British Advertising

When I was here before Christmas, the airwaves were innundated by stupid "spendSpendSPEND"ads for the holidays. I've been to see festivals at the Walker several times where they play funny and interesting British ads from the previous year, and so I was kind of disappointed when the ads on my tele weren't all that great. Now, however, it seems I've hit the start of advertising season. Half the time I'm not watching TV now...I'm killing time until the ads come on.

Here are some examples of things I've seen so far:

• There is a very strange ad with people wearing giant wigs that obscure their faces. Instead, they have faces drawn on their very toned stomachs. They dance around the house to a silly song and act happy because they're eating lowfat yogurt. That's weird, but when they bump bellies in some sort of body puppet kiss, I wince.
  
• There's one with a little boy dressed as a bank robber (black and white striped shirt, mask) and he's sitting in the back seat of his dad's car saying how he doesn't want to get out...no one will like him and they'll think he's weird. His dad says, "Go on, it'll be fine," so the kid gets out of the car. The dad sighs and looks up and sees an add on the side of a bus stop with a nice looking car, and the price is surprisingly low. We see a look of shock and horror on the dad's face as the voice over says "Peugeot...less expensive than you might think" and then we pan to a shot of the kid as he runs out of the bank with alarms sounding, money flying everywhere, screaming "Drive, Dad! DRIVE!"
• Two rappers are packing up one guy's grandma's house...she's moving to another apartment. The grandson is thanking his buddy for being so helpful, he really appreciates it, yadda yadda yadda. As he's talking, the grandson goes into another room and while he's gone his buddy finds some perfume. He tries to see what it smells like, but he accidentally sprays it in his face and in desperation grabs the closest cloth he can find to wipe it out of his eyes and nose. So, when the grandson walks in he sees his friend rubbing a pair of his grandma's underpants on his face. "Oh, MAN! That's sick. You really need help, man." (End of ad)