According to adverts, even the most mundane car will transform your life, writes KILIAN DOYLE
BEING BOTH a Francophile Irishman and a lifelong Arsenal fan, I’m terribly conflicted this weather.
As far as I’m concerned, Thierry Henry – the man whose handiwork means we’ll all be holidaying in Castlebar instead of Cape Town next summer – is, and always will be, a god to us Gooners. So you can see why I’m torn.
Disgusted by the result though I am, I’m equally disgusted by the bile being flung in Henry’s general direction. It seems glib to say it now, after the fact, but had the glove been on the other hand, I imagine the reaction would have been very different.
If Robbie Keane – no angel himself, having deliberately fondled the ball at least twice during that fateful match – had done the same thing as Henry, we’d now be erecting solid gold statues of him on every street corner in the country. Still, that doesn’t keep the sick from gushing into my mouth every time I replay that fateful moment in my head.
To quell this torrent, I’ve decided to do something drastic. It’s a huge sacrifice, you’ll agree, but I think it adequately signifies how strongly I feel about the whole debacle. I’m not going to buy a Renault Clio. Ever. Va va voom yerself, pal.
Which brings me neatly to the question of TV car ads. I’d rather watch a permanent loop of Damien Duff crying or Michel Platini gloating than most of them. Granted, there are some diamonds among the dross, but the vast majority are about as realistic as Cowen’s entreaties to Sarkozy for a rematch. And as patronising as Sarkozy’s response.
They are entirely unrepresentative of reality, as I know it, with their urbanites smiling smugly to themselves, as they glide through streets lined with envious pedestrians, in their jazzed-up hatchbacks while impeccably groomed and permatanned yummy mummies gaze adoringly at their immaculately behaved offspring quietly reading Ulysses in the back of some Asian metal box.
As they get ever more ‘sophisticated’, most adverts have ditched all pretence of outlining cars’ actual merits. Instead, they sell you a dream, using bland, meaningless buzzwords in a transparent attempt to convince you that their wares – and theirs alone – are the key to a better, happier, more successful life.
That explains why the cars are always seen driving down palm-lined boulevards or over glorious sun-drenched mountain passes rather than overheating in traffic soup on Gardiner Street or being stripped by urchins while broken down on the edge of the N17.
It’s precisely the same reason why booze ads feature healthy, sexy and smiling people climbing the Rockies or swanning about on yachts in the Caribbean rather than violent oiks foundering in pools of their own vomit.
But we all know buying a particular brand of car isn’t going to make you instantly irresistible to the opposite sex, the best parent in the world or great at limbo-dancing. So why do they persist with this nonsense? Is it too much to ask for a bit of authenticity?
Why do advertising gurus churn out ads depicting gaggles of white-teethed, perfect-skinned students piling into the back of a convertible to go snowboarding when the world and his wife knows this demographic hasn’t two empty Pot Noodle cartons to rub together? Why do they market Micras for hip affluent 30-somethings when everybody knows the only people who buy them are septuagenarian nuns?
Where are the real people? Where are the pot-bellied, balding, middle-aged blokes who really want a Porsche but can only afford a Ford?
Where are the frazzled mothers who need three happy pills before they can even contemplate embarking on the daily battle of getting their feral brats to sit quietly in the back of their Zafiras without stabbing each other in the eyes with sharpened lollipop sticks?
Where are the miserable, the desperate, the downtrodden and the broken? Where am I?