Iron-Free Shirts Insult our Intelligence

by The Imaginary Reviewer from the Imaginary Review

My most hated TV commercial goes as follows: A man emerges from what looks like a steamy hotel bathroom wearing a dressing gown. He sees smoke, and runs towards an ironing board in the hotel room. He picks up the steam iron, which has been left sitting on his shirt which, in true slapstick style, now has a big wedge-shaped hole in it from where the iron has burned through. As the foolish man looks despondently at his favourite shirt, the voiceover implores you to buy new Crapola* Brand Wrinkle-Free No-Iron shirts.

Usually by this point I am throwing the nearest potted plant at the television, such is my hatred of this advert.

My problem with this commercial stems from the fact that the agency seems to be implying that no-iron shirts are a good idea because ironing is such a mentally taxing activity. It’s not that ironing is one of the most boring, tedious, shittiest menial tasks there is, no: men need wrinkle-free shirts because they can’t be trusted with a spoon, let alone a steam iron.

“Hey men,” the ad’s makers seem to be saying, “look how difficult it is to iron a shirt! Look how stupid you are! You can’t even iron a shirt properly! You twat! You UTTER TWAT! You probably lack the basic attention span required to follow the complicated storyline of this ad! Why, I bet you stopped watching this ad after several seconds because you were distracted by the sound of an airplane in the sky outside your windows! You’re probably poking yourself in the eye with a pencil right now! Dur dur dur! Look at the stupid man!"

"Oh, and please, buy our shirts.”

Let me say this now: I have never stopped in the middle of ironing an item of clothing to do anything more time-consuming than scratch my balls. And even when I do, I remove the steam iron from the garment in question so as not to end up with a cotton/polyester fireball. Nobody, not even the most ignorant shit-for-brains mouth-breather, stops ironing mid-shirt in order to have a shower. This ad isn’t just unlikely, it’s insulting.

And so, I won’t be buying that particular brand of Wrinkle-Free Shirts for Brainless Room-Temperature-IQ Morons. But I will make a suggestion for their next commercial.

Everyone hates ironing because it’s crap, not because it’s hard. Men hate it because we’re lazy; women hate it because it gets in the way of complaining about how lazy men are. So the ads should reflect this. I say, begin the commercial with a normal, average bloke getting out of bed. He starts getting dressed, but pauses as a gorgeous Victoria’s Secret-style model sits up in the bed, and says seductively, “Frank? Do you have to go so soon?”

The man looks at the camera, smiles and shrugs, while the voice over says: “New Crapola* Brand Wrinkle-free Shirts. They save you ten minutes every morning. How you spend that ten minutes….is up to you”. Fade out to sounds of frantic groaning and frenzied bed-squeaking.

Seriously, the world lost a great advertising executive when I decided to take up reviewing things that don’t exist.

*This is possibly a gap in my memory.