Jingle Bells, Batman Smells

Christmas comes but once a year. And with it, comes the annual office calendar debate:

And the slues of Christmas compilation CD adverts onto the TV.

I have to confess - these adverts really irritate me quite a bit.

Here is the advert for Now That's What I Call XMAS! from 2010:


Here is Now That's What I Call XMAS! from 2005:


This is the advert from 2011 for Now That's What I Call XMAS!


Oh - your Christmas album - does it have, you know, the Wham song one? It does! What about John Lennon? And it has the New York one where they verbally abuse each other in a sort Christmassy way half way through? And Wizzard? Does it have, you know, Slade? Does it? Does your Christmas song album feature Slade? Really? Does it?? Slade!! Slade!!!

Yes, every pop Christmas compilation worth its salt I am sure has these on it. By rights they have to be. It goes without saying. Or it should. But apparently it doesn't. Not according to the advertisers, at least. Apparently we need told. The makers of the Now! compilation feel we need told that these stalwart, classics of the genre, songs are on these albums, thereby making them the best to purchase. And they have been telling us every year for the past 15 years. Who in Britain doesn't know that these songs are on this album? I mean it is exactly the same album, every year! They don't even pretend by changing the order of the songs cut into the exact same advert, every year!

Who buys these Christmas compilation CD's anymore? Despite it being named XMAS [but still infuriatingly called "Christmas" on the advert] in order to, I can only imagine, appeal to the youth who don't want to buy a "Christmas" album, I just can't fathom why young people would need to buy it at all, in these modern times. Their parents must have it, for a start. Surely there can only be so many a single household will have. I would love to know the unit sales of Now That's What I Call XMAS!. I would love to see it as a graph over time.
Even your precious Slade sings on the song that is on every compilation of Christmas songs... ever! this:

Does your granny always tell yer/
that the old ones are the best?
And she's up and rock and rollin'/
with the rest!

Slade - you have become the thing you have always hated.

It drives me slightly crazy that Christmas albums are not updated regularly. Wouldn't it be better if an advert included some of the songs which set that particular festive album apart from the others? If we could all agree that the usual favourites being on it was a given and don't need mentioning?

To counter these perennial Christmas songs that not only are on every CD ever made for this holiday, but that are also played on every Radio and depressingly shown on things like VH1 on flickering loop from the 1st December, I have been inspired to post some alternative Christmas songs below which the Now! gang could look to add into next year's compilation album and advert:











Of course, not even this collection can escape having a Crimbo classic in it. Here is Joe Pesci (yes, genuinely) singing in his inimitable (read: foul and offensive) style about his take on the practicalities of Santa getting from A to B. Pesci seems to have forgotton that Santa has flying reindeer for his sleigh but since he wrote a song about this n' all, and seems to be rather a disturbed individual, it is perhaps churlish to bring it up.



Merry Christmas, one and all!

Screwing the news

[Disclaimer – I never, ever read the News of the World and most of this blog is simply made up from an impression I have of what was in it from other news sources and The Daily Star].

The news of the screws, so called because of its high level of readership in the prison demographic, may have shut down but that is not the end of the story.

Sordid

Amid the investigations of the phone-hacking scandal sanctioned by the sensationalist and morally askewed tabloid paper, where as many as hundreds of mobile phone voice mail systems were illegally listened to by Screws journalists who would then quote any sordid, life ruining, details heard in a few forgettable column inches attributing them to “a source close to the reality TV star” – revelations recently emerged that former policeman and now private eye, Deek Webb was employed by the paper to tail upwards of 90 people from Princess Catherine of The Sister With The Nice Bottomshire and Wills, to Harry Potter’s Mum and Dad.

Saucy

Following these people as they went about their personal lives, Deek and so the Screws, hoped to unearth some saucy bit of detail or two to keep the paper shifting in-between the prison bars. Watching an interview on the BBC with the private eye, I heard him explain that he would sit in his car, tailing and filming all sorts of MPs, actors, other journalists and Richard Madeley. When Richard, during the same interview, was shown footage filmed of him in 2006 standing outside his London home he was disgusted. Richard dim-wittingly nailed it when he verbalised: “What is the phrase where what is happening is not illegal but that everyone knows is wrong? ‘It’s creepy’ – that’s it” [also simultaneously rather adeptly describing his marriage to his elderly, frail aunt]

Costume

When the cockney accented Webb elaborated on his techniques I began to realise just how far these Private Investigators go to film members of celebrity. “I normally followed behind at a distance in my car” he said, reasonably, “Boris Johnson thought that cycling would prevent the Screws following him, but when I turned up to the press offices I was handed over a bicycle and I would cycle behind him”, he went on, slightly more oddly. By the time he brought up the name of MP Blunkett I was over half convinced Deek was going to explain: “I turned up to the Screws offices and was handed a hired dog fancy-dress outfit and a hi-vis vest. Blunkett was unique in that regard as I had him following on my tail. It meant I could go where I wanted to go and get me messages and stuff while keeping an eye on him. And I could sh*t anywhere. Once, the hire shop didn’t have the dog costume, so I was just given a gorilla one instead. Blunkett didn’t have a fu**ing clue.”

Unfortunately, he didn’t say any of that. But the damage had already been done and it has heaped even more trouble onto Screws International.

Tongues

It was always going to end like this for the Screws. Over the years, their methods of reporting and journalism to keep convicts’ tongues hanging out their filthy criminal mouths were plumbing new depths. From publishing solitary photos of young, beautiful people with other young beautiful people on holidays using massive camera lenses, through to the ridiculous sub-editor means of grabbing attention to a story by pull quoting slightly ambiguously titillating words or phrases out of context from the subsequent paragraph of a story, the Screws of course went the extra distance in the name of the “public interest".

Two women… at the same time

Many of these “public interest” stories were not really, to my mind, all that interesting to the public. Grotty little video-phone images do not need to be printed for the public at large to inform us that people with money and a lot of time on their hands who have obscene egos can get into a vice or three when they think no one is looking. Two women on a bus may make a brief comment about the news that a former children’s TV presenter might like to do more adult activities when not talking to a glove puppet about a homemade birthday card, but the news will hardly cause other passengers to partake in mob-handed condemnation along with them. At the same time, the Screws were deciding developing “public interest” stories of their own would take out the middle man.

Once again whether these stories actually told us public anything is debatable. In the early days of this, the reporter would basically go to an actual brothel in all but name and report with surprise that women there offered private services for payment. The reporter would always decline with the get out sub-line “made my excuses and left”. It was not long before reporters made the step to dressing as wealthy sheiks and Russian mafia to offer someone an awful lot of money to do something either never before thought of or seemingly too good to be true – selling an audience with your ex-husband, missing the 5th red in a frame of snooker or throwing a no-ball. Perhaps no one should be surprised to find some people mistakenly accepted.

Besides entrapment, the Screws specialised in “public interest” security stories. A reporter would work as an attendant maid in Buckingham Palace for 4 months before revealing the awful truth that he was able to lie on the Queen’s bed during a shift. Perhaps this is of interest to people – but I can only think of the Milk Tray Ad Man who would find any bedroom security lapse worth noting.

The best example I can think of in the debate about if they really were reporting for the sake of “public interest”, was the occasion when a reporter, dressed as an airline pilot, infiltrated a long haul passenger aircraft cockpit shortly before take-off. Should the authorities have spotted him and shot his face clean off (which they would have been well within their rights to do) would the Screws have run the headline: AIRPORT SECURITY: SOUND AS A POUND or INNOCENT UNDERCOVER REPORTER GUNNED DOWN TRYING TO PROTECT UK PUBLIC INTEREST.

And I think we all know the answer to that.

Ultimately it appears that the screwspaper staff lost their perspective on reality. They began believing themselves to be movie secret agents for the forces of good when in fact they were working for Elliot Carver all along.

When numbers don’t really figure

A solemn government health warning segmented between songs on the local radio station announced:

5000 people each year die in this country directly because of smoking. 5000 people: the equivalent of a town’s population. Smoking kills.

This struck me as quite a specific population of a town. Almost too specific one might say. What are they trying to hide in these conveniently populated towns, somewhere, out there? Now no one is saying they are some sort of genetically modified towns built to enable the trialling of the provision for a human civic-cubed future. No one has mentioned that at all here. Nope.

Anyway, I digress. Could there be harder hitting ways of illustrating the 5000 dead for those too busy driving their Volvo in drive-time traffic to simply imagine 5000 dead people as “a lot”?

5000 people: the equivalent of an impressive regional militia. 5000 people: the equivalent of 5 times the number of oak tress in Sherwood Forest. 5000 people: the equivalent of an audience at a Girls Aloud concert. 5000 people: the equivalent of 5000 frogs standing together side-by-side, hand-in-hand, and one of the frogs has a crown on its head. And they are all singing Band on the Run. As a round.

Certainly makes you think. Terrifying.