But I’ve always been a fan of bullies who play on the irrational, insecurities of others by pushing a lie in a calous attempt to manipulate them which is why I enjoy this advert so:

Or as Becky, who submitted this bad ad, puts it:

“This is possibly the most awful, irritating, full-of-shit advert I have ever seen. I mean, really!

If you have a nice fake salt-and-pepper ‘do, the birds – who, by the way, are way too young for you – won’t be able to resist your mix of energy and experience.

Yeah right!”

To be fair to Just For Men though, it is a tricky balance – on the one hand you leave your hair grey and it drains all your energy but on the other you dye your hair and you spend all your energy shagging a string of beautiful, younger women. Either way, when you get to 45, the best you can hope for is lying in bed all day with out the strength to get one up.

It’s not easy being a middle-aged, single man, it really isn’t.

Obviously, this advert is knowingly and deliberately awful – much like the Pot Noodle itself – but it’s on all the time which, as Jesus puts it, make watching again:

Like being punched in the head by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And then he rapes you in the ear.

With a knife.

And as for the Flight of the Conchords style one, well…

Which is why whenever I hear Cuprinol’s version of “The Self Preservation Society” song – from that quintessential 1960’s film – with its new, far more apt lyrics about the preservation of wood, I’m instantly transported back to that technicolored Bohemia:

Oh no, hang on, no I’m not…

But what I do particularly love about this advert is the fact there’s only one idea in it – if you change “self preservation” to “wood preservation” it could be about varnish and still fit the tune.

Brilliant.

So from the moment the hapless actors burst out of the garden shed – each one desperately trying to out “Dick Van Dyke” the one in front but only to succeed in becoming inexplicably more twatish – singing those blood curdlingly awful reworked lyrics to the moment of blessed relief and this horror show of an advert finishes, Cuprinol are banking on the fact that changing “self” to “wood” is, in some way, amusing.

Which, in a “Repeatedly being kicked in the genitalia by Jim Davidson whilst watching Schindler’s List on loop for 7 days” kind of way, it is.

Well done, Cuprinol. Well done.

Although eating it didn’t make me repeatedly sing the chorus to My Sharona with two of my simpering mates, I did below the hits of Marilyn Manson down the toilet bowl latter that day.

I wonder if it’s connected?

Thanks to CovertJellyfish for submitting this bad ad.

And let’s be honest, being dead makes you feel pretty bad, doesn’t it?

But thanks to Volvic – and their lovely scientists – all that tiresome “dying of dehydration” can now be avoided. Yes, they must have been working double shifts in the labs to discover that drinking water can – hold on to your underpants – make you *feel* *better*.

As scientific break-throughs go it’s really is up there with evolution and relativity, isn’t it? 

Now, this is big news but Volvic aren’t fools. They realised that a scientific discovery of this magnitude is going to be pretty hard for the average Nigel to swallow. That’s why they employed Jimmy!

Don’t be fooled by the fact that Jimmy looks a bit of a spod. Maybe he’s not cut his hair in, ooh, 10 years and maybe he wears a headband when doing unspecified sports-type exercise. So what? Because despite his dreadful hair and dress sense fool you, Jimmy’s just like you and me. And if Jimmy’s doing the Volvic 14 Day Challenge then so should you!

But he’s off to a nervy start. When first faced with the Challenge he’s naturally intimidated by its scale (“That’s a lot of water” *gulp*!) but with the golden carrot of *feeling* *better* dangling in front of him he’s prepared to give “drinking water” a bash.

Hoorah for you, Jimmy!

And the challenge is a true voyage of discovery for Jimmy because, despite still being blissfully unaware on day 6 that water is readily available almost everywhere in the country, by day 10 he’s found out that drinking water is nearly as easy to do as eating food!

And by day 14, when he’s playing that unspecified sport – one that’s played in a cage, requires a baseball glove and an exceedingly camp run – Jimmy’s completed the challenge and, would you credit it, he *feels* *better*. 

Hmm.

I hate to be the one to piss in your volcan mineral water pool but this whole 14 Day Challenge is such a horribly transparent marketing ploy (“Hey if we convince them they need to drink 1.5 litres a day for 2 weeks then that’s 21 x 1 litre bottles @ £0.63 equals… billions!”).

To call drinking water ever day for 2 weeks a challenge is beyond patronising (the only people who would fail to complete are those who can’t be trusted with scissors, not even paper ones).

To make the unmeasurable claim that completing will make you *feel* *better* is so Mickey Mouse that it’s not even funny.

Finally, the benfits of drinking lots of water have been debunked - once you’re re-hydrated, you’re re-hydrated. The rule isn’t the more the drink the better it is for you. And, unless your mother was a camel, there’s no bnefit to drinking a lot of water for 2 weeks if you’ve quenched your thirst after one glass of water. 

So come on Volvic, cut the Jimmy crap and bring back the far less scientifically questionable talking dinosaurs.

“You don’t need experience, just the DRIVE to do something new” the advert man tells us.

Brilliant.

“So RUN OVER to the phone and call us now because all the INDICATORS show you’re on TRACK to a career in the FAST LANE. But don’t REVERSE your decision [to become a driving instructor] or I’ll have to BOOT you in the face – really hard.”

Doesn’t it sound like being a driving instructor really is a laugh a minute?

Amazingly, despite all of the hilarious driving-based puns, my favourite part of the ad though is the actress’ particularly convincing performance. Those cold, dead eyes say so much, don’t they? As she stares dolefully into the camera, they’re screaming “I was going to be the next Anita Dobson but look at me now!”.

Poor love.

She’s the one who comes out with the laughable claim that by becoming a RED driving instructor you can “choose your own working hours.”:

“Now I fit my career around my family life – it’s totally flexible”

Of course, what with this being TV’s Worst Adevrts, I haven’t done any actual research but I reckon that the reality of it is that most of the “over a million people” learning to drive each year are 17 and go to school or college. So there’s probably going to be a lot of evening and weekend work – at least, there will be if you want to make that £30,000 a year.

But don’t worry, you can see your family some other time so let’s just gloss over that fact with another terrible pun:

“If you’ve got a licence then we’ve got the KEYS – to a new career”

Oh, you driving instructors are such wags. You really are.

Two cases in point – those God aweful Hancock remakes and Paul Merton in China. In both of which he proved he has the delivery of a doped up Jose Luis Hernandez when reading his pre-prepared material.

That doesn’t make him a bad man, of course. He’s not Ross Kemp for instance.

But I can’t help but think that everytime he stumbles his way through the supposedly off the cuff “Not very mobile for a phone” Paul Merton dies a little bit inside.

Please don’t do these any more, Paul. Please.

Note: Stephen Fry has always been a whorebag and it seems to have done him no harm so he can keep going.

2nd quarter 2009 and Britain Plc. is mired in recession.

A dolorous rain courses down the display windows of Teddington Peugeot as junior sales exec Jason sips his fourth cup of vending machine coffee and wonders how he will possibly meet his target for April. A slight breeze from the direction of the showroom door brings him back from his reverie and he notices the smartly dressed, attractive woman walking purposefully toward him.

“I’m looking for something kind of…Drivesexy” she smiles.
“What?”
“I’m looking for something kind of…Drivesexy” exact same tone and intonation.
“Er, we have these” he mumbles, while pointing awkwardly at a mundane hatchback.
“Fact me”

Jason manages to recover some of his composure and launches into his by now familiar sale pitch; he gains an inch in height and more importantly he gains an inch in girth as he leers into the woman.

“Well we take a regular 308 and we pour on the goodies. Mundane alloys, some other stuff that practically all cars have, and hold on to your knickers, CUSTOM FUCKING MATS LMAONADE!!!!eleven”.

Warming to his subject he presses on in a deliberately smug tone “Rather than just paying us the correct price, you give us 12.5k and we give you change (probably a pound)”.

2nd quarter 2009, and Britain Plc. is mired in recession. A dolorous rain courses down the display windows of Teddington Peugeot as junior sales exec Jason suddenly jerks awake, realising that he has dozed off again whilst listening to one of the worst car adverts in a long time on a perpetual loop in the showroom.

In the forty five seconds or so he was asleep, he has managed to spill his coffee……..and ejaculate.

He sells nothing that day.

Nice one, Simon.

Is there a less olbique way of suggesting that the Wilkinson Sword Quattro for Women Bikini is for trimming your bush? They even provide shapes that you might like prune it down too, the “landing strip”, the “dairylea triangle”, the “Hitler moustache” and the lesser seen “round one”.

They’ve missed the scraggly naked bare bush though, perhaps there’s no way of extending the visual euphemism to the Brazilian.

There’s a woman who lives down the street who has her bush done in the shape of a squirrel. She doesn’t use a Wilkinson Sword Quattro for Women Bikini though – she gets a man into do it with a big pair of sheers. 

I wonder if she keeps her merkin as trim?

Yes, 2 of the world’s top sportsmen and Thierry Henry are back on our screens in a new Gillette advert – this time for something called Gillette Fusion Power Phenom.

Their return might come as something of a surprise as the previous advert – Gillette Champions – was voted as the worst of 2008 by Campaign. An advert whose shitness was largely due to its 3 stars having absolutely zero on screen chemistry or charisma. In fact, their acting was so terribly that Drench managed to get more personality out of an actual puppet than Henry, Woods and Federer could manage in the Gillette ad.

So surely only a fool would bring them back – you know, only a fool or someone who’s seen the sales figures. One of the two.

Reassuringly though is that the new advert isn’t any better than the previous one. Based around the toe-curlingly made-up word “Phenom”. This, according to the advert, is short for “phenomenal” but only a pathetic wannabe hipster or middle-management wank stain would ever dare utter it in public.

“Have you heard the new Boris Brejcha EP? It’s phenom.”

“How does the new Audi RS4 handle? Oh, totally phenom!”

To make matters worse, the new advert’s set to what sounds like a late 90’s “corporate song”. The kind of uptempo, supposedly motivational yet ultimately meaningless tripe that the HR department loves but everyone else in the company hates. It’s a tune that’s designed to “empower you as an individual” but in reality just makes you desperately want to cut your own ears off then crawl inside your own anus just so you don’t have to hear it ever again.  Ever.

The icing on the cake is some more spectacularly terrible CGI work in which each of the stars play their sport with a ball that is actually the Earth (How about “Use Gillette and you’ll have the world at your feet”?). This CGI enables Tiger Woods to play golf with one hand in his pocket. Roger Federer to balance the ball/globe on his racket before hitting through his legs and Thierry Henry to do some ball skills that culminate in a spin so preposterously fake that even the makers of House of Flying Daggers would think it’s “a bit over the top”.

Sadly for Gillette, even with all this CGI trickery at their fingertips, they still couldn’t make the 3 men to look even the slightest bit comfortable in each others company.  

So just how bad is this new Gillette advert? Christ, it’s phenom.

What does that mean?

I don’t know. I just don’t know.

At least that’s the picture of “men” Oven Pride portray in their latest advert for “oven and BBQ cleaner in a bag”.

And it’s so outrageously patronising to men and such a depressing picture of married life that I get an overwhelming urge to kick my eyeballs out every time I see it.

The advert features a couple who are straight out of a 1970’s sitcom – she’s a sour-faced battle-axe in training and he’s a simpering emasculated idiot. Their relationship is so loving that they can barely bring themselves to look at each other. So instead they take part in a bizarre silent and deeply menacing gurning competition.

There she stands – hands on hip, desperately trying to suck her lips clean off her face – as a statuesque representation of womankind’s disgust at the inadequacies of men. Whilst he fidgets uneasily on his stool, presumably because he’s so idiotic he’s put his underpants on the wrong way.

This tension is only broken by an aggressively condescending female voice over claiming that Oven Pride is “so easy – a man can do it”. On hearing this, the woman thrusts the box of Oven Pride into the man’s chest with the force of an elephant on a pogo stick.

Relieved that his internal organs are still internal the man sets to work cleaning the oven.

But it’s not all bad news for the man. From the look on his face, and the mildly masturbatory way in which he shakes the bag, cleaning the oven gives him an almost orgasmic pleasure.

In fact with just a few more shakes of the bag and a shift onto the other buttock to contort his back-to-front underpants a little tighter and… yes, yes, there’s the face of a man who’s just inadvertently ejaculated whilst cleaning a household appliance:

Now I’m sure that this Oven Pride is supposed to be ironic. It hopes to get house wives all round the country knowingly tutting and shaking their heads at “men never doing the bloody cleaning!”.

But it paints such a depressingly misanthropic picture of marital life and such a staggeringly patronising picture of men that any irony is completely lost.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s depressing and patronising?

Everytime I see this overly-long advert, it makes me cringe.

The worst bit of it is where everybody is gathered around at the end rythmicly shouting “One one eight!”.

Just awful.

As every TV’s Worst Adverts fan worth their salt knows, Ghostbusters is one of my favourite films and I die a little bit inside each time I hear Ray Parker Jr straining out every line to the directory enquires based version of the Ghostbusters theme tune whilst simultaneously taking it up the poop chute off the 118 boys for a few dirty dollar.

It’s enough to make poor ghost-busting meta-psychologists cross their streams. It really is.

“Jonathan? How are things?”

“Steve. Same old, same old.”

“Must be 8 years since we competed together at the Games.”

“Where did you go?”

“Well, while I was competing with you I was having my wonky eyesight fixed.”

“Having your wonky eyesight fixed and competing at the same time?”

“Yeah, vision and competition. And Ultralase helped me see straight again.”

“Sounds easy.”

“It was. Getting A1 vision changed my life. Now I’m earning more money then I ever thought I could. Even the misses is happy. Oh and I was knighted.”

Is it me or does that remind you of anything?

Quite. The. Onscreen. Rapport.

“Arrgghh, the gotomypc advert!

Two businessmen are about to give a presentation to the board. But, oh no disaster “The presentation is on the office computer”.

You’re in a presentation. The clue as to what to bring is in the meeting title. But the fucking idiot has forgotten it. Left it on his machine in the office. What a fuck nuts.

But come on, it’s happened to all of us, hasn’t it? Hmm. Not me, John.

Options open to him at this point:

1. Apologise and make up some bullshit file corruption error. Maybe wing a manual presentation, you know, like people who know what they’re talking about.

2. Get a squadron of birds to steal his work PC and bring it into the presentation (or pre-sentation, if you come from where the ad’s from). Please Note: If you’re going to do this, you’ll need some Wagner going on and some hilarious fluttering about. Give it some drama since, you know, I’m rooting for this dunce.

3. Ask to borrow a PC or to connect his laptop to their internet connection; opening a completely unapproved line with the outside world (Jack Bauer would word this better, but I’m so enraged…). Or maybe he could get all hi-tech and use his modem as a wireless for his laptop. But he’d probably struggle with this one; seeing as he’s got a presentation that day, and has forgetten to bring it with him. In fact the chances are his feet are still wet from trying to work out how to use the toilet that morning.

It’s your pick. 1, 2 or 3.

If you picked any of the above, you’re still in a presentation and you still look like an arse.”

Nice one, Simon. Hope it’s made you feel better.

A. 1984.

A problem essentailly caused by a group of retarded children trying to prove who has the biggest penis by fucking around with our livlihoods. And the penis competition became so fierce and the impact of the credit crunch so great that it’s the only thing anyone can talk about or even think about - even for proper grown ups who don’t work in London!

Don’t believe me?

Well, you might kid yourself that you were thinking about which shoes would go best with that new dress you’ve just bought. But you weren’t. You were thinking about the credit crunch.

And you might pretend that you were thinking what to have for lunch but you weren’t. Cer-red-it Cer-runch!

But I’m so sick of thinking about it or even hearing the phrase that I’d literally rather an environment catastrophe happen then have to listen to one more reporter’s histrionics whilst telling me that “this time next week the economic outlook will be so gloomy” I won’t even be able to afford to take a shit.

Although having said that, there is some fun to be had with the credit crunch. Because, just like the media and Tory MP’s, I’ve started blaming the credit crunch for all the bad things that happen:

Why are you late? Credit crunch.

Why haven’t you finished that work you promised me by this morning? Credit crunch.

Why haven’t you got a job? Credit crunch.

Except, if the new Jobsite advert is to believed, the credit crunch isn’t the reason why you haven’t got a job. The real reason is because you’re a stupid, useless, lazy wanker:

Or as Rob, who submitted this bad ad, put it:

Max Beesley insults anyone and everyone with his patronising and arrogant pseudo-edgy monologue. Basically, this advert repeatedly calls you a twat over and over again.

I hate angry adverts that shout at you. Hate them. And there are few more guaranteed ways to get me to not do something then to shout at me to do it.

So when someone very aggressively tells me to “UPLOAD YOUR CV NOW!” I’m inclined to think “Actually, I think I’ll just set fire to it then wank on the ashes instead, thanks very much.” So this advert kind of misses the mark with me.

But more so, the message I think this advert sends to potential employers is that the candidates on Jobsite are so stupid, so lazy and so feckless that they’re only on Jobsite because Danni Minogue’s ex-boyfriend shouted at them.

They sound ideal. When can they start?

Of course, that’s not really true. Employers don’t need to worry about the quality of candidates on Jobsite, I’m sure they’re fine.

Just a shame there aren’t any jobs anymore.

Bloody credit crunch!

Yes, BT’s Adam and Jane are back on – at least they’re back on the nightmare box:

I had very low hopes for the future of the relationship when Adam went and took his “dream job” in Cornwall. 

You see, Jane was mad.So mad, in fact, that the only way she and Adam could communicate was using Instant Messenger – just like millions of fully grown British people do every day. Sadly for them, the internet was broken in Cornwall meaning poor old Adam couldn’t tell Jane what he was ‘feeling’.

Then Adam was so distracted by Owl TV that Jane wasn’t mentioned for a few months. 

But suddenly, out of the blue, a letter arrives from her!

Yawn.

The big problem I have with Adam and Jane is that I’ve got a deeper and more meaningful relationship with my right (and ocassionally my left) hand then they have with each other.

I don’t believe it which means I just don’t care.

Anyway, in spite of this apathy, TV’s Worst Adverts can exclusively reveal to you the question that Jane asked Adam – that Adam mysteriously answers “Yes” to: 

“Would you pay to watch Iron Man?”

So now we know, there’s no need to keep up this charade of a relationship, is there BT?

Judge for yourself.

So poor old Skeletor has had bend over a think of Eternia while the man sticks it to him:

Not really.

This is, in fact, the horrifying sight of, the now 113 year old, Iggy Pop whoring his bag of bones for swiftcover.com car insurance.

Some folks on t’internet have claimed that, following the Johnny Rotten/Country Life butter affair, this advert sounds the death knell of punk.

Others refuse to believe that Iggy Pop, an icon of this anti-establishment rock music genre, could throw his principles out the window and flog car insurance?

What has he become? Some sort of stooge?

Anyways, if punk is dead (which it is) then, from the looks of him, I’m fairly certain Iggy Pop won’t be far behind.

“I’m selling you time.” Iggy tells us.

“Get a life!” Iggy emplores us.

If only poor old Iggy Pop would listen to his own advice and make better use of the precious little time he seems to have left and not churn out any more of this guff.

No bother; have a cup of tea instead.

I wonder how much money I’ve wasted on the gym when I could have just been sat on the settee instead?

Judge for yourself.

Or more to the point the makers of Mamma Mia! have got a lot to answer for.

According to DVD sales figures (which I can’t find now but definitely heard this or read it or dreamt it), one in four British households have been subjected to Pierce Brosnan’s singing and Julie Walter’s dancing over the Christmas Holidays.

Although the performances are clearly laughable, your brain is far too mashed by sprout fumes and subdued by a cocktail of drink – the contents of which is lost in the haze but definitely began and ended with Cockburns – that it was just about bearable. Just.

But the worst thing about the success of Mamma Mia! is that the people at Take A Break have seen it:

I can’t decide whether the choice of the Bee Gees song is ironic or not because there’s only one word for this advert: Tragedy.