Nothing Compares 2 U

I suppose we must be in a recession now (curse you Tony Blairs!) because the only stuff which seems to be being advertised now is car insurance. It’s the spirit of the age. People don’t just want cheaper car insurance. They want to compare different car insurance companies to get the best deal on their car insurance.

Christ it’s a dull subject. So what do the advertisers do? Well, you’ve still got direct line, the perky talking telephone on wheels, now voiced by the Pocoyo and Harry Potter guy and Paul Merton (who, let’s face it, doesn’t get a lot of voice-over work for a reason). And you’ve still got Admiral Insurance, though sadly no longer played by Andy from EastEnders. Do you remember Andy from EastEnders? I do. And there’s still Churchill the dog. Not sure if he’s still being voiced by Vic Reeves.

But I don’t just want car insurance, I want to compare car insurances! What should I do? Well apparently I should enter a white void, like that bit in The Matrix where Keanu is choosing his weapons, and compare my car insurances that way. Because, let’s face it, it is exactly like The Matrix.

Or you can have an advert full of ‘real people’ talking as though on home videos, which basically means hired actors but made up to have slightly bushier eyebrows and pallid complexions because that’s what real people look like.

Or – and this is genius – you can advertise your insurance comparison site with a talking computer-generated Russian meerkat. I don’t have a car, so I don’t need car insurance, but I love this advert so much I’m tempted to get one. It may even rival the ‘One step at a time, Martin!’ advert in my affections. And check out the website.

I'm Tongue-Tied

I don’t have a speech defect, as far as I am aware, but there’s one or two words I have a problem with. One of which is sausages.

It’s not that I can’t say it. I can. It’s just that at university, I think it was, at the canteen I would go to, for some reason whenever I asked for sausages the person serving would give me a blank look and ask me to repeat myself. It may have happened a hundred times, it may have happened once, I’m not that keen on sausages so it’s probably somewhere between the two. But for whatever reason, it got inside my head, a niggle of self-consciousness, so that now whenever I have occasion to say the word sausages a litte voice in the back of my mind says, ‘Oh, you’ll have trouble saying this word clearly’.

I don’t. But because I think I will I’m a little surprised and delighted when I don’t get a blank look and am not asked to repeat myself. That said, try ordering anything from Subways and you’ll get a blank look; whenever I go to Subways I fear for the future of our language as every one I go to seems to have people working there who can neither speak nor understand spoken English even though it is their first and only language. Every word they say is slurred and mumbled; every word you say you have to enunciate loudly and clearly like you’re Leslie Philips or something.

Oh, ding dong.

It’s an irony that the one word I have trouble with is a word that even dogs can pronounce. If That’s Life is to be believed. Though I suspect that the dog in question wasn’t saying sausages; it was merely suffering from a bark defect.

Ring Ring

Watched The Ring the other day. Don’t mind admitting, I found it incredibly scary. And yet it contains no violence, no gore... what made it scary was the brilliant script.

Once you get past the first scene, that is, which is incongruously expositional, and has all the hallmarks of a late addition – it includes a character explaining how the video-curse thing works when a) she shouldn’t know this and b) it’s too early for us to know this and c) going by what later happens in the film, her friend should aready be all-too-aware that’s she’s under a curse by this point. Makes me wonder whether this scene was in the original Japanese version. It’s a thing with horror movies that they have to begin with a little vignette, like a short film version of the big film – think of Drew Barrymore’s bit in Scream.

But, from then on, a brilliant script. Not a scene or line wasted. And the effect of such sustained, cumulative, relentless re-iteration of the same disquieting concepts is extraordinary. The invention – and the eventual explanation – is also phenomenal. But there are so many spooky things in this film; the fly, the scribbled-out drawings, the blurred photos, the phone calls, the water... plus everything in that freaky video. Always found them unnerving; you’ll go into a darkened room in the Tate Gallery where you’ll see a montage of badly-shot cod-surrealist nonsense you wouldn’t give five seconds if it was on the telly.

So many spooky things, but all tied together beautifully. Like all great ghost stories, it’s not about jets of blood or shock tactics but about burrowing away into the firmament of suppressed anxieties; of finding yourself in a universe working by another set of malicious, arbitrary and unknowable rules. That’s what’s really scary.