Have you bought your JML Super Slicer yet? No? Well, you're a fool to yourself!
This whizzo product is currently being flogged on the telly and everytime it pops up I am tempted to buy, buy, buy because it puts me in mind of the seemingly always-sunny '70s, when life was good, Pither was alive, mortgaging was something you did in Monopoly and the only baggage girls of my acquaintance carried around with them was a satchel.
The Super Slicer is.......well.......just a thing for slicing other things. It's not exactly a teleportation machine, nor is it a cure for cancer. It is, in truth, a completely crappy piece of crud (bearing in mind that the knife was invented centuries ago) but it is advertised in such a way that you feel you must be an idiot for not having one in your home. Nostalgia rears its ugly head because in the days of my youth there was another company which was always plugging equally ridiculous products on our screens............K-Tel! Remember?
K-Tel was most famous for its compilation albums.
There were winners such as Soul Motion, Super Bad and Dynamite, all with "20 Original Hits by 20 Original Artists" (despite the fact that each track was edited down to around 2 minutes). Although I have to admit I've got a box of these somewhere up in the attic, I used to prefer the Super-Slicer-type wonder products K-Tel also tried to flog.
There was the legendary Fishin' Magician. Then there was the Buttonmatic, followed closely by the Brush-o-Matic. There was the Hair Magician and,
for the more discerning customer, the K-Tel Record Selector or the equally scientific Cassette Selector. The beauty of K-Tel was that almost all of its products had one fantastic property - they didn't fucking work!
Ah, those were the days. God's speed, JML! Good luck. Take on the mantle of K-Tel and fill the attics of generations yet to come with worthless, broken, plastic gadgets. You shall not go to Grantham.
4.2
2.7
8
1.6
0
5.9
Shaggy Blog Stories
6 comments:
Don't forget K-Tel's arch rival, Ronco (well, I presume they were arch rivals).
JML are also advertising some kind of pest control device on television which features live rats (presumably Equity members), and are always promoting products on those instore videos which are always on in Robert Dyas with the volume turned low, and which none of the shoppers pay any attention to. How does a company like that keep going?
Plastic cutting gadgets demonstrated by a man in a polyester suit - truanting in Lewis's dpartment store, Corporation Street, during the 70s was, in its own way, educational.
Hi Betty,
Ah, Ronco!! Yes indeed. They were obsessed with getting fluff off things, I seem to recall (not the late DJ).
I really don't think the Pied-Piper-o-Matic 9000 is a winner. It'll never replace the Smith and Wesson 45.
Hi Arabella,
You're getting all misty eyed over there, aren't you? Don't!! It's pissing it down here and has been for three months now - and they've taken Bullseye off the box!
Rivalry between K-Tel and Ronco? Don't get me started. Remember the great home hair-cutter (name escapes me at present). Nearly tripped over my flares rushing to the shops for one.
Oh yeah. . . what about the bottle chopper which was supposed to create a set of cut-glass crystal goblets from a Corona bottle?
Post a Comment