Sunday 22 November

BLOGS

blogCategory
Previous
Back to blog
Next

TV Warehouse

Keep-fit fanatics
  • Posted at 11:57am
  • 04 October 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT

It always happens when you're at your most susceptible. You're bored, you're slobbing on the sofa wearing trousers with an elasticated waistband, fragments of pizza and chocolate are lodged about your person and you're stabbing at a remote control with a fat thumb. Suddenly, a Day-Glo American woman screeches at you from the television set, asking you to "just imagine" various things.

Just imagine having a waistline like hers. Just imagine achieving that waistline "the easy way" – ie through several months of ceaseless toil on some contraption called a lateral thigh trainer. Just imagine not having just buried your face in a four-litre tub of chocolate chip ice cream and eaten your way out.

This kind of 30-minute advomercial seems to kick in during the downtime of many satellite channels, urging us to part with cash in exchange for having something revolutionary delivered direct to our door. No, not Che Guevara - perhaps a vegetable chopper, a cleaning product, a super gazebo, or a ladder that's not just a ladder, it's 10,000 ladders and a marital aid rolled up into one ladder. Just call this number. Do call.

As these ads are always American-made, any fitness gurus thereon will refer to parts of the body that I don't think I've managed to evolve yet. Actually, I'd be interested in getting a random group of British people into a room and asking them to point to a human outline and indicate where they think the "glutes" are. Not to mention obliques, or indeed abs. It would be like some nightmarish, eternal version of pin the tail on the donkey. And "buns"? Anyone in need of a lateral thigh trainer knows exactly where their buns are. They're in the bread bin.

Fortunately, between all the "way to gos!" and "alrights!" we hear from fitness expert Brenda DyGraf as she literally "incinerates fat", we get the voice of a pleasant British man who translates some of these complex medical terms into friendly phrases like "saggy saddlebags". Which is no more informative, but at least he's not screaming at us. With the order hotline number up on the screen, he then takes us through the various benefits.

We get a free lateral thigh trainer computer at no additional cost – although, as said "computer" is a small digital watch-style read-out that's firmly embedded within the product, they can't really call it an extra. It's like selling a bike and trying to sweeten the deal by saying you'll throw in the wheels. We also get a free video which, apparently, will be like having Brenda right there in the room with you, with the added bonus of being able to control her considerable volume.

And then there's the standard trick that these ads always employ: showing black-and-white footage of people who have chosen not to buy the product in question and who are experiencing extreme distress as they plunge a knife into their hand, fall off a rickety stepladder or, in this case, snap their spinal column as they clumsily attempt to do a sit-up. And then it's back to Brenda, training her thighs laterally in glorious technicolour without even breaking a sweat.

"It's the easy way to step up to the fun," she tells us, "the quick way to tight buns and sexy obliques." A nation roars its disapproval by hurling abuse at the television screen. And then we just pick up the phone and order one anyway.

Link to this post
Post a comment

Post a comment

Do you have something to say about this post? Share your thoughts…

Post a comment

(first or nickname only)

Please do not include any personal or personally identifiable information about yourself or others (including email addresses). All information you submit about yourself or others can be viewed by others.

Thank you for your comment

Thank you for your comments. All comments will be looked at by a moderator, however, due to the numbers of comments we receive, we can't promise that all will be posted on the site.

Post another comment

More


Advertisement