Gollum's Commercial Breakdown

I’m finding the adverts her in Sauronville hard going. The standards tend to swing between shockingly awful and risqué to say the least. Some of the stuff that happens pre-watershed has the wife and I exchanging wide eyed looks of bemusement. Though to be fair, they showed an advert for Skins at 7pm and bleeped out “f*cking” but left in “tw@ts”. Random.

Richard Till is the most annoying creature in all of Mordor.
It’s not the sound of this shrill voiced ghoul’s human voice.
It’s not even the way this grinning, dead eyed spectre leers at you from the screen trying to lure you into its food based doctrines.
No, it’s the way the voice falls and rises at stupid moments to miss any sort of point or structure. He could be saying anything, be it “eat healthily”, “worship me, mortals” or “kill your family. Take the knife and do it now!” but you won’t hear it. You’ll just focus on his annoying cadence. Actors held in the thrall of this hideous abomination stand beside him declaring unswerving allegiance to his unholy cause in order to further add to the subliminal programming.
Only the most disciplined amongst us can find the strength to switch the channel before it is too late.

Sky City is the local big casino run by Australians. We went in at New Year and it just looked like every other casino we have ever been in, with its gaudy carpet, dead eyed faithful throwing dollar after dollar into unforgiving slot machines and lots of Orientals.
They have recently tried to change this image by running an advert showing young, hip, financially secure, fun-loving individuals gambling, laughing, drinking and dancing alongside middle aged, artificial hip, financially secure, getting out of the care home-loving individuals enjoying themselves as best they can with full colostomy bags and a pacemaker.
I have it on good authority that all of the individuals featured are either actors or staff and do not represent the real punters, many of whom were too busy to be pulled away from the slots or bingo to appear on camera. Plus they were all wearing shorts, and that isn’t the image that Sky City wants to project.

Infomercials are also rife here with a special place in hell being reserved for the AA Insurance one which looks like it is a daytime chat show and is there just to have the AA bloke being “interviewed” spouting about his competitive rates and premiums. Even for Christchurch, apparently.

The most annoying ad has to be for the “The Amazing Maze In Maize” which is just those five words being shrieked more or less in tune by a man who is having his testicles cooked in a George Foreman grill.

However, the crowing turd in the pipe is the new raft of Burger King ads.
These started off quite innocuously with the Burger King (who looks uncannily like a man in a Barry Gibb mask) playing tennis before being informed that sales of his beefy goodness were down in Hobbiton.
The next ad has him at the airport where he refuses to take off his crown to go through security and does a runner over the barriers. Yeah, just the kind of thing you get shot to death for at any US airport. Well, that and looking remotely Middle Eastern, anyway.
Then he is viewed on airport security tapes making his way across the tarmac after presumably hijacking an airliner. I guess the Air Marshals must have missed him.
Once he reaches NZ he proceeds to annoy people by turning up unannounced and then shoving a burger at them.
He turns up on the porch of a guy playing the banjo (which goes to show that these are merely generic ads rather than country specific which are then slightly tailored using voice overs. It also explains the lack of Maoris in the ads) and starts dancing in that hillbilly kind of way. You know, the kind of dance that is used by many a slack jawed yokel to woo his own sister (who is also his mother).
After gracing us with this delight he shows up next to a very nervous looking guy in a sauna and invites said naked man to get his jaws around his Whopper.
Finally, in the spirit of all mask wearing sociopaths he appears silently behind a couple who are kissing in a car.
So, essentially you have a creepy bloke in a mask showing up when you least expect it as an advertising gimmick for BK.
No wonder the sales are in the toilet.