Fuck me, but I have seen some shit ideas in my time.
In my line of work, it’s inevitable - but some that stand out were an idea for a brand of Bitter which consisted of a procession through the streets of Derby, led by a chimp with the followers of the town marching behind him (their ranks swelled by other luminaries such as Jordan) and chanting “Beer Monkey, Beer Monkey!”; and then there is Wife’s all-time advertising nadir of the French cheese that chose to advertise via two baguettes having a duel against a mock chateau background, with sub-Clouseau accents; not to mention the heart-sickness I felt when I read a script that began “We open on a Gandalf”. I read no further on that occasion, responding simply with “No, we don’t”.
Anyway, it turns out that Permanently Exhausted Creative Director (the man behind “We open on Gandalf”) has managed to come up with something (or rather: one of the teams under his guidance have come up with something) so scrotum-shrivellingly awful that I would chew on broken glass to return us to the world of the Tolkien magician. It’s not going ahead, need I say, so I can relate it in all its awfulness.
In the pursuit of advertising dish-washing liquid with an anti-bacterial action, the idea was to have singing cutlery proclaiming (to the tune of Leonard Bernstein’s “America” from “West Side Story”): “I’m not afraid of bacteria!”, “He’s not afraid of bacteria!”, “We’re not afraid of bacteria”, “We are in a cafeteria!”.
I’m not joking.
Thank God the work was delivered by e-mail as I don’t think I’d have been able to keep the look of horror and contempt out of my eyes, but as it was, I managed to rein it in and take it into a new direction that doesn’t make me want to self-harm. They have a week to do something amazing. Fingers crossed that they don’t fall back on a certain wizard…
