Free I can make you hate by Charlie Brooker Page A

why we asked you to film your family performing the script for our new TV ad, for the chance to see yourselves on TV, alongside some of Britain’s other brilliant families.’ Or ‘other insufferable arseholes’, depending on your point of view.
    End result: a bunch of wacky-doo show-offs titting around in their kitchens, each reciting the same script, which they’re not allowed to deviate from. They can perform it ‘ironically’, and indeed they all do, which somehow only makes it more horrible still: the OXO family of 2009 may display faint traces of corporate-approved subversion, provided they adhere to the corporate-approved screenplay. Lynda Bellingham’s fictional family of yore might’ve been insipid, but at least they weren’t willing participants in a macabre dystopian dumb-show.
    Phone ads are worse. ‘Everybody’s brightdancing’, according to the
X Factor
break bumpers. ‘Brightdancing’ consists of shooting a video of yourself waving your mobile around while being filmed by a Talk Talk website gizmo which turns the glare from your mobile’s screen into a ribbon of light. It’s less creative than choosing which colour iPod you want for Christmas. ‘ Brightdancing ’. Fuck me.
    Then there’s Josh, a simpering middle-class mop who’s apparently ‘forming a supergroup’ for T-Mobile. According to the official advert backstory, Josh was strolling down the street one day when a T-Mobile film crew asked him what he’d do if he had free texts for life. Rather than pointing out that ‘free texts for life’means dick-all in a world containing the internet, Josh burbled something about forming a band. A few weeks later and gosh oh crikey that’s precisely what’s happening! And we’re all invited! Hey everyone! Join Josh’s band!
    As well as TV spots recounting the irritating story of Josh and his ‘volunteers’ (Yikes! They’re busking in an open-top London bus! Bonkers!), there are YouTube videos of Josh’s utterly spontaneous and not-at-all-stage-managed musical quest. The group has its own song, which you’re encouraged to perform and upload yourself, hastening humankind’s slow cultural death in the process. The recurring melody sounds suspiciously like a seven-note ringtone, while the lyrics speak vaguely of inclusion and connectivity – y’know, the sort of thing they guff on about in mobile phone ads. The third line is ‘I call up all of my friends’. Why call anyone? You’ve got free texts for life, you fucking prick.
    It’s so clumsily contrived it wouldn’t fool a hen, yet we’re meant to welcome this ‘supergroup’ as an authentic grassroots musical phenomenon. On MySpace, Josh (or whoever’s controlling him) claims, ‘It’s a shame so many cynics think this band is completely manufactured.’
    So it’s a genuine people’s movement, then? And this band doesn’t contain any paid-for session musicians? And that song wasn’t written by professional tunesmiths-for-hire? And the lyrics weren’t penned by some dickshoe at Saatchi & Saatchi? Hmm. Go fuck yourselves, T-Mobile. Stop trying to ‘crowdsource’. You’re embarrassing yourselves. Scram. And empty that bucket on your way out.

Naughty or Nice
12/12/2009
     
    Like a giant black velvet cat whose tusk-white incisors glint malevolently in the darkness as it slinks noiselessly towards its prey, the end of the year is almost upon us. Eager to get things overwith, Christmas has faded in extra early this year. Everywhere you look it’s yuletide this and festive that. Each shop window sports a snowman; each street lamp a coil of winking fairylights. I had a piss the other day and tinsel came out. Yippee for Christmas.
    Christmas, of course, has its very own ‘face of the channel’: Santa Claus, although he doesn’t appear in adverts as often as he used to. For the past few years Coca-Cola has been aggressively pushing Santa as some kind of God of its own making, so it’s hardly surprising that in other ads,