You know what it’s like, you’re under pressure at work, you’ve got a busy social life, your family are driving you mental, so you don’t drink water for a couple of weeks only to bloody well wind up dead!

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.

This advert for RED Driving School features a few of my advertisment pet hates: misleading claims, actors pretending to be real people and terrible, terrible puns:

“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.

It’s interesting – or at least it is if you’re a loser with too much time on your hands – how someone (I am going to name names here, it’s Paul Merton) who is the God father of UK improv comedy and the king of the witty repost can be so very funny off the cuff and so very terrible at reading from a script.

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.

Are you grossly overweight but too lazy to go on a diet or, God forbid, do some exercise?

Are your body parts – that, not wishing to patronise you, probably resemble over-inflated balloons – terribly, terribly sore from all that nasty chaffing?

Then have we got the lubricant for you!

Yes, it’s the latest advert from Lanacane:

If only all the horrifying pain and suffering that goes on in this world – you know, and not just being too fat and wearing cheap synthetic fabrics – could be prevented just by greasing yourself up like a chip shop worker’s hair.

You know what it’s like, you the head of an international car company – or possibly a toothpaste salesman from Sidcup – when you hear that a rival company is developing a replacement for the most boring car ever made and, naturally, you’re desperate to find out more about it.

So what do you do?

That’s right! You send the product from an unholy union of Ethan Hunt, Jack Bauer and Jason Bourne to infiltrate your rivals test facility and covertly gather information about the new car.

God, this is going to be exciting.

At least it would be exciting if only the industrial spy they selected weren’t so completely useless that he’s totally flummoxed by what he finds. So much so that his report consists of nothing more than “It’s as if it can…” and “The light have some kind of…” and “I don’t know what kind of engine it is.”

That’s it? We paid you, how much? And that’s all you got? “It’s as if it can see?” What are we supposed to do with that? Worst. Industrial spy. Ever. Get out!

Plus they are going to kick themselves when they find out that they could have saved themselves all this bother just by texting “insignia” to 84464.

If only they’d watched the advert.

Here’s an advert that’s been getting a bit of press over the last couple of days so I thought I’d jump on the band wagon and stoke the fires of indifference that are sweeping the UK by adding it to TV’s Worst Adverts.

It seems that the new advert from Burger King for it’s “Texican” burger featuring a tall, bearded, scrawny Texan – who’s good at reaching high shelves and cleaning windows – and a midget Mexican wrestler – who’s good at opening jars, has a large fan base and enjoys swimming – has caused outrage in both Mexico and Mexican embassies the World over:

Yeah, according to the Independent this advert has left Jorge Zermeno, the Mexican ambassador to Spain, with a bad taste in his mouth – one even worse than actually eating a Texican. He is reported to have been so outraged by the depiction of the Mexican wrestler as both short and good at opening jars/swimming that he “wrote a formal complaint to Burger King, asking for the ad to be removed.”

So if once the dust has settled and this advert has been forgotten like yesterdays fart we only learn one thing from this whole sorry affair it’s do not mess with the Mexican ambassador unless you’re ready for him to unleash a can full of “formal letter of complaint” on your arse!

Is that headed note paper? You’re a nasty piece of work, ambassador. 

But like most people, what surprises me most is that a man as important as the Mexican ambassador to Spain can possibly find the time to get so worked up about an advert for a spicy cow’s buttock in a bap? 

I just can’t believe that he’s not either too lazy, commiting too much petty crime or is too high to worry about Mexicans being stereotyped?

Anyway, I think that we can all agree that there’s only one way to decide if this advert is really offensive to Mexicans, vote for it on TV’s Worst Adverts.

So get clicking, amigos – as long as you’re not too pissed on taquilla, busy stealing mules or sneaking into the US, that is.

Whenever I see the “Live Your Moment” adverts for the Xbox 360 – that are presumably supposed to show that the Xbox experience is so engaging that it’s like it’s actually happening in your brain (although I’m not sure where else Microsoft think we have experiences) – I can’t help but think:

“Play the Xbox 360 – Like Having a Lobotomy!”

Surely these adverts just plays into the hands of the “Games consoles turn you into cabbages” brigade?

Here’s part two of TV’s Worst Adverts‘ “Disturbingly Sexied Up” Trilogy – Birds Eye’s Salmon Fish Fingers advert.

If you did a survey of 1000 men, asking each of them to write a list 1000 things that they found “sexy”, on resultant and fairly comprehensive list of “one million things that turn men on” not one of them would have written the words “Fish Fingers”.

Not one.

In fact it’s been proven that it’s medically impossible to find sealife that’s been covered in breadcrumbs then frozen in anyway sexually exciting.

Daryl Hannah in Splash – Yes.

Daryl Hannah in Splash covered in breadcrumbs then frozen – No.

So my jaw never fails to hit the floor when I see that Birds Eye have tried to use sex to sell their new Salmon Fish Fingers:

Oh goodness.

When the *male* fish finger says “So much pink!” at the end, is he referring to a woman’s shaven bits?

If so, it’s all kinds of wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

See Also

Peugeot 308 – DRIVESEXY

Under normal circumstances upon finding out that a group of middle aged men are spending too much time thinking about our children we’d be completely justified in forming an angry, torch wielding mob and hunted them down like the dirty dogs they are.

But not when it’s the middle aged men at the ASA. 

That’s because they’re not thinking about your children just for cheap sexual kicks but alos because 51 feckless crackers – seemingly without even the most basic of parenting skills – complained about the NHS’s Scared anti-smoking advert. 

These whingers complained that the advert featuring a little girl telling us what she was and wasn’t scared of, somewhat ironically, scared their children so much that the only way they could calm the little blighters down was to give them cigarettes. Tsk, what are the chances?

After thinking long and hard about it, the ASA adjudication concluded: 

“We considered that the ad could cause distress to children if they were watching TV alone without their parents or family to explain the ad to them”

Don’t you just love parents who are so concerned about their children’s well being that they can find the time to complain to the ASA about adverts frightening their kids but can’t be bothered to sit and watch the fucking nightmare box with them (the kids not the ASA).

Anyway, it turns out though that the number of compaints that the ASA received over that NHS advert was patheticly small in comparisson to how many they got about the VW Golf Fight advert. 1066 Daily Mail readers were so concerned that this advert was too violent and that it might lead to copycat behaviour that the lodged complaints.

And although it’s easy to scoff at these people and dismiss them as “over-reacting” and “too easily offended”, it turns out that some mindless idiots did copy scenes from the advert. I, for one, was so influenced by this advert that I took the Walton sextuplets to a scrap yard and made them fight each other with car spares to the death.

Needless to say, it was fucking brilliant. 

After a lot of soul searching the ASA decided that neither of these adverts should be shown before 9pm to protect our innocent and so easily influenced children.

But never shy of controversy TV’s Worst Adverts is pleased to bring you the adverts that you can watch at whatever time of day and regardless of how old you might be.

Enjoy.

NHS Smokefree Services – Scared 

VW Golf Fight Advert

Here’s part one of TV’s Worst Adverts‘ “Disturbingly Sexied Up” Trilogy – the Peugeot 308 DRIVESEXY advert, as submitted by the lovely Simon Breadbin:

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.