Adverts are twee and infantile. Why don't they tell it as it is - just like that nice man who sells Calgon
My favourite advert at the moment is for Calgon. A kindly looking handyman is sitting behind a washing machine and a box of Calgon, addressing me directly. "You've heard about Calgon, but why should you use it?" he asks. It's true. I have indeed heard of Calgon, but don't know why I should use it. It is as if he has looked into my soul. This guy understands me better than many of my closest friends, and I've only known him four seconds.
Better still, he follows his ice-breaking question with a straightforward answer. Apparently Calgon stops your washing machine turning into a crumbling chalk sculpture. "Calgon protection," he says, patting the box. The advert ends with a good old-fashioned jingle - a small choir singing: "Washing machines live longer with Calgon!" It couldn't be simpler.
Now obviously, I'm never going to buy Calgon; popping a Calgon tablet "in every wash" might make the washer "live" longer, but a) it sounds like too much trouble to go to on behalf of a machine and b) I could probably spend the money I'd saved on not buying Calgon on getting a new machine when the old one finally dies of limescale cancer - and I bet new washing machines are thrillingly advanced these days, with wi-fi iPod connections and sat nav and everything. But I appreciate the ad's straight-talking nature. It's refreshingly unsophisticated, and unlike almost every other advert on television, not glaringly over-pleased with itself.
Right now, there's a rash of commercials which combine "twee" with "patronising" - "tweetronising" if you like, although that's quite tweetronising in itself. You can spot a tweetronising commercial a mile off - it'll have a modern folk music backing track, a cast of non-threatening urban hippy replicants, and a drowsy hello-birds-hello-sky overall attitude that makes you want to chase it down an alleyway and kick it until the police arrive.
Furthermore, tweetronising takes infantilism to a new level. They're like children's programmes in miniature - not so much talking down to the viewer as placing the viewer in a cot and tickling his chin. George Orwell once described advertising as "the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket". These days it's more like the rattling of a rattle.
Take the current Orange ad in which a woman stands in a forest unfolding a range of ain't-it-cute props while a self-consciously lo-fi recording of a female voice recites: "I like conversations that last for hours and hours/Full of jokes about singing bees and talking flowers/I like it when they take up whole mornings/And fill up whole nights/When they mention books and cocktails/And trumpets and kites/I like them when they talk about parties and talk about dreams/And talk about cakes covered in cream/And all that they need is me and a friend/ And the talking to go on and never to end."
Never to end? I'm all for a bit of pointless digression, but this imbecile wants to witter about "singing bees" and "trumpets and kites" for eternity. This is a description of hell. Orange does not think insipid babble is the sole preserve of womankind, incidentally - there is a companion ad backed with a man moronically singing about how he likes to talk about dinosaurs, cars, and "anything that pops in my brain/and then falls out my mouth/kind of like the rain". He is either naturally stupid or recovering from a head injury. Or maybe years of intensive mobile phone use have caused a brain tumour so huge, it has crushed his IQ, leaving him with the conversational skills of a six-year-old.
The rule of thumb seems to be that the more grimly impersonal the product, the more ingratiatingly syrupy the ad. Cars, for example, were until recently portrayed as cold mechanical sharks; selfish metal cocoons that transported men in sunglasses across isolated desert roads at fearsome velocity. Now, apparently, they are cuddly scamps with an impish sense of humour. Or toys. Or skateboards.
But they're not. Cars are bastards. You know that advert where the smashed-up little girl whines about being run over at 40 miles an hour? A car did that. And the car was such a bastard, it probably thought it was all her own fault. (And to be fair, it's got a point: if she's OK with being hit at 30mph, why didn't she start running away at 10mph the moment she saw it heading toward her at 40? No, she'd rather laze about on her back at the side of the road, moaning about it. I've got no sympathy.)
In summary: phones are little plastic boxes, cars are large metal boxes, and no amount of goo-goo gurgling will change that. Please, advertisers: enough with the sugar and folk music. It's time to get puritan. Washing machines live longer with Calgon. Ronseal does what it says on the tin. That's all we need to know.
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