Tuesday 26 March 2013

A giant fox head bellowing from the coach of the damned

It turns out gambling yourself into a whimpering pile of debt via your smartphone is a national pastime over here. Got a spare few minutes at work? Hit the bingo. Just sitting at home with two friends? Time for bingo. Playing bingo? Play more bingo. With your feet.

All this life-changing bingo playing is then followed up with an instant payday loan to smooth over any gaping holes you've just smashed into your bank statement, and then rounded off with a quick trip down to the local Cash4Gold (with whatever old mobiles, gold teeth and treasured family heirlooms you can scrape together) to pay off that loan before it multiplies by 1700%, leaving you back in the black, but now with slightly less stuff. It's a vicious cycle, with each revolution costing you one teapot each time you go around. Unless you manage to hurl yourself down some stairs, which will handily net you a cool £11,000. Well. Probably.

Of course, this is all just an assumption based on the sheer volume of bingo, payday loan, pawnbroker and injury lawyer ads.

An apparently hands-off approach to online-casino adverts has resulted in nearly every ad break containing at least 60 of them. Foxy Bingo. Mecca Bingo. Bung A Random Word In Front Bingo.

The ads themselves aren't much better. Foxy Bingo, for some reason or another, features a terrifying man-fox grooving and jiving aboard some kind of purgatory bus that hurtles round the country, filled with British stereotypes from eras gone by. Doomed to wander the earth and endlessly repeat catchphrases at one another for all time -- they can't cross over to the light until you play some bingo.

There're other, slightly saner, ads. Mr Green sits in a chair and pulls a lever -- where will you be whisked off to today? Athens? Monaco? Your front room? It's more likely your front room. You'll still be sat in the same old house pissing your life up the wall, but you'll have a fancy little backdrop of pyramids and hieroglyphics to entertain you in between the bouts of sobbing. If you're lucky, Mr Green might turn up every now and then and dip his bowler hat at you and say something cryptic at you, you devilish card. Wink Bingo refreshingly (for an ad) features topless men jigging about -- but then you realise this is because they're probably trying to target stay-at-home mums.

The worst might be Paddy Power's ad for their bingo app. A woman attending a yoga class opts to sneak out and do a bit of gambling in the car instead. A bit like, oh, a gambling addict. It's only a matter of time before some lad's mag has an ad where they replace 'yoga' with 'work', and 'gambling' with, er, 'reading'. 

Tuesday 19 March 2013

Ten brooms (and other obligatory purchases):


The other week at a Poundshop, I bought an optical mouse. For a pound! Sure, it clicks like a 90’s r&b rimshot, and glows a sickly blue when you use it – that’s not really the point. The point is, it cost a pound. One pound.

Britain. Land of bargains.

For 10 pounds, I could get a pair of jeans at Primark. Admittedly, these jeans won’t fit my (apparently) massively overlong legs, but if they did, I could buy a pair for the pleasingly tidy sum of 10 pounds. The arse might violently tear out of them within a week or two (or less, depending on how much lunging needs to be done), but that’s at least as long as a NZ$35 pair from Jay-Jays.  

Or, instead, that 10 pounds could go elsewhere, and I’ll come home with 10 brooms. Ten of the bastards! Or 10 “vocal microphones” that are probably more likely to pick up big-bang static and passing ghosts than actual vocals. Or 10 2-in-1 pregnancy tests! Or 10 precision screwdriver kits! Or 10 dubious hair-dye kits! Or any combination of these, and more!

Based on the exchange rate, the equivalent to a Poundshop back in NZ should be the 2 Dollar Shop. The 2 Dollar Shop, however, almost exclusively deals in worthless crap. Kaleidoscopes, mood rings, bags of army men. You won’t find yourself walking out of the there with an armful of TV cabling anytime soon, I can tell you that.   

What I’ve learnt since arriving in the UK is that NZ is a rip-off. I was dimly aware of this already, what with Peter Bills causing an uproar a few years ago with an inflammatory column about NZ’s ridiculous prices, but it’s really struck me now that I’m actually here.

You can pick up 2 litres of milk here for a pound, or roughly NZ$2. Back home, it’s more like $3.50. A smaller country, sells less milk, prices are higher. Makes sense. But milk is a huge industry for NZ, a huge part of the economy. It goes all over the world – it probably produces as much milk as the UK. And yet the domestic market gets a higher price. It’s likely down to the monopoly Fonterra has over the NZ dairy industry. They’re the only one in the game, they set the prices, and there’s only two supermarket chain to barter with.

Britain, on the other hand, has at least 7 supermarket chains, all ready to claw each other’s eyes out in a desperate, blood-soaked grapple for my cash.

Which is why such a thing exists as 17p own-brand cola. Sure, it tastes like severely watered down imitation vanilla essence with an aftertaste of chewed paracetamol – but that’s not really the point. The point is, it cost 17p. At this price, it costs more not to buy it.