Hard Sell: Change for Life campaign

The Guardian

(This Hard Sell was commissioned by the Guardian Guide a while back but was not published as the advert had already been "dealt with" by another "writer". The magazine, fearing vicious retribution immediately paid up and apologised, hoping to avoid scenes like those when the Bonekickers review hit the shelves. Aerial Telly forgives the Guardian for their folly and reproduces the piece which is now a collector’s item)

At an undisclosed location in a office bathed in puke-coloured light from a 60 watt bulb dangling precariously from the ceiling, cloven hoofed Quango illuminati debate government health policy as they flog illegal Polish immigrants tried to radiators.

Next on the agenda: how best to get the povs on board the healthy eating lifeboat? Hectoring celebrity chefs are fine, they agree, but for really Olympic standard condescension you need a cartoon advert that talks to them like they are mentally subnormal. Yes, we’ll call it Change for Life says Quangoscum #1.

Animated Morph men, he continues, will demonstrate the evolution of man showing how in hunter-gatherer days we used to burn off calories by a thing the cavemen called EXERCISE – killing woolly mammoths, bison and the like. Then, rather like Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, it will reveal the emergence of civilisation but this time by showing cartoon houses popping up, kids playing video games and plasticine proles stuffing their slow-learner faces with pies, pies, hotdogs and fries.

Good thinking, says #2. And with a revolting intrusive cockney voiceover telling them that such a sedentary lifestyle may give your kids horrid fings like ‘art disease, caan-cah and diabetes and how "that’s terrible because we love the little blighters". The Quango creatives lock antlers and snort biliously in delight at their unholy brilliance. Glasses of human baby blood are poured in celebration.

Quangoscum #1: OK, let’s get Bob in and storyboard this mother. Whose turn is it to flog the Pole?

Quangoscum #2: I’m up.

Marek, a PhD from Katowice, shudders in anticipation. But it is not the flogging he fears.

 

Imagined: 29th May 2009