I'm a Britbonger and have noticed an insidious trend in advertising recently in my country. People have made a big deal before about the massive overrepresentation of black and brown people in advertisements aimed at an audience in a country that is 81.7% white, with only 9.3% Asian and 4.0% black people living in it (it's genuinely quite comical at times - you'd think couples in Great Britain were almost entirely interracial, if you judged society purely on how rare it is to see a couple where both partners are the same race on television!), but I'm looking to talk about something a bit less obvious.
What I call the niggerisation of voiceovers.
The first place I noticed this phenomenon was in the Bulldog Razor advert, where a bulldog with a bizarrely Caribbean-influenced roadman accent implores 'men of duh werrld' to get a 'noo ray-zaaaah'.
Then, I saw it again, in an advert for Experian, where a CGI chameleon with a similar accent tells me to try their website for credit card deals. "Das riiiiiight!"
Then I heard another advert on the radio today for Pepsi Max, again, that same horrendous fucking chimp accent, with three of the fucking treeswingers shouting "MAKE IT BETTAAAAH!!" at me.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think we should go back to the old days where to be on television one had to talk all proper with Received Pronunciation and all that shit, and I don't mind hearing say, the soft Sheffield tones of Sean Bean trying to flog me O2 vouchers or whatever, but compare that to this obnoxious fucking Brixton monkey jabber, which is loud, shrill and honestly quite irritating to listen to. Like, these people sound like fucking Jar Jar Binks. If I imitated that accent, people would call me a racist, but it's literally how these people fucking talk.
