The fat bloke on the Nationwide advert is actually quite funny. I’ve seen him in other comedy offings in the past – he’s quite a card – a good character actor. Bloody fat though.
Quite obviously, he’s getting paid quite a lot for these ads as he’s leading the brand and has been now for a few years. I say ‘quite clearly’ because, unlike Michael Winner who has shrunk, the NW bloke, on account of a huge, enormous salary and the resulting food budget, has ballooned to quite staggering proportions. Maybe he and Winner did some sort of fat exchange? I don’t know, anyway, he’s a really big fat bastard now to the point I’m not finding the adverts that funny anymore as I can see that behind the cheeky comedic quips and mugging a deeply insecure and disturbed porker has evolved into an eating machine as a means to cope with something he’s buried deep within his psyche.
He’s clearly not happy, and you all sit there and laugh at this porcine hippopotamus with a very serious and deep rooted psychological condition, stemming from the need for oral gratification (his mother may have rejected him when he was a child, or he might have been interfered with by his dad) which results in him eating everything that doesn’t smell of plops.
Anyway, my point is this, in the latest NW ad, another advert has become coincidentally entwined. Currently the government is attempting to put off smokers by realising a metaphorical hook. The grim grey commercials depict a selection of average Joes being caught in the cheek by ‘the smoking hook’ only to smugly disgorge said hook with such a sanctimonious air of implementation (‘Hey, it’s that easy!’) that it makes one feel like smoking an entire pack at once outside the cancer ward at Whipps Cross Hospital just to spite the cunts that made it…
The fat bloke in the NW ad does the same ‘hook’ thing, but he’s using his hook to describe how banks ‘hook’ one in with a low rate only to bump up charges later on. Tedious, isn’t it? The biggest problem here is that whilst the anti-smoking adverts are just the tossy results of a lack of UK film funding driving all of our creatives into the moronic world of advertising, the fat bloke is clearly ‘hooked’ on pizza, burgers and kebabs, harming his health as much as smoking does and subsequently dropping me into a confusing universe of self imposed irony and subsequent depression.
The NW ad guy should start seeing Fearne Britten, because she only eats low fat Ryvita products which is how she keeps her svelte Mount Fuji figure.
Next week ‘Laboritoire’ Garnier. TAKE CARE
Tags: Crap adverts, Crap TV, Fat man, Mark Benton, Nationwide, Television
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