LEE PAYNE

Tag: my

  • Things that need to sod off #1 – car adverts

    Advertising is in a sorry state at the moment. Gone are the days of the catchy jingles and clever ideas. In 2023, chances someone in the marketing department has seen something on YouTube or TikTok and shamelessly copied it to shill whatever. Adverts are designed to annoy, going on the principle that “any publicity is good publicity”.

    Adverts for cars are particularly irritating. They tend to show a left-hand drive vehicle cruising down the wrong side of the road (translation: the company were too tight to pay for a British ad and just use the same one they made for mainland Europe), along mountain roads or through a desert. The music playing will either be a brash load of mumbo jumbo or a breathy, twee cover of a pop classic. At the end, the manufacturer’s logo will appear alongside a meaningless slogan, and you’re left none the wiser about the car they are advertising.

    Show me some useful information! How much does it cost? How many miles can I do between filling up/charging it? How big is the boot? Will it be able to get round the tight corners of a British town that was laid out in the medieval period?

    Here’s an example. This is a recent advert for the Peugeot 408. It is remarkable in the way the voiceover manages to say so many words that mean absolutely nothing whatsoever.

    I know nothing of any substance about the Peugeot 408 after watching that advert, other than what it looks like. Ridiculous!

    Sometimes, a car advert doesn’t need to be particularly useful to be memorable. Here is an ad for the Skoda Fabia from 2007. I remember it from my childhood.

    You don’t learn anything about the Fabia in this ad – not even what it looks like, since the car is made entirely out of cake. But it was clever, and it was soundtracked by an actual song from a real artist. I can still recall it 16 years later. That is what good advertising looks like.

    Still, if adverts for cars are bad, then adverts for selling your car are even worse. Mufasa can well and truly sod off with this.

    Do you have a suggestion for something that needs to sod off? Do let me know.

  • Things that are winding me up today

    Ahh… it’s Valentine’s Day. Love is in the air. As I write this it’s bang on the time that the lovers amongst us are tucking into a love sausage or making the most of a 2 for 1 offer at Pizza Express, but alas not me. I’ve been repellent to women for a whole 30 years now – an impressive record I’m sure you’ll agree.

    I don’t think it’s related to being alone on 14th February – God knows I’m used to that – but for some reason a lot of things today are getting right on my nerves. Here’s a few of them.

    Hair

    If I had a superpower, I wouldn’t want to be able to fly or shoot webs out of my wrists or anything like that. I’d just like to be press ‘pause’ on the growth of my hair. As someone who has what you might call social anxiety, I find the whole process of going to the barber’s and getting my hair cut difficult. Having gone through it and left with my hair looking nice and tidy, I’d love to be able to halt its progress instead of the bloody stuff being all over the place again four weeks later. The same goes for facial hair – I can’t stand the feeling of a hairy chin so I stand in front of the mirror holding a razor way more often than I’d like.

    Earphones

    How do people get them to stay in their ears? I wear mine while hoovering or on long car journeys (as a passenger, of course) – I don’t know if my ears are just a weird shape or something but they just won’t bloody stay in! The sound they produce is disappointingly tinny as well.

    The lack of an affordable ad-free YouTube

    You’re welcome to say this is a First World Problem, but I watch a fair amount of YouTube (I’m too old for TikTok) and it is infested with ads. Want to watch an Alan Partridge clip from the 90s? Well you’re going to have to sit through two noisy 30 second adverts first! You can actually pay a monthly fee to get an ad-free YouTube, but because it comes with bells and whistles like being able to continue playing in the background and download videos to watch offline, they charge £11.99 a month for it! If they just offered an ad-free option for, say £5.99 a month, I’d be right there.

    Waking up early on a day off

    My work pattern these days means that I have one day in, one day off, two days in, one day off, one day in and then one day off. Why is it, then, that on the days I’ve got to go to work I feel like I could turn the alarm off and sleep for several more hours but when it’s my day off and I have no alarms set I am wide awake before 7am? It’s infuriating. Going back to sleep isn’t an option, either, as I’m very much a ‘you wake up, you get up’ sort of person.

    Anyway, that’s enough of the moaning. I’m going to leave you with a love song for Valentine’s Day.

    If you know me just a little bit, you’ll be aware that I am a huge fan of Arctic Monkeys. While I wait for their new album (due this year), today I was listening to their early work. The Bakery was a B side to Fluorescent Adolescent, a song from the album Favourite Worst Nightmare that reached no. 2 in the UK singles chart in 2007.

    Alex Turner is a brilliant lyricist and in the early Monkeys stuff he was particularly good at taking very relatable scenarios and putting them to music. In this one there’s a girl he fancies and he like seeing her about the place, and gets a bit annoyed when she’s not around. 2 minutes and 57 seconds of adolescent innocence. Enjoy.

    Thanks for reading this load of old moaning. I’ve not been doing much writing recently – not been in the best place, mind wise – but hopefully I’ll soon be back on track!

    Lee

  • My First World Cup

    This year, the World Cup will be more than welcome. Norwich City’s rebuilding job after Premier League relegation can be put to the back of minds for just a month and attentions can turn to the fun, excitement and drama in Brazil.

    This is probably not the first article of this type you have read. You probably know by now that every football fan has a particular World Cup that they consider to be their ‘first’ – not literally, but the first tournament to capture their imagination and the first to live on in their memories. For me, this accolade belongs to 2002.

    As the World Cup began in 2002 I was a few months short of my 10th birthday. With the tournament being held jointly between Japan and South Korea, the time differences meant that matches started early in the mornings here. Before breakfast time. My school must have been very generous because for England matches we were allowed to stay at home and watch before coming into school afterwards, and if your parents were not able to keep you at home for an extra hour or two then the match was played in the school hall on a delay. I can clearly remember heading into school after England had drawn 0-0 with Nigeria and giving a smug-looking smile to my fellow pupils who were having to sit through it not knowing the goalless outcome.

    In literal terms, of course, my first World Cup would have been USA ’94, but as I was not yet two years old I can say with some confidence that I remember nothing about it whatsoever. I was also a late developer in becoming a football fan. I grew up in a family of football fans but much preferred watching cartoons until I was about 8. I can remember laying on the living room floor watching England’s famous 5-1 win over Germany in September 2001 and being utterly inconsolable after Norwich lost the play-off final against Birmingham the following May.

    The 2002 World Cup did not go too badly for England in the grand scheme of things. David Beckham scored a penalty to beat Argentina which made up for his red card against them in 1998 (see video above) and we made it to the quarter finals before a fluke of a free kick from Ronaldinho went over David Seaman’s head and we went out 2-1 to Brazil. I can also remember The Sun, which my dad had delivered every Saturday, putting their cartoon character Hagar the Horrible on the front page as a preview to England playing Denmark. The Brazilians went on to win their 5th World Cup with a comfortable win over Germany in the final.

    To think that ‘my first World Cup’ is now 12 years ago was an eye-opener. 2002 was not a vintage World Cup, but it was my World Cup. As much as I am club before country when it comes to football, the World Cup is such a brilliant tournament that for four weeks every four years I indulge myself in it and revel all the colour and celebration that it has. Inside, it makes me feel warm to think that, to some young boy or girl out there, Brazil 2014 will be their first World Cup.

    Perhaps you will read all about it before the kick off in 2026.