by the time she passed.
I have to admit that I was worried about her. She’d always stayed in touch, and credited me with having taught her to drive. But the thought of her driving alone filled me with horror. I advised her to get a car as soon as possible because she really didn’t want to let her driving get stale (actually, we got on well enough for me to be much more frank about it than that, but this is the general gist).
More than a year later she called me out of the blue. She’d bought a car and wanted some refresher lessons in it. She wanted me to provide them.
I remember that I was just about as scared as I’d ever been each time I took her out. Even with just the brake and gas pedals to worry about she frequently got them mixed up, and on one occasion we arrived back at her house, drove slowly up her driveway, and almost went through the fence and into the the back yard. Within a fortnight of buying the car and driving to work in it, she’d hit her wrought iron gates while reversing out three times (the resulting garage repairs amounted to 70% of the car’s value). She had to get a neighbour to put it in her driveway each evening, and work colleagues to back it out of wherever she’d parked it when she finished work. I subsequently heard from someone who knew her that she’d got rid of the car because she couldn’t afford to run it.
My point here is that there are some people who simply should not – ever – drive, and they are a danger to themselves and everyone around them when they do. Passing a driving test is no guarantee that someone is a good or capable driver. In fact, there are many thousands of people out there who have passed tests, but who are not competent drivers. They’re the ones you see driving slowly, or at a constant 40mph through 30, 40, 50, and NSL zones. They’re the ones who habitually switch lanes at the last minute, or who drift between lanes on roundabouts. They have virtually no awareness or understanding of lane divisions or direction arrows. And they do not learn from their mistakes because they are in a complete and terrified daze most of the time. Unfortunately, there is no law preventing them from driving – and nothing that says an ADI should tell them the truth.
I think the lady in this first episode of The Undriveables is a prime example of this. She simply should not go anywhere near a car if she is going to react the way she does – not unless she gets some serious medical or psychiatric help. You see, if she had passed her test, she is almost certainly still going to react in the same extreme way to situations when she is out on her own (or with her two boys in the car). The possible outcomes don’t bear thinking about.
On the programme itself, you have to accept that it is heavily edited for TV purposes. However, there was a lot of evidence of parking on yellow lines and pavements from what I saw. Apart from that, the ADIs featured didn’t do themselves any great disservice. It will be interesting to see subsequent episodes, because the trailers I’ve seen suggest that some of the later featured drivers are typical examples of people who failed the Big Brother auditions.
A few people have found the blog on this search term in the last few days. I wasn’t sure why until I checked, but it’s because episode 11 of the documentary “Metal Evolution” is being shown, and all three members of Rush are interviewed in it (which is an achievement on the part of the producers and Sam Dunn, since Neil Peart doesn’t do many interviews, and he is very forthcoming in this one).
It’s also worth pointing out that an R40 boxed set is planned for later this year featuring 6 discs and lots of bonus material as well as their recent (post-hiatus) performances. I’ll be getting it, that’s for sure!
Correction: There is a new show, Classic Albums 4, featuring Rush and their albums 2112 and Moving Pictures. Again, Neil is included prominently, along with Alex and Geddy. The show was originally aired in the US in 2010, but it has taken this long to come over here!
The show is available on catch-up on ITV Player until around 16 August 2014.
An ITV press release a couple of weeks ago alerted me to this programme, and I commented on that release at the time. Since I wrote the piece – and before the show was aired – both of the people appearing on it have contacted me. Neither was happy with my opinion about these sorts of shows and the type of people who appear in them. It’s also generated a disproportionate (and suspicious) amount of traffic to the blog.
This genre of TV show has become very popular with the media in the last few years. Without exception, those appearing on past programmes have clearly been involved for reasons of self-interest – and I’m talking about the kind where appearing on TV is the objective, not the kind where they actually learn something and change their ways. You see, when someone is eating behind the wheel on the motorway, driving with no hands, texting, speeding, etc., you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realise that this is both dangerous and wrong. However, these previous shows have glamourized the whole sordid business of driving badly by following the contestants – there is no other word to describe them – into bars and other places where they can show everyone how cool they think they are.
My initial assessment of the forthcoming programme – which I stress that I hadn’t seen at that time – was based on all of this. All I had was the press release for yet another hour of bad drivers who the TV company thought made for good TV.
In fact, I was wrong to suggest (or expect) that bad driving would be glamourized here, too. The show did not – in any way, shape, or form – suggest that the normal behaviour on the road of the two featured drivers was anything other than of an appallingly low standard. One of them – the one who wrote to me and stated that he was now a better driver than me – was an accident waiting to happen. He was speeding, shooting red lights 6 seconds after they went red (and claiming they were on amber), and so on.
A simulated (but realistic) collision with someone driving like he did under normal circumstances scared the shit out of him. The programme suggested that this had changed him, and one can only hope that it did. But I have to say that anyone who was driving as badly as this guy was prior to that experience is likely to need a little more than a scare to put things right. As I have said, it isn’t rocket science knowing the difference between right and wrong, and when someone actually denies or defends it then you have to wonder why they are even on the road to start with. And as for driving better than me… well, let’s just say that I’ve never had to make such a huge leap from such a low starting point, so I don’t think so. Let’s just hope he drives a little better than he did before.
The other driver got less screen time, but she was actually more dangerous in her original state. She was eating, texting (almost continuously if the edit is in any way representative), playing with her dog (and letting it “drive”), applying make-up, doing her hair… all the stereotypical things you constantly read about in the press when there’s nothing more important to cover. Although she might resent this comment, she had the attention span of a goldfish, and that’s where the problem was. She, too, was subjected to a simulated incident, and got a serious wake-up call as a result.
Whether the experience changes the behaviour of these two people in the long term remains to be seen. The programme didn’t attempt to suggest that this had happened, and nor could it have. I still maintain that most of what has apparently been “learnt” from the experience by the two drivers would have been available to all but the dullest examples of homo sapiens if they’d have applied some common sense in the first place, or unless they had other underlying issues – like poor attention spans. Unfortunately life doesn’t seem to work this way, and even if they do learn from it, how on earth would you roll it out to the general public?
Each crash involved the writing-off of at least one, and up to several vehicles. These crashes required vehicles kitted out with advanced remote control systems to be totalled. If you did this for the general driving public it would cost maybe £10,000-£20,000 per experiment, and with around a million test passes each year (or approaching that figure), that would add up to between £1 billion and £2 billion! It isn’t likely to be rolled out anytime soon.
The programme was actually well made and somewhat different to its predecessors. But I was right when I said that the characters involved would feature hooks and deviate somewhat from what would be classed as “normal” (in the most general sense). When these shows start featuring boring, ugly people with no trips to clubs or coverage of expensive hobbies and pastimes included, they will begin to chip away at the problem. Until then, they remain unrealistic.
As an aside to all this, the female participant in the show has been plaguing me with emails. She doesn’t come over as very bright, in my opinion, although with hindsight that might also have been apparent in the programme. After all, she did allow her dog to “drive”, amongst other things, and you don’t need to be too smart to realise how dumb that is.
Suspiciously, I received another message on the same subject and using the same pathetic tone from an IP address only 5km away from Miss Britain’s Worst Driver within the time bracket of her first two. She denied this was from anyone she knew, then admitted in passing a few days later that it was one of her friends. Basically, it was exactly as I’d suggested to start with as a result of the suspicious IP addresses – but which she had denied.
I tried to explain to her that her IP address had been routed through Hounslow, and the other one from Staines – about 5km away. I seem to have spent the last two days trying to explain to her that no one has actually said she LIVES in Hounslow, just that the email was routed through there. She cannot get her head around the fact that her email DID go through Hounslow. And the other one through Staines, which made me suspicious. I mean, to get two messages on the same subject, within minutes of each other, with the same snivelling tone, and only 5km apart as far as the logged IP address goes… you’ve got to wonder, haven’t you? She even claimed she had talked to her ISP and they’d told her “only one digit [of the IP address logged] was correct”, which is utter bollocks, since it was a BT address and that means at least three characters would have matched even if it was otherwise wrong.
You know, of all the hundreds, even thousands, of people I have taught, I have never come across anyone like this. Is it any wonder she ended up being picked as one of Britain’s Worst Drivers?
A new series (well, a single show) begins next week. Not much information in the press release, but it appears to feature two typical berks (note: that’s a general comment – I don’t know either of them) who couldn’t get on Big Brother (note: that’s an opinion built up after watching many similar shows), so went for this instead. It’s an hour long, so be prepared for the usual pointless filler material. Oh, and don’t be surprised if at least one of the “contestants” turn out to be more than two standard deviations away from the mean when it comes to being “normal” (note: that’s a further opinion built up from watching similar shows – there is going to have to be a hook of some sort).
Will the shock of what they experience help Jason & Laura change their ways for good?
No. They drive like that because they want to, yet are too stupid or arrogant to do anything about it.
I’ve had an email from one of the contestants who believes his driving is probably now better than mine as a result of taking part in this show. Mmm. I’ll wait until I see it next week before I comment on that – although I’ve never been bad enough to need to appear on a show like this in the first place, so he will have had to have made up a lot of ground compared to me.
However, as I said in my reply:
Don’t take it to heart.
I guess you can’t say too much prior to transmission, but why on earth would you want to put yourself in front of millions of viewers like that, rather than simply book a few refresher lessons with a local instructor if you feel you had something to learn?
These shows don’t choose boring, “normal” people. They choose extroverts – often with some sort of hook – who are selling themselves (or their hook). And such programmes do a major disservice to the industry that I work in. My comments were not personal, just general.
It does make you wonder, though. If you know you are a bad driver and claim you’re not proud of it, why go on TV in front of millions of people to show it off? Why not just take some lessons to fix the problem? Being crap on the roads is not a badge of honour, except among real lowlifes.
I mean, if you enter yourself for something like this, then you KNOW you have a problem. I guess that fixing it quietly just doesn’t get the same sort of publicity, does it?
The other contestant has written to me now. Apparently she is an actress (I told you there’d be hooks), and did the show for “all sorts of personal reasons”.
As I pointed out, my job is to try and teach young people enough about driving so that they don’t end up killing themselves (or other people). The TV companies are making that harder and harder by glamourizing bad driving on these shows. The average chav male sees it as a chance to show how hard he is. As for the chav girls… well, it gives them a chance to go on TV in their best clobber, if previous shows in this genre are anything to go by.
One person’s 15 minutes of fame is enough to encourage thousands of impressionable young people to seek the same publicity.
These days you don’t get people who you could genuinely class as comedy legends, but if you did, Rik Mayall would be up there. So, it was very, very sad to read of his sudden death earlier today at the relatively young age of just 56.
He first hit the big time in the 80s in the cult TV show, The Young Ones. That show was essential viewing to any teenager at the time – and to be honest, it still is on the frequent re-runs on UK Gold. He also had cameo roles in several Blackadder shows.
They don’t know what the cause of his death was yet, but it isn’t being treated as suspicious in any way. He had apparently been unwell since a quad-bike accident about 15 years ago.
I’ve reached the conclusion that in order to own any Apple device you have to be an annoying and pretentious bastard at the genetic level. I just saw this latest advert for the iPad Air (click the Esa-Pekka link) and it is already driving me mad. It also seems to help if you’re immature and enjoy making a noise just for the sake of it – as the recent iPhone advert shows.
In my experience, the vast majority of iPhone owners have scratched or cracked screens, and the early stages of carpal tunnel syndrome as a result of such erudite exchanges as:
I knw u wld rather spk 2 evr1 lk thiz n stead of rglr tlk cuz it mch ezr 2 type it all up
dnt b lk tht m8. :l
roflmao 😉
I’d say that about 99.998% of all Apple users aren’t composers or musicians (if you exclude rap and hip-hop from the term “music”, which you would if you had any sense). Clearly, 99.998% are as thick as two short planks!
A new documentary is scheduled to be shown on 10 April 2014 on ITV (10.35 pm). It promises to “delve into the murky world” of test fraud and illegal driving. It follows the DSA’s Fraud & Integrity Team and the press release suggest the problem is far deeper than you’d imagine, and that the people behind it will go to any lengths to commit such fraud.
If you use the search box on the right and type “annoying adverts”, you’ll see the previous examples I’ve written about. It seems that I’m not alone, as those adverts were specifically Googled by people (along with the word “annoying”) to find the blog.
I was just typing out an article before I left for my afternoon lesson, and I was assailed by two candidates for 2014’s most annoying adverts. Both involve whistling – the most irritating sound known to man.
The first was for Nescafe instant coffee. It features a number of people whistling “Bring Me Sunshine” and making other noises. It was followed immediately by an advert for TSB and, if anything, the annoyance level was higher due to the tuneless high-pitched racket. To make matters worse, TSB is obviously on some sort of campaign, as another variant with the same intense whistling came on at the next commercial break.
Why can’t people get it into their thick skulls that whistling is annoying? With knobs on.
Some time ago I wrote about the JML PediPaws nail trimmer for cats and dogs. At the time, it must have rated as the stupidest product ever – though plenty of Westie owners were clearly enthralled enough to buy it in spite of the obvious drawbacks, judging from the Amazon user reviews.
More recently, there was the JML PediPro. I didn’t write about this – I thought I had, but I can’t find it if I did. It’s like an electric razor for feet – human feet, this time – and the TV ad shows it grinding about a kilo of dead skin off some woman’s foot (I was having my dinner the first time they showed it). The reviews on Amazon reveal that it is a low-quality product that doesn’t appear to either do the job it says it does much of the time, or do it for very long before breaking.
And now, we have the JML Turbo Brush. You can call me old-fashioned, but to my mind a tool like this would – if it actually worked – come with a safety warning. Any footage of it working would see it producing sparks as it contacted a hard surface, and flinging bits of baked-on grease around the room. You see, the Laws of Physics absolutely dictate that it would do all these things if it was anywhere near powerful enough to do what it claims to be able to. And it wouldn’t run off four AA batteries. There’d be a generator out back.
As an aside, many years ago there was a TV advert for Spry Crisp’n’dry cooking oil. The ad showed chips (French fries to American readers) being cooked in the stuff and then – the point being that food was especially crispy when cooked in Spry – one was broken in half on camera. The chip in question was clearly the softest and least crispy of its kind, but that didn’t stop the sound effects crew dumping a hefty “snick” sound over the top. If you shut your eyes, it sounded like someone had snapped a pencil.
Well, the Turbo Brush must come courtesy of the same ad people. The blurb on JML’s website says:
Zap! Wham! Doktor Power Turbo Brush uses sonic power to make dirt and grime vanish in a flash. This heavy-duty scrubber generates over 12,000 oscillating scrubs per minute and is perfect for cleaning in awkward, hard to reach areas.
So, the four AA batteries make it vibrate. That seems pretty clear. But “scrubs”? That suggests to me that the brush head moves several centimetres either way – which it doesn’t. Mind you, the video seems to imply that the head oscillates – though most of the work appears to come from moving your hand around. And could those stains be any more phoney?
You’ve got to be realistic about this. You’re not going to be able to remove really caked-on dirt with something that runs off four small batteries any faster than you would be able to using a toothbrush and some elbow grease. And unless it was built specifically to withstand a nuclear strike, it isn’t going to last long if you use it a lot (indeed, some of the Amazon reviews make exactly that point).
