Halifax: Villains

[originally published here and in print copies of gair rhydd such as this]


The point of an advert is to make people want to buy your product, to believe in your company. Not to make everyone within smashing distance of a television set take up their hammers and aim. That memo obviously bypassed Halifax.

It all started back in 2000 with Howard. Howard Brown, to use his full name; you probably knew him as something more along the lines of ‘that irritating twat off of the telly’.

Loveable Howard, singing like a sex bomb about how he’d give you extra. And it didn’t stop there, oh no; Howard was then allowed to bring some of his friends along for the ride. They were all sailing away to the happy land of cheap mortgages and and expontentially growing savings. Hah, they were wrong there. And not just in the fact that they were trying to use a building as a boat.

For a while, you thought it was okay to turn on the TV again – a bit like the aftermath of Jaws. Howard and co. had sailed away; the Bad Thing was over. Maybe you even got lulled into a false sense of security by that fun Barclays advert with the waterslide. Then it started again.

The latest Halifax advert has gone back to the normal ‘bank advert formula’. But it’s still excecrable, because now they’re using Bright Eyes as their soundtrack. My blood nearly began to spurt from my ears, but I eventually realised that it could have been worse – at least Howard ‘I sometimes feel like a popstar’ Brown wasn’t involved.

One can only assume that with the current recession, they can’t afford to pay their staff salaries for being both bankers and sham karaoke laughingstocks. Thank God for small mercies, eh?

No wonder the banks are so unpopular these days.


On the plus side, enjoy the original, untarnished Bright Eyes song: