Two for me, none for you
Every
nation has its own classic advertisements and jingles that we can still
remember and sing by heart even after several decades. This is also
true for Finland. I never got to see myself the unfortunate oven
cleaner commercial during the miniseries "Shoah", though, so I just
have to take the word of other people that this incident really
happened.
I also remember another old TV commercial from about ten years ago. The advertisement featured an underclass male who was not a comedic character but looked very realistic and disgusting. Life at the bottom. He said to the camera that he has never in his life drunk any milk, and never will. The image switched to text "And we can tell", and last a film of beautiful white milk flowing into a glass was shown in slow motion. One rarely sees such refreshing honesty in commercials these days. This is much better than the hippity-hop dairy farmers of Ontario ad that you can always see on TV these days (link).
Another commercial, this one many years older, started with a horse pulling a wagon on a cobblestone street. The horse took a dump while it was slowly going clip clop clip clop, and after the horse and wagon had gone by, two old ladies on both sides of the street were eyeing the pile and thinking "That sure would be so fine for my roses". The ladies then noticed each other and watched each other suspiciously. And oh crap, now the jingle of that product suddenly came to my mind. "One poop, two poop, don't need anything else", as the jingle might be translated here losing a lot of its original zing and spirit. I guess I had better go on the treadmill now to get rid of that olde timey earworm.
I also remember another old TV commercial from about ten years ago. The advertisement featured an underclass male who was not a comedic character but looked very realistic and disgusting. Life at the bottom. He said to the camera that he has never in his life drunk any milk, and never will. The image switched to text "And we can tell", and last a film of beautiful white milk flowing into a glass was shown in slow motion. One rarely sees such refreshing honesty in commercials these days. This is much better than the hippity-hop dairy farmers of Ontario ad that you can always see on TV these days (link).
Another commercial, this one many years older, started with a horse pulling a wagon on a cobblestone street. The horse took a dump while it was slowly going clip clop clip clop, and after the horse and wagon had gone by, two old ladies on both sides of the street were eyeing the pile and thinking "That sure would be so fine for my roses". The ladies then noticed each other and watched each other suspiciously. And oh crap, now the jingle of that product suddenly came to my mind. "One poop, two poop, don't need anything else", as the jingle might be translated here losing a lot of its original zing and spirit. I guess I had better go on the treadmill now to get rid of that olde timey earworm.
That non milk drinking gentleman in that ad was nowhere near the real underclass in his appearance. He was just rather an uneducated ordinary macho bloke but very very far from the real rock bottom low life as one encounters in the dark abysses of violence, murder and mayhem. It is sad to see that the civilized intelligentsija is so alienated from the reality that it takes this kind of young man to be a representative of the Life at the Bottom as Dalrymple describes it.
Posted by Catilina | 7:54 AM
That non milk drinking gentleman in that ad was nowhere near the real underclass in his appearance.
In that case, I don't understand what the text "And we can tell" referred to, if the guy wasn't supposed to be somehow mockworthy.
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 12:31 PM
Mockworthy perhaps to some people although I would slightly disagree here but I take it that your choice of words "Life at the Bottom" refers to the book of Theodore Dalrymple which I have read and which is in my shelf. Having myself worked in prison, drug rehabs, methadon maintenance, mental asylums, state asylums for criminally insane etc etc I think I can see the disparity here. I wouldn't say that you have exactly missed something important and worth of seeing having obviously not encountered the real low life though.
Posted by Catilina | 1:45 PM
Having myself worked in prison, drug rehabs, methadon maintenance, mental asylums, state asylums for criminally insane etc etc I think I can see the disparity here.
That is probably the reason. I used the word underclass inaccurately to mean what is usually referred to in Finnish as "syrjäytynyt" but not criminally so, which is closer to the mainstream Finn's mental image of the underclass.
I see you haven't written into your blog for a while: if you do, perhaps a good and important topic would be to examine to what extent Dalrymple's articles could apply to Finland, and what the real underclass is like.
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 2:24 PM