Advertising: Ringtone heaven for fans of pants music
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Your support makes all the difference.What a friend we have in Richard Curtis. He's given us so much: from the comedy ring in Four Weddings to the comedy pants in Notting Hill. Rhys Ifans, on that Blue doorstep, before the world's press in his British underwear – hopeless, discoloured things, so very un-Calvin. Only an Englishman could think that up.
There's something very adolescent about mobile phones too – their gadgets and features. When they only did one thing, they were owned by show-off Masters of the Universe. Now they do everything and everyone has one, and the real enthusiasts are kids. And they're really keen on tunes, fancy ringtones. A mobile can play any of a thousand snatches of music in the same tinny way. They sound so awful that properly uptight adults would prefer the occasional "is it me?" embarrassment to the shame of "Bohemian Rhapsody" coming from their pockets.
Comedy mobile ringtones, like those brought to us in an ad for Kiwee, are very Richard Curtis.
In a comedy bedroom – a hopeless boarding house bedroom from another world (somewhere on the Kent coast?) – there's a nerdy man in grey, Y-frontish pants jigging about in a tortured way to a pathetic half-tune on a mobile.
In the same room there's another young man in his pants – don't ask – with his own mobile. He looks a bit like Vernon Kay from Boys and Girls, the one with the 1960s revival hair. His pants are red, in a dad's swimming trunks style. His mobile plays much more of a tune – enough to get his pale, hairless body thrashing about. Enough to summon up a Pan's People legion of 1970s wet-dream girl dancers, in their 1970s red bikinis, to join him in a sublime routine straight off Top of the Pops c.1973, while his nerdy friend stands by, wanting in. When the music stops, the girls vanish, so the lad shouts at his friend in a very Welsh-sounding way, "Call me on my mobile, Johnno." Kiwee ringtones are a kind of Heineken for the 21st century – something for people too cool to answer the phone.
I had a flood of emails about last Sunday's column on the KFC 'Soul Food' ad. I was terribly wrong to suspect the music-over was pastiche. Apparently it's a Northern Soul gem called 'I Can't Get Away' by Bobby Garrett. Not just real, but a bat squeak of hyper authenticity for men in their forties who used to go to those all-nighters in Wigan. Thank you, boys.
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