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Fat people need loving too, they just have to pay for it. They also need clothes too, and it seems that same adage applies, as they have their very own brands and shops. Pragmatic shop names such as High & Mighty, Long Tall Sally, have given way to things like Jacamo, SimplyBe and The Newcastle FC club shop. And now they’ve started advertising. Jacamo, for fat blokes, is voiced over by none other than the Monkey-bummer himself, Johnny Vegas.
First off, I doubt very much that he is your mate, Johnny, but that’s just being pedantic. What is more clear from this advert is that Jacamo have spent probably all of their budget (after chang and hookers of course) of their budget on wrenching Vegas away from his pint glass of a PG Tips/Guiness/kebab cocktail. I thought that perhaps the Wonga.com degenerate had the most degrading job in television, possibly the guy who used to play a mouth ulcer in the Bonjela ads, but I think we have a new winner. Maybe it’s the dulcet tones of Vegas’ beautiful and in no way grating or rip-your-ears-off-blend-them-with-caustic-acid-and-then-pour-over-your-exposed-inner-ear voice that does it, but for some reason, the Ad Men have made ‘Phil’ look as retarded as possible. His corpulentness is almost secondary. Maybe that’s what they’re going for. His facial expressions are like Forest Gump’s sex face. He’s got a swagger that looks like he’s reffing a boxing match between Mohammed Ali and Michael J. Fox. Either way, it really does look like they’ve auditioned people whose IQ is only matched by the number of X’s before the L on their clothing tags. The only other time you see a bloke like ‘Phil’ on TV is on a Channel 4 documentary about some retard or someone with a really funny rare illness trying to integrate back into society; but they get laughed at by the people in town (not because of their immense weight and/or illness you understand, but because a camera crew seems to be following them around and then edits in the laughs later). And that last line, “Phil? You’re ‘andsome!” Is that REALLY the best way to sign off an advert? Making your ‘star’ sound like a chubby-chasing gay man?
The whole ironic idea of this ad just doesn’t work and ends up being rather offensive. And that’s not just because I’m so fat that I have my own postcode.
