Thursday, March 20, 2008

Gordon in the morning: You can't sing, you can't play, and you look awful

Bizarre leads this morning on a very, very slight story - Girls Aloud film chocolate bar advert. Even with Smart's obsession with the state of the Tweedy-Cole marriage, it's a strange thing to build your column around. Even odder is the headline:

Girls Aloud babe is Cheryl cold

We wondered if this was because KitKat were going to be emulating the Mars Cool 'Em campaign from way back (oh, you do:"Mars Cool 'em/ Cool 'em in the fridge/Mars Bars and Milky Way/ Cool your Bounty for a summer's day/ Ice-cool Topic/ Marathon too/ Cool 'em the whole summer through.... Yes, as a nation, we needed an expensive marketing team to tell us that if we put our chocolate in the fridge, it wouldn't be melty when it got warm.) But, no, it turns out that the headline just relates to how nippy it was outside for filming yesterday - something that we suspect Smart only mentions in the first place so he could do the Cheryl Cold joke in the first place.

Gordon almost spots the irony of the wafer-stick-thin band pushing chocolate, but not quite:
They must have felt the chill in their skimpy outfits – and with none of them having much meat on their bones.

Smart also covers the announcement of the new Coldplay album title:
The Spanish phrase — which means “long live life” — was influenced by the late Mexican painter FRIDA KAHLO, one of MADONNA’s favourite artists.

Now, we know Gordon is writing for Modern Painters, but surely he could have come up with a nice, spoon-feeding explanation of who Kahlo is without saying "I don't know anything about her, but Madonna likes her" - you'd have thought some reference to the Oscar winning film with Salma Hayek might have hit the spot.

Especially since Gordon is filling a little:
Coldplay album titles have always been slightly unconventional.

The lads called their first collection Parachutes and their last CD was X&Y.

In what way, exactly, is 'Parachutes' unconventional? And 'X&Y' is hardly 'Jesus Egg That Wept', is it?

Gordon also finds space for Sarah Nation's piece about Kerry Katona checking into the Priory, as filming a programme about how 'crazy' she is has started to harm her state of mind.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ah, the Cool 'Em campaign... Remember the Cool'em Callers? I vaguely recall they were a team of people who'd travel the country, visiting houses at random. If you could produce a Mars product from your fridge, they'd give you ten pounds (the TV advert had a very catchy dreamy jingle which went "We're calling on yoooooo-ooooo-ooooou...." and then, when they revealed the prize, "Here's ten pounds for yoooooo-ooooo-ooooou....". Pisses over "I'm Lovin' It", don't you think?). It was an interesting strategy - They seemed to be rewarding us for buying their product but not eating it. To this day, cautious pensioners still keep a rock-solid Marathon in their fridge just in case.

I'm not sure how well the campaign went. The advert showed the callers driving around leafy suburban cul-de-sacs in what appeared to be flimsy Cool'em-branded milk-floats. For a national campaign, they didn't look like they'd make it that far between towns without breaking down or a Cool'em Caller falling out.

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