Ad’s All Folks: Forever Friends Christmas Album

As Christmas speeds towards us like a Juggernaut on Bambi, adverts are either warnings against drink driving, the latest fad for the ankle biter in your life Jamie fuckin’ pukka Oliver gurning over honey roasted parsnips like a spazz kettle. Sandwiched between these little vignettes of marketing are the compilation CDs. The latest one that’s caught my attention is piggy-backing on the cash cow that is Forever Friends. If you’ve never heard of Forever Friends, then you’ve probably never stepped foot into a Clinton Cards. To do so would be to see cards, calendars and mugs portraying the same couple of teddy bears hugging and frolicking with oversized heads and limbs. They’re like the soft toy equivalent of John Merrick.

What can we conclude from the 30 seconds we hear of the track listing? Well, initial thoughts are that somewhere along the manufacturing of this CD someone must have misheard or made a typing error, because clearly the title of the CD is ACTUALLY Just For Your Funeral. There’s not one track played during this half a minute that doesn’t make me think that I’m loved but that someone has planned my untimely demise and created the soundtrack to accompany my friends as they bid me farewell. It’s such insipid drooling dirge. The kind of thing that gets played over the highlights of funerals for royal type folks.

Maybe I’m just being cynical but watching the advert with the sound down seems to hint as to what my friend has waiting for me.  The soft snow, the oh so nauseatingly cute teddies, the hugging… They’re trying to throw so much schmaltz at me that they’re hoping I’ll slip into a diabetic coma! Oh yes, and whilst I’m languishing in hospital, in nonchalantly walks my so-called friend and, oh look, pillow of over my face. Struggle, struggle, struggle and off to talk to the big guy upstairs.

Don’t think I’m not on to you, Forever Friends! You big headed bastards. You won’t turn my friends against me! Never!

…

Just for you is available in all good record stores.

The Great (?) MJ Scam

So, on the day that Michael Jackon’s death certificate has been redone to include that little bit of news his death had something to do with a homicide, a spokeswoman for RTL has commented on their bizarre ‘Jackson is Alive’ video they released last month.

“We wanted to show how easily users can be manipulated on the internet with hoax videos. Therefore, we created this video of Michael Jackson being alive, even though everybody knows by now that he is dead – and the response was breathtaking.”

The thing is we didn’t need a tv station wasting money on a 30 second video to tell us something we already know. Setting people up with fake videos on the internet is like shooting John Belushi in a barrel. The way she talks, you’d think that the entire world had been duped. Oh how they must have chortled when they leaked the film on the net. HO HO HO! Look how everyone is falling for our scam. Except, I don’t think we did. I don’t believe anyone was taken in by this video. For a start, it was about as believable as this one:

Yes, we tuned into various websites and the news to see what this was all about but we did it because when you hear a bold claim that a dead singer is alive, you’ll tune in. If someone told you the Queen was having sex with Jude Law on Channel 4 right now, you wouldn’t believe it but a little part would be going ‘go on, let’s wathc and find out’. As soon as you got on the net or sky news to witness the ressurection of the King of Popped Clogs, they treated it with the same disdain they did when faced with a fancy dress costume in a block of ice.

In this blogger’s humble opinion, the only successful thing RTL managed to do was possibly hurt the family of Michale Jackson who watched their son’s/father’s/brother’s death used to prove a stupid, already proven point.