craziest uk adverts

Watching a collection of controversial British adverts gave me a few very different reactions. Some were gross, some were shocking, and some were just funny. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something on television that made me call up to complain, so I was curious about what had upset people in these examples.

I moved to the UK at the end of 2015, after the earlier adverts in the collection had aired. I hadn’t had the opportunity to see them at the time, and I wasn’t watching live television by the time I recorded this reaction either. Streaming meant I wasn’t particularly familiar with the current adverts, never mind these older ones.

Someone had to agree to the Pot Noodle horn

The Pot Noodle advert built its joke around a man having the horn for a snack, with the sexual double meaning eventually becoming an actual big, brassy horn. My immediate thought was about the people who’d agreed to make it. Somewhere, marketing and company executives had approved an idea about getting the horn for Pot Noodle. Insane.

That was me imagining the conversation behind the advert, rather than claiming I’d seen its planning meeting. The finished idea was enough to make me wonder how everyone had got on board with it. There wasn’t a lot more I could say once I’d watched it.

Phones4u was a brand I hadn’t heard of, and its advert went for horror instead. The message was that missing its deals would haunt you. It reminded me of spooky films like The Ring and The Grudge, although I didn’t know whether their timing had anything to do with the advert.

It wasn’t something I particularly wanted to watch, but I could understand the logic of using a haunting to sell that message. I also didn’t think it was the most offensive thing I’d ever seen. A creepy advert and an advert worth phoning someone to complain about aren’t necessarily the same thing to me.

The public warnings belonged in a different category

A Department of Health campaign was trying to get people to stop smoking, with a message about getting unhooked. I thought it made its point, but I wasn’t sure I’d put it in the same category as an advert for a snack or a phone.

I also felt that this and the children’s charity film in the collection belonged with the public service announcements I’d watched before. To me, they were trying to tell people something or improve their lives, rather than persuade them to buy a product. Putting them alongside snack and phone adverts blurred those categories.

The Act on CO2 film was another example. It used a bedtime story to talk about climate change and the consequences for the child’s generation. I questioned that setup. Getting a child snuggled up for a story, then telling them about a frightening future, didn’t seem like a particularly comforting route to bedtime.

I also questioned where the message put the responsibility. My reaction was that I’d rather see attention on regulations for large international businesses than on making ordinary people feel guilty about heating their homes. That was my opinion about the campaign’s approach, not a calculation of anybody’s emissions. And again, I considered it a PSA rather than a normal product advert.

The Volkswagen fight was fun

The Volkswagen advert took a different direction, with a man confronting a version of himself from the future. I couldn’t initially tell what the message was meant to be, but the line about sometimes only having to beat yourself explained the idea behind the fighting.

I thought it was pretty cool. Yes, it involved violence, but there wasn’t blood or gore, and I’d seen much worse on the internet as a child. I didn’t find this particular fight especially shocking. By the end, I thought the advert had been fun.

That was the difference running through my reactions. I could understand a message and still question its approach, while a fight that had apparently upset other viewers could seem fairly mild to me. Calling the whole collection controversial didn’t mean I felt the same way about every advert in it.

Watch my full reaction to the controversial adverts.