Thursday 18 December 2008

Secret Santa

Do you like unsavoury things? (Mmmm yes please!)
Do you like pornography? (Gulp. God yes!)
Do you like mischief? (Yelp!)

Then SHHH!TV's Secret Santa gift generator is the answer to your devious little prayers. Send crap or unpleasant (virtual) gifts to friends, colleagues, enemies, ex-wives, spurned lovers or the girl who just won't look at you (look at me, damn you! LOOK. AT. ME!!!!) from the comfort and anonymity of the internet.

Apart from some crappy words by yours truly, SSSH!TV also features the incredible talents of a whole bunch of smashing people who are far, far, far more talented than me. They know who they are. So big well dones for doing such an excellent job of bringing Santa to life, and a big fat thanks for letting me play.

http://www.shhh.tv/

Chappy Histmas y'all

Wednesday 17 December 2008

Dinosaur Christmas

Ladies and gentlemen, by popular demand, I present to you my very own bid for Xmas No.1 2008; the haunting winter ballad... Dinosaur Christmas.

Taken from the 2000-and-something album, Please Santa, Don't Hurt Them, Dinosaur Christmas emerged from a very heavy night in the pub, and was recorded... erm, not long after.

Yes, that is me trying to sing. And yes it is very embarrassing. But having said that, my mate's kids fucking loved it. It's amazing what you can do with a laptop, a synthesiser and a bottle of scotch...

So, headphones on children. Now. Are you ready? Good. Then we'll begin...



Terrifying Concepts

There must be someone you've always fancied having in your book, right. Sony? Nike, maybe? Everyone'd love to work on some big, cool, GLOBAL account, wouldn't they?

Well, let me tell you: they don't come much bigger, cooler or - er- global than Lockheed Martin Space Systems. With billion dollar budgets, international clients, and cutting-edge (literally) out-of-this-world products, Lockheed are the dog's bollocks, cat's pyjamas and wasp's tits all rolled into one great big pyjamaed bollock. With tits.

For instance, just take a look at this promo video for their Multiple Kill Vehicle MKV-L. It's... erm... well... See what you think. I'm guessing they made it look completely shit to confound enemies or something... maybe..? I mean it doesn't really look like a washing-up bottle with a couple of cans of Lynx taped to it, in real life. Oh, and the music's spot-on - I mean, nothing says "interstellar death machine" better than squirting 80's Midi-farts over some old CNN
graphics.

I don't know which is more terrifying: the notion of the weapon itself, or the total indifference with which it's promoted.

Scary shit.




They should've done it like the Bodyform ad, shouldn't they.

Tuesday 16 December 2008

Farm Cops

I once pitched a TV show to Channel 4. It was called Moon Salon, and involved a crew of intergalactic beauty therapists visiting ugly aliens in space. The crew themselves were various, impossible aliens and had an array of equally impossible techniques for beautifying their (also impossible) clients. For instance, one of the aliens was a meant to be a famous pop-star, so the crew were really excited to have them coming on board for a treatment. But when we finally meet the star, we see he's nothing but a vast (ie. fucking enormous) brown cube with a tiny little face at one end. The whole thing was so impossible to do, we actually visualised it as a puppet show.

In fact, the whole point of Moon Salon was that - like all successful TV shows - it was A) completely unrealistic, and B) ever so slightly fascist. It was intended as a culmination of everything that was overblown and ridiculous about American TV...

And now, I've just come up with a show that does exactly the same for British TV!

Yep, Farm Cops, brings together the Sunday night, morphine-drip nostalgia of Heartbeat/Last Of The Summer Wine, with the crap, ITV shit-grit of Taggart/Cracker. Oh, and with all the cute farm animals, rolling countryside and Land Rovers, there's a whiff of the Howards Way lifestyle porn about it as well.

The action centres around DCI Paul "Digger" Moss. He had it all: family, career, the lot. But one day it all went wrong. We dont' know how or why, but he's haunted by it - whatever "it" is. We know his wife died giving birth to his only son, Dan (who's gay, just so we tick the equal opps. box). Digger gave up his career to become a potato farmer in East Sussex. He lives a modest life; keeps himself to hiself. He is friends with Mellissa, who runs an organic farm-shop and supplies her with potatoes. They fancy eachother really badly and every week we expect them to fuck, but they never do. Digger is true to his dead wife (except during a Xmas special which will get massive ratings). Each episode sees Digger faced with 2 kinds of adversity: 1) a local crime to solve (this could be everything from a murder, pony rustling, land disputes with gypsies, fly-tipping) and 2) trouble at the farm (this could be the rising cost of organic pesticides/pink diesel, finding a supplier for a machine part, a union dispute over Polish labour).

Not only will Farm Cops be must-see TV with sexy farm-hands and Range Rover Sports, it'll also be a poignant commentary on contemporary rural affairs.

And it'll be just as fucking shite as everything else on telly.

Sunday 14 December 2008

Rape

Did you watch it then - the X-Factor finalists sodomising that poor Leonard Cohen song?

I don't know which was worse: JLS's creepy, plastic harmonies, or Alexandra's fucking weird, demonic mellisma. Could've been worse though. I mean, they had the hysterical, inappropriate choir and those shit "messiah on a budget" roman candles, but at least they didn't use the pan-pipes. That would've been a little too far up the bum even for Cowell's insane standards.

Mind you, looking at that picture... "See this," he's saying; "See this, Scott Walker. Next year I'm shoving this right up your fucking arsehole. If I say it's pop, it's fucking pop, ok."

Wednesday 10 December 2008

Good Will To All Men

Thanks goes to one of Santa's elves for letting me know that TBWA/Manchester's 2008 Christmas card is available now.

I wouldn't normally mention something like that here, but I'm "reliably" informed that practically all of TBWA/Manchester's clients read this blog for some weird reason. (I know - it sounds like something delusional a paranoid person would say, but it really is actually properly true!)

So. If you're one of TBWA/Manchester's clients, but haven't yet received your official TBWA/Manchester 08 Christmas card, drop us a line and I'll ask the elves to make sure you're on the list. Oh, and thanks for reading this year. I hope all the swearing and pictures of cocks continues to be of significance to your business in 2009.

Merry Christmas everybody.

And, yes. That does include you.


ABOVE: Client hospitality

Wednesday 3 December 2008

Sublime Vs. Ridiculous

Seems to be a lot of us ad-slags shitting on about Charlie Brooker's (excellent, I thought) Screenwipe advertising special, last week.

Top of people's Denials List ("No, no, it's just not like that!") is the show's assertion that advertising is mostly about pillaging YouTube and the internet for stuff to knick.

So, here's two reasons why we shouldn't pilfer off t'interweb:

1) An example of what YouTube is mostly filled with
2) An example of what the internet is mostly filled with

One is sublime and one is ridiculous. Although I'm not sure which way round they are.


1)


2)

There. Now anyone who can make an ad out of either of those wins a packet of custard creams.

And yes, that is who you think it is.

Tuesday 2 December 2008

Missing Post

For the benefit of Pieman and any other observant readers out there, here's the link I seem to have deleted like a shambling, cack-handed oaf:


Click on the "About"button and there's some rather lovely words for you to read, you big word loving readers you. Nice.

Oh, and here's the picture of a Hulk.

Glad we sorted that out.

Ad-Vent

Hello Santa. What's that in your sack - a glut of rubbish Christmas adverts? Whoopee! Just what we get every year.

Now, let's see which is your favourite. Is it Lowe's Christmas-on-prozac, maudlin-athon John Lewis campaign? Or TBWA's blink-and-you'll-miss-it 39p Co-Op clementines (or is that McCann's Aldi entry?) Maybe you're a fan of Richard Hammond's don't-spare-the-huskies cacky Crimbo Morrison's style (doesn't Denise Van Outen look like a white Chinese lady), or perhaps you've been enchanted by Katona Vs. Nolan's "Who ate all the pies!? They were my fucking pies anyway!" buffet wars for Iceland.

Up until now, my No.1 Christmas "comm" has been M&S's chilling "they were never seen alive again" backstory-to-a-slasher-movie, Take That and co. trapped in a country house gubbins (it's the grainy handheld footage that does it; gives it that real John Carpenter "this was all that was left" forboding). But last night it was blown clean out of the water by this: the Littlewood's Direct commercial.

For those of you haven't seen it, it's a brave and startlingly original piece of work , almost as if Peter Greenaway had been asked to direct a Disney film. It's also pant-pissingly (genuinely) funny. It starts off pretentiously, then goes fucking bonkers, then ends with a totally hysterical flourish. This is WCRS making Fallon look positively heavy-handed.

Oh, and that cat must be destined for great things.