Radio Advertising

Radio Advertising. Annoying: probably pretty effective.

I'm working at the minute, with all that entails, including listening to an office radio. And this week, the slightly tepid pop selection comes courtesy of Absolute FM who, in their favour, have a policy of not playing the same tune twice in a day*.

The same can't be said of advertising unfortunately, and on commercial radio my experience seems to suggest far fewer subscribers buying slots – compared to the pluralistic frenzy of the internet or TV – with the result that the same five or so radio ads get some seriously heavy caning throughout any random eight-hour sample.

Radio advertising feels odd to me. My initial thoughts upon getting reacquainted were that it represented some kind of extant bunker of purely jingle-led promotion, sticking to its guns on the airwaves like packets of Japanese soldiers hiding out on Pacific islands long after World War 2 ended. But no, generally all the ads are re-purposed versions of TV campaigns – just lacking any visual context (one, a Subway ad, features a Peter Kayesque 'talking pocket' which I'd never have garnered from the radio) Even so, the focus of radio ads does seem to be the twee, catchy little tunes.

On the plus side, this relative lack of sophistication seems quite endearing, hearkening back to days when the marketing mensch weren't preoccupied with trying to enslave the latest bit of social networking apparatus to their own dark ends. But on the downside it does mean you're probably going to be subjected to some of the most insanely irritating tuneage since the last Christina Aguilera single. Irritating, but it must be said, catchy, for these sung refrains are insidiously compelling – like a kind of mnemonic mind-worm that burrows into your brain (think the slug things in the Star Trek film 'Wrath of Khan') – and they stay there!

I can still remember jingles from my childhood, in fact. Who could forget classics such the Kellogs Bran flakes ad, for instance?

"Theeeey're tasty tasty very very tasty." (etc)

Though when my brother bumped it to the forefront of my mental playlist whilst on holiday the other year, we were all at something of a loss to recall the product it originally centred around. Bacon? err, chips? dunno. And even though the accompanying images of the piece in question have largely faded from my memory, I can still vividly recall the song from a Mobil ad of my youth, that set the following lyrics to Gene Pitney's 24 Hours From Tulsa:

"Only 24 toasters from Scunthorpe,
Only 6 double beds from Torquay,
And I can’t decide if I will
Buy a diamond ring or a drill,
And if I want to
I can add to
My Premier Points with cash
If I haven’t driven enough!"

I think the line where the singer sums up the (exciting) quandary that the choice between a tool and a piece of jewellery elicits is pretty much automatic D&AD award-winning genius (well, maybe not). But still somehow captivating in its silliness, hey?. Old advertising is a heady garden of nostalgia though anyway – I recall with affection the ads that punctuated a crackly recording of Star Wars on VHS we watched to abstraction as kids, such as the Heineken one with the road-mender's sign in the rain, where the icon of the man slurps on a crisp lager, then with a flourish, transforms his spade into an umbrella (that was when Heineken was 3%, mind. God knows what he'd do now – probably fall asleep.)

But I digress. The main reason I'm writing all this is that the last few days I've been subjected to a Muller corner ad that uses the tune from Nina Simone's 'I Got Life', only behind some most unfeasibly inane wordplay I've ever heard. It's basically a choir of people, young and old, taking turns to insert their favourite Muller flavour into the "I've got my" format, and the net result is truly distracting in its stupefying idiocy. It starts something like this:

"I got got my cherry, got my berry! got my biscuit, got my crunch!"

then meanders off through some other flavours, (a child cheeps "I got my blueberries!", discordantly) before the cherry girl triumphantly reiterates that she's 'got her cherry', and the whole thing ends.

I've been hearing this about five times a day (at least) the last fortnight, and it has the kind of nauseating, delirium inducing effect otherwise only legally obtainable off herbal-high counters in Camden. Annoyingly, it's habit forming though, constituting an itch my brain seeks to scratch through involuntary repetition: I'll be pootling round my kitchen, say, and suddenly catch myself starting to hum "got my cherr" before I come to with a start and give myself a mental 'dry slap'.

It's brutally effective stuff. And I could envision myself happily pounding my own head to mush in order to escape extended repetition of this particular ditty, but my last word word almost certainly be "M U L L E R", spelled out in morse code and clumps of brain as my head beat a wet, red tattoo against the wall, probably leaving something much like a Muller yoghurt and topping smeared there, more's the irony.

But seriously, who writes these things? I'm trying to imagine, and the only mental picture popping in there is of a cross between Andy Warhol and Nosferatu hunched behind a mixing desk in a post-production house in Soho, giggling maniacally between bites of a Pret butty. I'm evoking an evil genius here, but it actually does sound like quite a laugh (unless you have to take it seriously).

Anyway. That's that off my chest. Any jingles that got you reaching for a rusty nail to scratch out the bit of your brain containing it? c'mon friends, share my pain...



*apart from some competition they're running at the minute

Addiction

I sometimes notice homeless people on the streets seem to have their individual outfits which (for quite obvious reasons) they wear again and again. There's the grizzled old red faced man, who sits swilling super strength cider from a can, on the steps of the solicitors opposit Camberwell Green. He's always wearing his trademark filthy Bench beanie hat.

By bringing this up I'm not trying to pen a Vice fashion article. I just think there's something quite poignant about this, these clothes that the homeless quite literally live in. Sometimes I'll see an old gent, wearing a suit shiney with filth, augmented with a palimpsest of burns, tears and stains, and wonder: Is that the last thing you put on before things fell, utterly, apart? The last suit in your wardrobe you put on the day your landord changed the locks on you; the suit you were wearing the day you parked your car up by the sea and kept on walking. Perhaps not. But it sometimes seems to me that as a second skin, each rip is a scar that marks successive bumps down the crooked staircase to hell.

Last weekend I went out in the morning to buy some bread from Sophocles Bakers. On my way back I spied two girls and a man outside Paul's Olive Shop. I say girls – they were in their late 20s or early 30s. They were gobbling water melon and spraying pips at the ground, alternately swigging at glasses of rose wine. At first I took them for people wallowing in the aftermath of a nights clubbing, but there was something really odd about the tableaux.. as I turned to watch them stumble across the road in the direction of The Flying Fish I realised that they were obscenely drunk, completely shitfaced, slurring, bumping into one another in a kind of spastic dance. In terms of dress they were quite presentable however, and I couldn't quite work out whether they were just hardcore boozers, or people toasting a deeper troth with alcohol, taking the first tentative steps on a path infinitely longer and more folorn than that to the off-license.

I found this thought unsettling. You see the same faces on the streets drinking away the pain, but once they've slipped off the bottom rung it seems hard to track orders of magnitude in the arc of their terminal decline, as all niceties, nuances and graces are ground away by the bitter friction of the street, to be discarded like old cans. As someone moderately obsessed with appearances, this reflexive slump seems like the ultimate gesture of despair, and to see someone swaying at the crossroads leading there is not a happy sight.

Alcoholism seems like a ruinous disease, which is hard to pick out in the fuzzy penumbra of our boozy national culture, but then many addictions, left unchecked, are witheringly degrading. Yesterday a smack-head (I suppose) came into the carriage I was in on a train begging. She was truly a pitiful sight: face a map of scabs, arms visible beneath tracksuit sleeves garlanded with trackmarks. She looked somewhere between 18 and 40. She came as a supplicant, tremulous voice wavering for cash. "sorry love" I said, uncomfortably. The business-man opposite me sat watching, blanky. She swiftly moved to repeat her pitch in the next carriage, but after a short pursuit was apprehended by the ticket inspector, and bounced off at the next stop into the not-so-welcoming arms of the British Transport Police.

I read on t'internet the other day that Heroin is, in itself, not that harmful to the human body. Far more damaging is the shit it's cut with, or sharing needles, or simply the fact that when you're into Heroin, you're not into very much else.. such as eating, washing yourself etc. There's a bit I remember from The Naked Luch, where William Burroughs talks about being off his face on smack, content to stare in rapture at the end of his foot for hours. Heroin it would seem, is not a thing to do if you want to do things; lest they be things related to the feverish topping up of your pay as you go contract with the brown stuff.

Against this yardstick many addictions seem relatively benign. My personal fetish for 12 inch circles of black plastic has waned somewhat recently, but even so only caused mild structural damage to the floors of my parents house in its sheer vinyl tonnage. Having said that I read that the hip hop producer Marco Polo goes digging for records wearing a surgical mask, in case a crate should be booby-trapped with asbestos, but that seems more an occupational hazard than anything else.