The Cadbury Creme Beckham

Where has all the treacle toffee gone?

It’s the end of October and the fifth of next month looms large in this house yet still I’ve not found treacle toffee in the shops. Our tradition is to eat treacle toffee on bonfire night but buying treacle toffee this year is almost as difficult as finding the traditional Jimmy Savile mannequin to burn.

The problem we face is that we live in a brand culture and there is no brand ‘treacle’. Supermarkets rarely stock something as old and established as ‘treacle toffee’. Instead, they want to stock familiar modern favourites repackaged for the month. They want to sell me Cadbury Scream Eggs for Halloween…

You might say it is clever marketing but it is also the dreadful bastardisation of multiple traditions. Remember when Easter eggs were just for Easter and would be sold off cheap the Monday after Easter Sunday? Now they’re all year around. Perhaps it made sense to accountants that Cadbury Creme Eggs needed to have 365 day stock levels to justify the costs of the machinery. However, I suspect it’s probably marketing people who knew that brand identification is far more potent than mere tradition. They adapt their products in order to make them suitable for the occasion. You can eat Easter Eggs at Halloween, Christmas, the height of summer and some whiz with a catchphrase gun will put his knee on the back of your neck and fire a catchy slugline into your brain. Suddenly Easter eggs at Halloween make sense. No doubt they’ll soon be available for Black Friday, a consumer holiday which has wormed its way over here from America. Indeed, have you noticed that we seem to have more ‘Days’ than in the past? It’s as if the marketing geeks had realised there were too many large gaps in the year when we weren’t being ordered to buy their crap. Since when did Valentines Day, Father’s Day or Mother’s Day have the same significance as Christmas and Easter?

Yet it’s not just Creme Eggs that have taken over or traditional festivals. Brand recognition is everywhere as if to prove that people are effectively too lazy to think for their selves. You like Mars Bars so Mars sells you the confectionery in every format: large and small, fingers and toffees, ice cream and cake bars. You can wear Mars Bar clothing and carry your lunch in the Mars Bar lunch box inside the Mars Bar rucksack on your back. One Brand to Rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

Novelty and individuality are outmoded in this crass consumer culture. Product lines are converging everywhere. Will Smith not only acts in a film but writes it, sings the theme song, produces the monstrosity, and then franchises out his seed in the form of his largely talentless offspring. Movies are become dominated by the same staple of figures from comic books. Soon Batman will meet Superman. The Avengers brought together difference franchises which will be spun and varied until the Church of Stan Lee stops converting every new born freckle into a DC neophyte. New films can’t get funding but franchises are rebooted at every opportunity. No sooner does Christopher Nolan finish a definitive Batman series than Warner Brothers want to start again.

‘New’ is disappearing from our lexicon or it now simply means ‘more of the same’. The ‘new’ iPad is pretty much like the old ‘iPad’. New chocolate is simply old chocolate given new wrappings. Nobody wants to invest the effort to make new products. Why can’t Cadbury make Creme Skulls for Halloween? Zombie heads might have been more appropriate or even Cadbury Creme Pumpkins. Does it take so little imagination that I can come up with these ideas in the span of writing a sentence? Of course not but that would require retooling of an entire production line. So we have eggs instead, despite their having no significance to the ancient festival of All Hallows Eve. It’s utterly postmodern, utterly calculated and utterly dehumanising.

How easy must it have been to make creme eggs with a slightly different coloured fondant rather than create a new product that people might enjoy? We see it everywhere we look with crossovers. Comparethemeerkat produce the Meerkat toys and books. Don’t invest in a writer you’ve never heard about because you can buy a book written by Jordan whose breasts you’ve previously admired…

Yet it’s not just banal celebrity slime who have their own product ranges. Guillermo del Toro has written and directed some sublimely good films but when he hands a 12 page outline for a novel to a writer with whom he then shares credit, you have to wonder about artistic credibility.

Not that artistic credibility matters. We’ve passed the point where consumers can vote with their feet, wallets or purses. The markets are too large for companies to care. What is one lone voice of dissent when Tesco make pre-tax profits in the first half of 2013 of £1.39bn? I complain about their bike stands and they do nothing because I’m insignificant as you are insignificant unless, of course, you are also a brand. Stephen Fry is a brand. He could change things because he is more recognisable than Tesco. He has real power. Almost as much power as the brand Beckham, though Fry, to his credit, puts it to more sensible use.

Beckham, of course, will apparently sell anything, however tangential it might be to his footballing career. He is refashioning himself as the male modern Britannia, a symbol of Britishness. And Beckham is certainly the perfect fit for this modern Britain. He embodies our culture because he is the ultimate vessel: good looking but empty, devoid of much significance but capable of being filled with any corporate message. He is so boring and bland he can advertise anything that doesn’t require him to open his mouth. Indeed, his horrible nasal whine is to his benefit because it means that he can spend his time brooding in ads with his white teeth and rank ugly tattoos, the golden boy of a gelded generation. He is the Cadbury Creme Egg of celebrities; just an empty impotent shell of sugary milk chocolate. One size fits all. Just slip a nozzle up his arse and fill him with whatever different coloured fondant meaning we want this week.

So has Twitter finally shown the middle classes that the world is ugly?

Back when I was still one of those blue-skied optimists who smiled at kittens and sang Abba hits when walking jauntily down the road, I used to enjoy Twitter as an intellectual game. Writing a funny one liner in 140 characters or less was an enjoyable routine for a year or so. It was akin to doing the daily Sudoku but with a generally funnier outcome. Then the celebrities took over. Twitter was suddenly full of every hacking newspaper columnist, unfunny comedian, and chirpy radio DJ filling the timelines with their awfully privileged banter.

With the arrival of the celebrities, Twitter lost its largely formless state. Before it hit the mainstream, Twitter was like a page of blank paper sprinkled with iron filings. There was still a sense of equality across the Twittersphere. Quality tweeting could attract an audience. After the celebrities landed with their marketing people, PR consultants, and professional social media teams, the situation was magnetised and every individual aligned themselves towards these powerful points of attraction. Twitter was suddenly another version of the real world. There were those people with power and those without and the popularity of the former had nothing to do with the quality of their tweets. Katie Price (aka Jordan) demonstrated that and still does. Her Twitter account is hugely popular, currently approaching two million followers, all waiting for her gems of wisdom such as ‘Yummie full fat milk and cornflakes 3 bowls can't be normal lol but lasts me till lunch time’ (© 2013 Katie Price).

I understand the attraction of celebrity and I guess I’m as susceptible to it as anybody, even if I like to think the people I admire have more about them than plasticised glands and ghost writers. That’s why I also understand the frustration and urge to write something biting towards celebrities I dislike. I would occasionally launch a sharp taunt towards a celebrity such as Peter Andre. Was I trolling? I never saw it that way and if my barbs were sharp they were never needlessly cruel. Yet I can see (and saw) how some unstable characters out there lacked the wits to engage in humorous taunting and took things to an extreme. For some people, violence, threats and intimidation are the only way they can express themselves. I’ve been victim to that plenty of times myself. Comments coming to me through this blog have often been foul, spiteful, and distressing but after a while I guess you become somewhat immune to them.

You might guess, then, that the current furore over Twitter doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Before Twitter got rid of the ability to watch the public Twitter timeline, I’d often sit and gaze the world’s tweets in real time. It’s no wonder they disabled that function because it didn’t take long before you would see how truly bestial we are as a species. I don’t even mean that small percentage of people who are, for want of a better word, ‘bad’. I mean huge segments of our population who demonstrated how illiteracy and stupidity prevail. I began using Twitter believing it a novel way to confine language, encourage pithy expression. I grew to realise that it’s actually the perfect way of expressing our piggish grunts, our infantile nature, our utter slavery to branding, marketing, and celebrity. Reading Twitter’s public timeline was like being trapped inside the mind of one enormous planet-sized imbecile.

Certain self-satisfied middle class commentators now want to censor Twitter because they don’t agree with what Twitter allows people to say. They are suddenly shocked about the world and our human nature which they, as columinists, are supposed to understand better than the rest of us. The debate has quite prominently been about threats of rape, which is understandable. The threats were clearly distressing for the victims. Yet these rape threats have channelled the nature of the debate into a familiar and not so helpful territory. Over at The Guardian, it’s turned into the familiar feminist bell ringing as the usual cowled figures wander the streets crying ‘bring out your misogynists’. The arguments sound tired and familiar. There’s barely an acknowledgement that men find these comments as offensive as women and that women are sometimes as guilty of posting ill-considered and sometimes offensive tweets themselves. (As an aside: the offensive comments left for me on this blog were mainly from women who wished me dead in a variety of unpleasant but imaginative ways. Hard lesson learned: never make jokes about Daniel Radcliffe.)

And that’s the point I wanted to make in my slightly rambling way. This debate shouldn’t be about gender. It’s about who we are as individuals and what we become in that silent inner world we inhabit when we’re sitting at our keyboards and are annoyed by something we read. Twitter is a pure expression of humanity at its very worst. It is the world’s inner monologue in written form: a shameful indictment of what we can be and what we’ve become.