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The Worst Adverts on TV at the moment, for me, include some that are new and some that have been around a while but are still on the box. This will be the first in an occasional series and, they’re not in any particular order because I hate them all equally and quickly reach for the mute button when they begin….
Oh, and whenever I’m renewing insurance I’ll check all of Go Compare, Compare the Market and Moneysupermarket and see which gives the best result, since there’s no guarantee that just one of these sites will give me the best deal.
1. Admiral Insurance – First Day
Adverts featuring singing are bad enough at the best of times, especially when they’re doing a cover version of a song where the cover is so hippy-drippy twee that it makes you want to pierce your eardrums with the sharpest kitchen knife you can find. However, with Admiral, they have a bizarre premise where a young woman is starting work for them, and breezes into the building on her first day, badly crooning “Oh what a beautiful morning” from the musical Oklahoma.
Somehow she already knows the name of the security guard, Derek, and how he takes his coffee, so she’s a stalker from the off. Then she casually lobs her (hopefully empty) coffee cup over the escalator, in the hope that it’ll go in the bin (which it does). Then carries on singing as she arrives in the office, even though on her first day she would’ve been greeted at the front door AND would’ve had to sign in and get a temporary pass until they’d been able to take a picture, later that day. Also, why would any company have a welcome party for a new recruit? Any company, these days, will be taking on a number of newbies on the same day, some of which won’t turn up anyway because they’ve had a better offer elsewhere.
And let’s not forget the fact that she also enters the building… in an Admiral hat. And with stripes on her jacket that indicate Commander. And, with her entrance, I was half expecting a nurse to come along at the end and take her back to the hospital from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
PS. It’s now been removed, so here’s another one.
2. Nationwide Building Society – the missing scarf
A man leaves a cherished scarf on the bus, which has been through the family for generations as well as, probably, in the dog basket from time to time, which is soon picked up by a Nationwide advisor who hijacks her company Twitter account to bleat about it. Like a lot of the pointless rubbish that trends on Twitter, it soon trends and is seen up by the family, leading to the advisor goes to their home to return it. As she walks in, they’re also greeting a newborn child, the first in a new generation of misplacing boneheads.
I’m waiting for the alternative version of the advert when she goes into the customer’s home to return the scarf, clearly not having phoned her boss to tell them she’s doing an unscheduled home visit. Then they chloroform her by surprise, stick her in the cellar and she spends the next 50 years chained to the wall, eating gruel.
Add to the background crooning of “I’ll Keep You Safe”… Well, they would if she’s in the cellar.
Or, all the occupants murder her and dispatch of the body. Work thought she’d just quit...
At most, she would’ve picked up the scarf and taken it back into the branch and, once identified, called the customer for them to come in and pick it up.
3. Virgin Media – Vivid 200Mbps
I love Chaka Khan‘s I Feel For You, but just as the party starts, why on earth would any DJ worth their salt leave PART-WAY through a song? And why does it require a 200Mbps connection to play one bloody MP3 track? And if “whole house is online”, who in their right mind would let all the guests of a party use their wifi signal??
4. Barclays – “mortgage – quicker”
No singing this time, thankfully, but instead, a woman struts across the screen telling you how using your savings can cut the length of your mortgage and save you interest – explaining it in exactly the same terms that EVERY offset mortgage has EVER WORKED!
Oh, and we see her sentence repeated endlessly, but cut down in size each time it’s shown, thus getting across the way an offset mortgage works. Add to the fact that the tone is intensely cocky and it’s insulting to your intelligence beyond belief.
5. Just Eat – Chicken Madras
Cover version catastrophe in the extreme. Originally, it was a dreadfully unfunny version of Bonnie Tyler‘s Holding Out For A Hero, sabotaged to discuss the requirement for a Balti, while now we have to suffer the ruining of Groove Armada‘s I See You Baby, the next words being “Shakin’ that ass”, but you can’t say ‘ass’ on daytime television, and hence the woman in the ad is demanding a Chicken Madras. Laugh, I never started.
And I don’t tap any app to order a takeaway in advance – I phone them up. Why? To make sure they’ve got my order. I don’t want to starve.
6. Travelodge – Travelodgical
Another singing advert. There’s twee music, singing, puppets, another puppet, more singing! Are they in a Travelodge? Are they in an office? Neither, possibly, as they appear to be in a bad set where everything swings in and out of camera on cue.
And, blimey, what a punishment – forced to spend a night in a Travelodge! They might add insult to injury by making her watch that godawful advert, too!
Go to page 2 for more annoying adverts and more.
7. Oak Furniture Land – “No veneer in ‘ere”
In the background, there’s a bastardised instrumental version of “Knock on Wood” playing… because they only sell wooden products. Do you see?
Alas, their actors are also as wooden, as one chirpily states – because they only sell real wood products and nothing fake, “No veneer in ‘ere!”
I want to decapitate him and leave it inside the drawer for a future customer to find…
Surprisingly, the Youtube channel name “OakFurnitureLand” was taken, so you they had to make do with “OakFurnitureLand1”.
Unsurprisingly, you see the words: “Comments are disabled for this video.”
8. Match.com – Teenage Dirtbag
It’s annoying enough when paid-for dating websites tell you “browse your matches for free”. Yeah, because if you want to contact anyone then it’ll cost you the best part of £50 to to do so. And who’s to say it won’t be full of timewasters like the free alternatives, such as Plenty of Fish? Perhaps if they offered a money-back guarantee…
But now it gets worse because there’s one doing the rounds featuring a cover of Wheatus‘s 2001 – yes, it’s that recent(!) – No.2 smash hit Teenage Dirtbag.
Funnily enough, they leave out the verse:
- “Her boyfriend’s a dick
And he brings a gun to school
And he’d simply kick
My ass if he knew the truth…”
The advert says ‘love your imperfections’. So, love the fact that she has a boyfriend and he brings a gun to school?
The advert appears to be removed from Youtube, now, so here’s the original.
9. Moneysupermarket – Big Bad Wolf
Moneysupermarket have made a few amusing ads in their time, but Big Bad Wolf makes you wonder how much cocaine the advertising company had been stuffing up their nose that day. There’s an inordinate amount of security surrounding a particular event, but never mind them because Gary looks like he’s had a seizure. And it’s contagious. I hope he gets some tramadol soon.
There’s also a radio version where, inexplicably, this features a man changing the words (as they’re ‘sung’) to “Big Bad Pussycat” and you hear a cat meow. WTF?!
10. Gladstone Brooks – PPI
“Have you been missold PPI?” AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!
Yes, there’s always at least one on the box at any given time, but when the nuclear bomb comes and wipes us all out, the only things that will survive are cockroaches, Beer microbes (mmmm… Beer), Lichen and Gladstone Brooks.
The well-dressed annoying man appears and tells us there’s a mountain of money that’s still unclaimed, and he thrusts one hand into the other to get the annoyance across. In a previous version, he used to then add, “Not interested?” but they dropped that because I kept shouting “NO, I AM NOT!!!” back at the TV.
He then continues to tell us why we should phone them up, but in any event, if you have a PPI issue, take it to the Financial Ombudsman. Yes, they take forever, but you’ll get more in the long run.
He also suggests you should call them “If you’re nervous, unsure, or simply don’t know”. Well, the latter two both have the same meaning, and I get nervous lots of times, but never around PPI.
And at the end of the advert, after the musical refrain, they sing “Glad-stone Brooks”. Make up your own swears to fit those three syllables.
11. Gala Bingo – Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye
Probably the worst singing advert out of all of those onscreen. Whichever version you have the misfortune to witness, there’s always someone killing “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye”, which I best remember from the 1980s Bananarama cover version, but it’s been since 1969, first recorded by a fictitious band called Steam. One of these ads is set in a pub with a ridiculous amount of people in the stage all shouting along, replacing the first two words with “Ga-la-la-la” (Gala Bingo, do you see?) and the “Goodbye” with “Bingo”.
And most recently, there’s an even worse one. Any adverts featuring whispering or soft voices are like a knitting needle through the ear, so that’s how this latest one feels as a single woman softly trills said lyrics, while the whole room she’s in falls apart, supposedly filmed in one take but you can spot the joins with ease.
And since most gamblers LOSE money, how come everyone wins??
And, why 11 adverts? It’s one more annoyinger…
But it’s not just adverts I hate. Sometimes, there are intensely annoying TV sponsorship promos as well.
Bosch – Sunday Brunch
Bookending sections of Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch, this one features various household appliances shout wisecracks at each other, often in wildly different and distinct accents, so they all jar with each other, and it enforces the fact that if you inject humour into any advert or promos – and if it’s not funny in the first place – then it grates immensely. These are among my most volume-off-able of promos.
Lloyds Pharmacy – The Chase
I’ve got hooked on this quiz show, but when Lloyds Pharmacy took over the sponsorship of the programme, they first created a series of promos in which an unshaven pharmacist repeatedly asked customers “How are you today?” with various inflexions upon the different words, while the customers stared back in gormless fashion. These were quickly replaced, after two weeks, with a lot less of him but with a handful of break bumpers where a male voiceover tries to be funny and often ends up supposedly irritating or confusing the viewers who are watching the programme – as if a camera is in their TV.
The most annoying of these is one with two women laughing so much they’ll need Tena pads to stop themselves from having wet underwear. God knows what they’re laughing about, but the voiceover tries to be funny, fails, and they both look at each other in confusion. The second worst features a woman with her new baby – Can anyone explain why, when the voiceover observes that she has “a little contestant in the making”, she looks back at him with a scornful visage as if he’s just taken a dump in her front room?
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.
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