A celebrity officially enters the world of twatdom once he or she sinks low enough to sell out and sell crap. Nothing is worse than seeing Mr T throwing chocolate bars from a helicopter in an attempt to get down wiv da kidz.
The worst of these evil alliances tends to be between stand-up comedians and insurance companies. Before we see who tops the list, lets have a run down of the top ten Celebrity Twats…
10 Ringo Starr
Remember those horrible adverts when selected has-beens, including Ringo Starr, told us that they “wouldn’t have got where they were today without changing their names”? It was supposed to be a reference to the Norwich Union building society “changing its name” to Aviva.
There’s a few problems here. Firstly, Ringo got where he was today thanks to John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney (in that order). None of them had to change their names. Ringo wasn’t the best drummer in the world. He wasn’t even the best drummer in The Beatles. So the first half of the analogy makes no sense.
Secondly, Norwich Union didn’t change their name to Aviva, they were bought out by them. Aviva have been around since 2000, and are the sixth largest insurance company in the world. I even wrote about these shits in my book, well before these terrible commercials were aired. The second half of the analogy also fails.
9 Carol Vorderman
Carol Vorderman made her name on TV’s “Countdown” by performing simple arithmetic and being slightly more attractive than Richard Whiteley. She is the most famous mathematician in the country, and she’s not even a mathematician. She studied engineering at Cambridge and only got a 3rd class degree. I could stick a pencil in my arse and fart out a 3rd class degree.
None of this stopped Vorderman fronting adverts from “loans company” Firstplus, advising viewers to get more into debt.
Here’s a typical hermit-head’s reaction…
“When you see Carol Vorderman you think ‘she's really good with figures so it must be good'. And because you're so eager to get the money and pay the debt off, you just sign it.”
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/loans/1146661969,42304
The world financial crisis can be laid squarely at Carol Vorderman’s blood soaked feet.
8 The “Go Compare” Man.
Does this bastard have a real name?
When polls and surveys which ask the question “who is the most hated person in the UK?” have been conducted in recent years, top of the list has always been the psychotic war criminal, Tony Blair. However, recently he has been knocked off the top spot by the transvestite opera singer from the “Go Compare” adverts.
There was an article in the newspapers recently that stated that the Go Compare man gets, on average, two boxes of human shit in the post every week. What I want to know is - who’s sending the other one?
7 Alan Davies
Davies began his career advertising the Abbey National building society, before branching out as a tongue-leech feeding exclusively off the shit seeping from Stephen Fry’s mouth and anus.
It’s not only me who thinks Davies is a twat. There is an organisation known as the Alan Davies is a Twat Fellowship. Please register your interest at their website…
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18384445819
That’s not all. Alan Davies is a cannibal. He bit off a homeless man’s ear.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article3037185.ece
The comedian and actor Alan Davies insisted yesterday that he was “not normally an aggressive guy” after being accused of biting a tramp’s ear while drunk.
I was going to open an account with the Abbey National this morning (if they even exist anymore), but then I remembered their public face - a desperate, greedy, tramp-eater. So I bought shares in a chemical weapons manufacturer instead.
6 Stephen Merchant
Note that Merchant insists on spelling his first name using the girly “ph”, rather than the real man’s “v”. However, that isn’t the limit of this man’s twatishness.
Once known as half of the comic genius behind “The Office” and “Extras”, Merchant is now the face of the hugely popular Barclay’s Bank. Here is an article from the Observer newspaper, printed in 2007.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2007/jan/28/accounts.Zimbabwenews
I’m pretty sure this is the one that Merchant read before offering his services. Here are some choice quotes…
Barclays bank is helping to bankroll President Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe, providing millions of pounds of support for his vilified land reforms, The Observer can reveal. Mugabe's opponents describe the bank's activities as a 'disgrace' and an 'insult' to the millions who have suffered human rights abuses.
One of the most controversial of Barclays' Zimbabwe loans is the £30m it provides to a state-sponsored agricultural 'facility' aiming to sustain land reforms that saw Mugabe seize white-owned farmland and drive more than 100,000 black workers from their homes. The government has expelled more than a million opposition supporters from Harare and Bulawayo, dumping them in the countryside.
Even more telling, however, is the actual advert itself. It shows how the “vonderboy” of British comedy lost his way.
“Isn’t it funny how financial institutions have changed the way in which they save, but we haven’t”
Says Merchant. He says something like that anyway, but all the videos seemed to have been removed from Youtube by his team of highly trained lawyers, so I can’t check.
Anyway, the truth is contained in that one “quote”. Merchant is amused by the fact that banks use different financial methods compared with normal people. Amused. I bet Ricky Gervais isn’t amused by that.
That is why Gervais is writing scripts for star studded Hollywood blockbusters, and Merchant is left waving the flag for Robert Mugabe’s piggy bank.
5 Rowan Atkinson
Atkinson was the public face of Barclaycard for about six years. The bigwigs at Barclaycard were reportedly huge fans of Mr Bean, and wanted to re-brand their shitty credit card in Bean’s image. Mute, greedy and corrupt.
The worst thing is that, unlike most of the people on this list, Atkinson didn’t really need the money - he did it purely for love (and money).
The best thing about this story is that it has a happy ending. Barclays finally got sick of being associated with the “rubber faced twat”, and got rid of him.
http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/64997/Barclaycard-ditch-Atkinson/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH
4 Lenny Henry
Lenny Henry advertises Premier Inn. He’s always at it. It got to the point that anyone on a TV commercial who had only a passing resemblance to Lenny was assumed, by people in my house, anyway, to be him.
“Is he advertising Curry’s now?”
“Good God, he’s doing George Forman’s grills this time!”
“What’s going on? There are two of him! Is that a camera trick? Why?”
Etc.
Someone told me that this bit might be seen as a bit racist. It isn’t. If you want to see racism, watch how the BBC lists the victims of disasters in the “order of importance”.
And it might just be a coincidence that Lenny started doing adverts for a hotel just after his wife, Dawn French, kicked him out.
3 Joe Pasquale
I’m not going to write my bit on Pasquale just yet. Not because he isn’t a Celebrity Twat (he is), or because someone who knows him asked me not to (he did), but because I’m trying to work out if he puts on that voice or not.
The advert, of course, is ambulance chasers “Underdog”. Pasquale voices a plasticine dog, while overweight twat, Brian Blessed, plays himself.
The controversy is this - Pasquale claims that the bizarre noise coming out of his face hole is his actual, real voice. He says this on the 2010 Channel 4 “100 greatest Standups” list show. On the same show, seconds before, was Pasquale from many years ago, looking much younger and sounding much more normal. I have a team looking into this.
And, by the way Channel 4, Billy Connelly is not the worlds best stand up. The top three are, in no particular order, Steve Hughes, Stewart Lee and Sean Lock.
2 Paul Whitehouse
Aviva has ruined more careers than any other company. Whitehouse was one of the best comedians of the 90s, so I’m assuming Aviva had photos of him and Enfield and threatened to publish. Nothing else explains why someone with Whitehouse’s talent would sink so low.
“Back in my day, concerts were free. You need a mortgage for tickets today. He he.” quips Whitehouse. No Paul, you’d go to prison for mortgage fraud if you did that. You’d be sharing a cell with Matt Lucas and David Walliams, who tried a similar stunt - pretending to be women when opening an account at their local building society.
The lazy way to try and make a difference in the world is to boycott twatishness. Don’t buy it, watch it or piss on it if it’s on fire. That’s why I just bought tickets to see Jerry Sadowitz, rather than “An Audience With Stephen Fry”. This policy becomes unstable when it comes to people like Whitehouse, who still produces brilliant comedy. So Whitehouse, if you’re reading this, and I am going to send it to you, either stop doing the adverts or stop being funny.
1 Stephen Fry
One of the best measurements of a man’s twatisness is the title of his autobiography.
Insufferable prick Richard Hammond, for example, selected these titles:
As You Do. That was published in 2008, and Hammond evidently thinks “As you do” is one of his catchphrases. The other being…
Or Is That Just Me? That was published in 2009, with all the juicy stuff from the previous twelve months.
The only interesting thing that ever happened to Hammond was when he got into a rocket and drove into a tree, but that was in 2006.
Still, at least the barely educated Hammond isn’t writing physics books for children. Apart from the sinister Can You Feel the Force?: Putting the Fizz Back into Physics. (Dorling Kindersley 2006), published the same year as his suicide attempt.
Anyway, Fry has trumped them all. In a move that has even staggered his sharpest critics, Fry’s book of shit is called…
The Fry Chronicles : An Autobiography
Yes, “Chronicles” because Fry is a cross between Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare, and “an” autobiography because there’s going to be ten more.
Stories abound about Fry nosing his way into someone personal space and giving them the benefit of his ripe idiocy.
No, Fry, no. The only thing you are allowed to comment on is car insurance. Perhaps insurance for pets, or for houses. It depends on what Direct Line are doing. Same goes for you, Merton. (You’ve got away with it for some reason, Merton. You even called Gary Lineker a crisp salesman on Have I Got News For You while you were pocketing your dirty silver. You’re just lucky that Fry’s twat-shadow shields you)
I wonder what Stephen Fry’s website is called?
The New Adventures of Stephen Fry
I preferred the old one. The one where he went mental and got on a ferry to Belgium.
Copyright Alan Osler 2011. What does that even mean?
