Tuesday 8 January 2008

Al and Monkey

Let's all cheer up a bit.
New Year's come late here.

But this blogger hopes this can be done
-------------------------------------------

Line. Drawn. We're now under it. End of.
One hopes.



Now, I thought I'd have a few beers tonight. And I have no time to post anything deep or meaningful, and, I need a rest.
Pubs are great things. They;
a. Serve alcohol.
b. Have sexy barmaids in them.

So I leave you with a tribute to that wonder of brainwashing, modern TV advertising.
Why I leave you this, is because it's a long running successful series of adverts that had ME hooked. I loved them.

The odd thing is ITV Digital actually went bust, so in one sense the adverts didn't save them.



But the Al and Monkey adverts entered popular culture. For the benefit of Non-UK readers, advert breaks here are co-ordinated by the networks to defeat channel surfing. One goes on break, generally most of the others do. It's usually every fifteen minutes from the hour.
The result is, our advert break are less frequent, but longer in duration than in, say, the US.

Furthermore, brash, direct advertising tends not to work. Adverts here often tell little stories. If people are going to have their films interrupted, they at least want to be amused. A typical TV advert in the UK is least 30 seconds long, sometimes longer.

Al and Monkey became such household names (Johnny Vegas, the comedian who plays Al made the big time as a result, pretty much), that even though ITV Digital went under a few years ago, the pair were recently resurrected to advertise PG Tips instead.



Advertising celebrities, you might say.

And yes, they work. Even I look up to watch Al and Monkey adverts.
And I drink PG Tips :)

So for tonight, all I have to say is 'Hey! (Inner) Monkey!'

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

PG tips are very good. Come and collect your award, Crushed.

Anonymous said...

Interesting. At least this guy has a self-awareness (or his writers have it for him) of his niche as an advertising celebrity. In the US, we tend to turn them into mainstream TV stars.

Anonymous said...

Have one (or two, better make that eight) for me.

Anonymous said...

It was funny... yeppo!

Anonymous said...

Hope you relaxed and enjoyed the beers, Crushed.

Anonymous said...

Of course I didn't know these ads so it was interesting to see them.

I think in fact that you and I might have had to share the PG tips. If only one could see the comments in the readers.

Anonymous said...

James- How exciting! An Award from James.

X.dell- He did a get a mainstream TV career out of it.
But he's stil best known for his monkey chum.

Paul- I usually keep to four, midweek.
It's the mornings I have trouble with!

Mutley- It was hard to keep to three, most of them were good.

Welshcakes- It was pretty quiet out actually. Not that I always mind that. It gave me time to contemplate. Time well spent, I think. I figured quite a bit out about something.

jmb- I still don't know a lot about Goggle Readers. I think I may have to look into getting one.