I can make you hate (7 page)

This is why buying a washing machine never feels ‘real’. If you walk around Battersea Dogs Home, brown-eyed puppies with names such as Timbo and Ookums softly yelp for your
attention
. Walk around Comet and you’re confronted by a wall of emotionless monoliths with incomprehensible names. And that’s just the staff!!!!!??!!!!?!

I got caught in a high-street retail delivery trap recently; one of those Kafkaesque scenarios in which you pay for something on the basis that it will arrive at a certain time, only to find out it won’t, and soon you’re sucked into a spiral of helpline calls and telephone keypad options and complaints and
counter-complaints
until eventually you realise that you’re both in a
loveless
relationship; needing each other, hating each other, revolving for hours in a weepy embrace, listlessly kicking at one another’s shins.

But this time something new and modern happened. Shortly after one of our bitter rows, while waiting for them to call back, I went on Twitter (yes, bloody Twitter) and angrily compared
the Currys electrical retail chain to the Nazis. The next day a mysterious message arrived with a number for me to call; this turned out to belong to one of their heads of PR, who’d spotted my outburst and tracked down my contact details.

It’s a bit embarrassing when you find yourself talking to
someone
high up in a company you’ve loudly and publicly likened to the Third Reich only the night before. Fortunately for me, she was polite and savvy enough not to mention it. Instead she quickly sorted out my complaint, which is the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like a VIP, or Michael Winner. Nice for me, annoying for anyone reading about it who hasn’t been afforded that kind of treatment, i.e., you. Perhaps, if I was principled, I’d have yelled ‘I demand to be treated as a regular customer!’ and slammed the phone down. But I didn’t.

Still, if buying a big boring box from a big boring shop is a harrowing experience, isn’t it time retailers were honest about it? There’s no point in pretending to be fun, happy-go-lucky institutions. We’re British. We know the truth and we can handle it. Dixons is running a campaign describing itself as ‘the last place you want to go’, which is meant to be a clever reference to its low prices (i.e., go and look at it in Harrods, then buy it from us), but effectively describes every electrical retail chain I’ve ever visited.

Someone needs to go further and launch a chain called Shambles, where all the familiar shortcomings are actively promoted as part of the ‘experience’. The staff wear ironic dunce caps and vulture costumes; if you want to actually buy something, they walk to a stockroom ten miles away in a neighbouring county to check its availability, methodically harass you into taking out five-year cover using a subtle combination of CIA ‘extraordinary rendition’ psychological techniques and unashamed sulking, then arrange for it to be delivered at 7 a.m. by a surly man who’ll arrive ten hours late on purpose, deliberately bring a BD4437BX instead of the BD3389BZ you ordered, attach a magic hidden ‘hobbling’
device that causes it to malfunction immediately before the next bank holiday weekend, screw your partner, scare your kids, wreck your life, and break wind on your doorstep as he’s leaving. All of which is heavily advertised as an integral part of the service.

It’ll be miserable. But at least you’ll enter the transaction with your eyes wide open.

‘Yep, it’s that time of year again – and the Christmas adverts are already on the telly’, remarks a man at the start of this year’s B&Q Christmas advert, proving that the grand tradition of moaning about premature Yuletide ads has itself been absorbed by the Matrix and turned into a stick to beat us with.

Let’s hope this kind of jokey fourth-wall-breaking doesn’t become a trend, or before long we’ll all be moaning about the number of early Christmas ads that moan about the number of early Christmas ads, and then our moans about their moans will in turn form the basis of the next wave of ads, and so on and so on
ad nauseam
, until they’re producing intricately constructed navel-gazing meta-commercials that are actually more self-aware than we are: fully sentient beings with thoughts and feelings of their own. And they’ll rise up and strangle us in our beds. While humming ‘Stop the Cavalry’ by Jona Lewie.

Postmodernist intro aside, the B&Q ad is a fairly standard offering in which members of staff clutter the shop floor reciting lines about great savings and gawkily radiating a sense of forced bonhomie, as though the government’s ordered them to look cheerful in case the enemy’s watching. There is one startling
departure
from the regular formula: while most of B&Q’s woodentops are presented in situ, stacking shelves or manning checkouts and presumably praying for death, one is depicted relaxing at home, sitting on his sofa in a Santa hat, wiggling his socks in front of a
roaring fire. Worryingly, even though it’s dark outside, he’s still in uniform. Perhaps all new members of staff have the outfit sewn into their skin when they sign up, as a permanent reminder of kinship – in the same way that members of a shadowy militia might each get the same tattoo. We won’t know unless they put a shower scene in their next commercial.

Come on, B&Q. We’re waiting.

Still, at least B&Q’s effort features common-or-garden schmoes, not a stomach-churning galaxy of stars. Watching Marks & Spencer’s Christmas ad is like sitting through
Children in Need
. Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry, Myleene Klass, Jennifer Saunders, Twiggy, James Nesbitt, Wallace and Gromit … it’s so chummy and cosy and thoroughly delighted by its own existence, I keep hoping it’ll suddenly cut to a shot of a deranged crystal meth user squatting on the cold stone floor of a disused garage, screaming about serpents while feverishly sawing their own hand off at the wrist.

Instead it jokily tries to undercut itself by including a cameo from Philip Glenister, standing in a pub to prove what a
bumptiously
down-to-earth Mr Bloke he is. His job is to stand at the bar claiming that the best thing about Christmas is the sexy girl from the Marks & Sparks ads running around in her knickers. Then it cuts to the sexy girl from the Marks & Sparks ads running around in her knickers, as though this is somehow as iconic a Christmas image as Rudolph’s nose or the little baby Jesus. Listen here, M&S: few things in life are more pukesome and hollow than a self-mythologising advert – so next year do us all a favour and just shake a few sleighbells, flog us some pants, and then fuck off back to your smug little shop and be quiet.

Like Marks & Spencer, Boots appears to have overestimated the popularity of its own Christmas adverts. Unless I’m mistaken, the people of this nation are not brought together as one joyful whole by the ‘Here Come the Girls’ campaign, so its
self-celebratory
tone seems somewhat misplaced. What started out a
few years ago as a mildly amusing commercial in which an army of women prepared in unison for an office party has devolved into a nightmare vision of the future in which large groups of female office workers spontaneously organise themselves into a cackling mobile hen night at the first whiff of Christmas. This year they’re causing mayhem in a restaurant. They’re mad, they are!!!! One even tries to get off with the waiter!!!!

I usually quite like women, but this advert makes me want to kill about 900 of them with my bare hands. It ends with the tiresome ladettes marching down a high street triumphantly singing the ‘Here Come the Girls’ song out loud, like an invading squadron tormenting the natives with its war cry. Next year they’ll probably be armed. Fear this.

Of the supermarkets, Sainsbury’s are running with a relatively innocuous bit of fluff in which Jamie Oliver tours Britain handing out free vol-au-vents to greedy members of the public, like a zookeeper throwing sprats to a load of barking seals. It’s been given a documentary feel, although everywhere he goes looks suspiciously wintry, with snow and swirling white flakes, which is weird considering it was probably shot in August. Still, that’s climate change for you.

But the winner of the worst Christmas advert trophy for the second year running is Morrisons. They’ve got several short offerings, including one where Nick Hancock appears to be preparing Christmas dinner in the afterlife – but the prize goes to their centrepiece ad: a bafflingly pedestrian sixty-second fantasy in which straggle-haired midget Richard Hammond wheels an empty trolley through an over-dressed, snowblown Tunbridge Wells, yelping about food and steadily gathering a pied-
piper-style
following of locals (and Denise Van Outen) as he heads for an illuminated branch of Morrisons in the distance, like a wise man following a star – or, more accurately, like a slightly unkempt mouse following a shop. I keep hoping it’ll suddenly pull out to reveal this is all just a slightly underwhelming dream
he’s experiencing, and that he’s actually still in a coma following his 2006 rocket car mishap.

And judging by the look in his eyes, so is he.

People of Britain! Why so sad? You have at least four different flavours of mulch to choose from! Enjoy what you’re given and shut up. The other day I was watching a report about the
The X Factor
charity single during an ITV news bulletin that followed
I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here!
It was the day Jordan went into the jungle. Jordan in the jungle, Jedward on the news. The media assumes you’re fascinated by both of them.

There’s not much to be fascinated by. Take Jordan. Ant and Dec announced her arrival on their gameshow in which celebrities eat live insects for publicity as though it was the most startling cultural event of the twenty-first century – a Festival of Britain for our times. She was presented as someone who divides opinion, which she simply isn’t. Everyone feels the same way about Jordan. She’s someone you’re supposed to dislike, and in disliking her you’re supposed to feel marginally better about yourself. So we all moan about this woman, moan about the weight of coverage devoted to this woman, and meanwhile this woman has herself sliced open and injected and sewn back together until she resembles some kind of rubbery pirate ship figurehead, a weird booby caricature looming at us out of the mist. But this mutilation only makes us moan all the more. No one’s coming out of this well.

At least Jordan herself seems oblivious. She hardly radiates emotion. Her voice is a perpetual low flatline, and she can’t or won’t perform basic facial expressions, as if she’s been unplugged on the inside. As fiery reality show catalysts go, sending in a mountain goat with a load of crude personal insults daubed on
its flank would be a better bet. Instead, the best they can come up with is a boring tabloid story in boring human form.

Meanwhile, in the
X Factor
universe, we’re encouraged to love/hate two seventeen-year-old twins with videogame haircuts called John and Edward. Of course the phrase ‘John and Edward’ takes too long to read or say, so to our collective shame it’s been shortened to ‘Jedward’. Ha ha! Jedward! Ha ha ha ha ha! Jedward! Ha ha! SuBo! LiLo! Ha ha! Brangelina! Ha ha! Bennifer! Ha ha ha ha ha! I am loving that! I am loving that! Ha ha!

Let’s hope this stinking world comes to an end as soon as possible. Leswossible.

Simon Cowell keeps making proclamations about ‘leaving the country’ if John and Edward win
The X Factor
. Doesn’t he leave the country each week? He flies to LA every ten minutes to appear on
American Idol
. And on his way back he lands his jet on a private island made entirely of gold ingots, to spend his weekend strolling up and down the beach listlessly kicking clouds of powdered diamond into a sea of molten platinum.

Of course, Cowell’s yabberings are almost certainly a smart double bluff designed to ensure people continue to vote for the twins, because he knows they’re the most interesting performers in this year’s contest: while the others are merely boring, John and Edward are just a bit shit. This makes them the most interesting thing in the entire programme by default. We’re accustomed to Cheryl Cole, and the judges’ interpersonal bickering got stale some time ago, so the only other faintly diverting thing in the show is Cowell’s hair. Suspiciously jet-black, bristly and curiously flattened on top, as though he prepares for each episode by dipping his head in matt-black Dulux and painting his dressing room wall with it, Simon’s hair continues to mesmerise even after all these years.

Silly hair and shit singers: that’s
X Factor
, the nation’s sole mainstream conduit for popular music since the decline and fall of
Top of the Pops
. All the songs sound the same, all the singers
are alike, and the only interesting acts are mediocre and officially sanctioned hate figures. One day we’ll emerge on the other side of this unprecedented cultural drought and wonder how the hell our imaginations survived.

Till then, enjoy what you’re given. And shut up.

Last week Mariah Carey turned on the Christmas lights at the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherds Bush, west London. That might sound like a trivial event of interest only to cretins, but remember: hundreds of thousands of brave men and women died in combat so the current generation could enjoy such freedoms. The assembled masses weren’t simply taking mobile phone snapshots of a vastly overrated singer emptily promoting a commercially appropriated religious festival celebrating the birth of a man who would have doubtless vomited up his own ribcage in disgust at the mere sight of the hollow, anaesthetising capitalist moonbase that is the Westfield Centre. No. They were honouring the fallen. Sort of. Vaguely. OK: not at all.

Anyway, any story featuring Carey has to at some point dwell on a list of outlandish arch-diva requests, and this one didn’t
disappoint
. According to early press reports, she demanded to be driven along a long pink carpet in a vintage Rolls-Royce before arriving at the podium (also pink) at which point she’d activate the lights by waving a magic wand, accompanied by 20 white kittens and 100 white doves. Pink, butterfly-shaped confetti would shower all around her at the end of the ceremony.