Dom Davis (The Blog)

Sadly it seems that the #1 search term for finding this blog is for the lyrics of the We Buy Any Car [Dot Com] advert, which I covered here. You’re probably aware that there is a new advert out, and in fact has been for some time now. Meanwhile I have been remiss in my duties to bring to you, my readership, the updated lyrics; mainly, I should point out, because I can’t remember them. I do, however, have the advert on pause right now and we can learn the new lyrics together. They go as such:

[Bored housewife] I just sold my car, quick, quick
[Mixed race geezer] I just sold my car, quick, quick
[Montage of posh idiots] Very / Snappy / Totally / Speedy
[Member of the IRA] I just sold my car, fur [or possibly fair, it's hard to tell] deal
[Two ASBOs] I just sold my car, fair deal
[Another montage] Nice / Price / Cheers / Dears [?]
[Uncool dad in garage] We’ve just sold a car
[Essex family] Risk free. We’ve just sold a car, Risk free
[Doddery old couple] Safely / Soundly
[Improbably couple] Trouble free / ‘Hehe’
[Annoying rapper dude] Enter. Your. Reg. Number. Now. At we buy any car [dot com]

So there you go. It’s also the first time I’ve actually worked out what the annoying rapper was saying as previously I thought it was something like ‘M.C. Eurage Number one, at we buy any car [dot com]‘, which is probably why I didn’t find any rappers under the name of M.C. Eurage.

Now lets watch those search stats rocket.

Oh joy. It would appear that, despite Channel 4 promising us Big Brother was dead and gone, Big Brother is back. To be fair it is Channel 5 inflicting it on us this time, however, if Channel 4 had done the decent thing it would have either bought the rights in perpetuity and just never shown it, or bought the production company and stopped them from peddling it to anyone else.

Served with this is a helping of The X-Factor garnished with a panel of judges comprised of whoever they could rustle up at the last minute. Oh, and Luis Walsh. And they wonder why Britain is rioting.

Girl on the platform may well have smiled, but I fear that advert is more than just a tiny bit of wishful thinking. Even at a quiet station the kind of separation between the two of them and the volume the bloke is singing at means that girl on the platform probably can’t here what is being sung. Her reaction, therefore is probably all coincidence.

One the train pulls out the bloke seems surprised that the girl is no longer on the platform. I think it’s safe to assume that the girl on the platform is waiting for a train and so it’s highly likely she’s going to get on one when it arrives, an action that would leave no girl on the platform. Regardless, trains are resplendent with many windows on both sides which actually allows you to see people getting on and off, or in this case, get up, leg it up the stairs, over the bridge, down the stairs and arrive, without being out of breath, next to the man without being seen or heard.

So girl on the platform may have smiled, but I’m going to guess it’s wind. The resulting song and her appearance next to the man is then the daydream of a man trying to find love while the girl heads off wherever she was going on the train.

So it appears they have remade Conan The Barbarian. The original was, if we’re honest with ourselves, dreadful as Arny grunted his way through the first 20 minutes before breaking into his stilted dialogue. It was, in fact, so bad it became an instant classic giving us lines such as “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women”¹. The general consensus of my friends is that the odds of the remake being dire as so close to 1 as to be not worth working out. The real question is: will it mimic the original and be so bad it’s good. Or will it just be shit?

¹A line almost as versatile as “I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure”. Between the two you can reply to 99% of Facebook status updates.

Tron: Legacy is shown in both 2D and 3D with only certain scenes in 3D. I know this because it told us at the start of the film. I think they used it as an arty demarkation of events in the real world (2D) and events in the grid (3D), but I could be wrong. That fact that I’m not sure just goes to show that 3D really adds very little to a film. Our eyes and brains are pretty clever and we’re able to work out depth from a 2D image which I’d why normal films don’t just look unrealistically flat when we look at them. Badly implemented 3D hasn’t helped matters and the technology does have it’s limitations.

Still, the film itself was OK (which is what I was expecting) and I’d say it was an improvement on the original.

Oh, and Kung Fu Panda 2 was advertised. I’m very excited

So it would appear that sunny Cromer-sur-mer is going to be the location for a film about something staring someone (the word “Love” was used during the news report where I learned this little nugget of information, it may have been used in conjunction with the phrase “One mans love for…”. To be honest I wasn’t really listening).

The footage shown with the news segment was just Cromer pier, in the autumn, early in the morning during off season. Pretty… as in pretty dull. Regardless of the storyline no doubt we’ll toddle over to the Cromer Regal Movieplex (5 screens) and watch it. In the mean time, with scant information and a complete lack of arsedness to Google for real facts I present you with the following trailer:

“In a world where people stand on land, one man wants more. I a world where people stand at the sea shore one man goes further. In a world where television is king one mans love for piers and seaside theatre brings him to Cromer. [insert name of movie star here] is [insert name of hero here], a man who dared leave the shore. A man who would walk along the pier. A man who would stand over water. A man who would watch a washed up music act in their twilight years. A man who would visit the lifeboat station and donate money. ‘Cromer Pier’, coming to a cinema near you. [Rated PG, contains scenes of mild peril which may be unsuitable for young children with pieraphobia, one drug reference (aspirin) and use of words which start with the same letter as swear words]

So once again the news outlets have proven to be utterly predictable in their handling of Breaking News¹: Big story breaks. Facts run out almost instantly, speculation begins to buy time for either more facts to come to light or to find whichever editor is onsite who can be wheeled out to sound authoritative about the speculation. Segments are recorded and rerun every 15 minutes while “experts” are sought and wheeled into the news room to provide definitive speculation. New segments featuring the experts are recorded, this time with graphics and stock footage. These are run every 15 minutes.

Morning breaks, the breakfast programs have relevant authoritative people sat on their couches. The headlines and speculation in the papers are picked over.

Come the weekend and there will be pull out specials in the newspapers. By next week the breakfast programs and womens magazines will have sections on how the news affects you and your life in some tenuous fashion.

Despite all this media frenzy the basic nub of news will not have changed and the body of relevant fact surrounding it will be tiny.

To provide relief from all of this I propose a meta news channel. One that reports when other channels ate breaking stories and the speculates on what they will speculate on next.

“Welcome back to those who have just joined us. A Royal Wedding has been announced by all the news outlets today. Both Sky and The BBC have their political editors waffling on about it, the question is where do they go from here? Andy, our political editor reports.”

“Thanks Dominic. Speculation is rife here over who will get the first interview with an official from the Palace. The BBC with their close ties are likely to get official confirmation but we suspect Sky will be the first to actually get someone in the studio, albeit a low ranking household member…”

sup>1 For a given value of news.

For reasons I’d rather not go into on a public forum this morning left me so angry I was shaking. It’s home time and I’m still pretty pissed off, however, I have a remedy for that.

Say what you will about Mr Clarkson and his chums but I find Top Gear to be hysterically funny (I will probably agree with every complaint you raise about them, only I find these things good things). The Zozo, unfortunately, does not, so in order to avoid inflicting it on her I have the latest series on my iPhone (yes, I know, it’s taken me a while to get round to it).

45 minutes (the length of the train journey, unfortunately not long enough to take in an entire episode) of Clarkson shouting “Power!!!” while driving something ridiculous, May trying to be sophisticated in the face of the other two and failing and Hammond reversing into May all the time is guaranteed to put a smile on my face and mean I’m not in my current killer mood when I get home. In the olden days I would have just sat on the train listening to angry music and seething. Isn’t modern technology grand

Soap. It’s pretty boring, fairly ubiquitous, hard to differentiate and low margin. We’ve gone from plain old bars (Imperial Leather, remember that?) and tried every trick in the book to make the product stick out and increase market share and margins. Bars with metal plates that stick onto magnetic holders, soap on a rope, liquid soap, soap with moisturiser, smelly soap, hypoallergenic soap, soap in dispensers, it’s all been tried. Recently one company has taken this to extremes allowing you to buy an automatic, hands free dispenser for their soap. The marketing pitch? With this product you don’t have to touch the nasty, icky dispenser that’s been touched by your families dirty hands.

Let’s step back and think about this. Let’s take our hypothetical hands and cover them in hypothetical dirt. Now we need to clean them, so let’s go to our hypothetical sink and wash them. We turn on our hypothetical taps, pump our hypothetical lemon and lime liquid soap (enjoying the thoughts of sherbet lemons it conjures) and… oh no, the soap dispenser may have put dirt and germs on our hands! Whatever will we do? Now at this point we could bemoan the lack of automated soap dispenser as we risk near certain Ebola, however, I’m going to suggest an alternative. Let’s carry on with our thought experiment. Let’s take our wet, dirty, soap laden, germ coated hands and let’s wash them. Look! Clean! Magic. Kind of renders the automatic dispenser moot. Sure, there’s the gadget appeal but it’s also not the cheapest thing in the the world.

They’ve missed a trick though. Let’s continue our thought experiment, where we take our lovely clean hypothetical hands and turn off the taps. But wait, our lovely clean hands are touching the now filthy taps, necrotising fasciitis ensues followed by death. Automatic taps, that’s what we need.

Last night The Zozo and I were subjected to the new 2010 advert for webuyanycar.com, a low budget affair that relies on the musical equivalent of malaria¹ to lodge itself in the brain. The lyrics of the tune as follows:

webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com – any, any, any any.
webuyanycar.com – any make, any model, any age, any price, from fifty quid to a hundred grand.
webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com – any, any, any any.
webuyanycar.com – buy a newer car and don’t part ex, you may get a better deal when you buy next.
webuyanycar.com – enter your reg number now at webuyanycar.com.

Most important to note is the ‘dot com’ part of ‘we buy any car dot com’ is said in a slightly different voice and it is this that makes the tune so hard to remove from the brain once it’s got lodged there.

This morning The Zozo and I have both been suffering from having this tune stuck in our brains and it’s not got to the stage where she will go ‘we buy any car’ and I will go ‘dot com’. Worse still, I’m not putting ‘dot com’ on the end of bloody everything [dot com]… see!!

I’m hoping the meme will burn itself out but in the mean time I’m trying not to go crazy with the little voice in my head going ‘dot com’ to everything [dot com]. Gaaaaahhhhh!!!! Make it stop!².

¹Highly infectious and not pleasant if you have it

²dot com