Advert Watching: Cillit Bang

Ahh, a good advert to rip to shreds. It's one that's come under quite a lot of scrutiny before so this is my chance to shine. Like an old penny?

So here we are. Barry Scott and his lady friend Jill, a stereotypical housewife who has a task on her hands (ironically, it's not getting rid of Barry; he's actually been invited and not broken in). Although if I was directing this advert, I'd have called her Penny, just to be ironic. So I will refer to her as Penny even though in the actual commercial, she's called Jill. You'll just have to pretend. Anyway, we see the pair with bottles of Cillit Bang; the clean-everything detergent. It's the pink bottle we're focusing on today, the others, we have to assume are totally different products for different jobs. Although for all we could know, they could do exactly as the one we're looking at: Cillit Bang Power Grime and Lime. It cleans (or so it claims) limescale, rust, ground in dirt and oh my god what is that bath covered in?


According to Penny (Jill), this bath was the wrong doing of her kids. Yeah, and I'm George Clooney. If social services saw this, I'm pretty sure they'll take them away from her. I mean, whoever lets their bath get to a state like this really should be using Cillit Bang on themselves rather than limescale encrusted taps. Either that or this bath isn't being used as a bath. I don't know about you but whatever it is that surrounds that bath, it must have been really thick to leave that sort of ring around the edge. Like custard or something.


Roundabouts now, Penny looks like she's going to be asking quite a few questions about Barry Scott and his incredible grime busting abilities. Questions like:
-What is a Cillit?
-What makes it go bang?
-Is it full of Nitroglycerin?
-What are the other products you placed on my work surface?
-Are they just the same just with different coloured labels?
-Is Barry Scott your real name?
-Why do you do tests on Pennies? (See, it makes the joke easier)
-Do you have some strange obsession with really clean coinage?

But obviously, before Penny gets to ask any of these, he pulls out - yep, you guessed it - A dirty penny (coin).

And now they've got rid of the Cillit Bang bottles and replaced with another fish tank. What is it with cleaning products and fish tanks? We've already seen that the product works on what it's supposed to clean so why does Barry Scott, if that is his real name, have to better himself. We know. It works! Wrap up the advert and go home! Stop cleaning coins*. But we have to let him do this. He claims it's his old favourite. Like a magician, he then places the coin in the cherryade, I mean, Cillit Bang Power Lime and Grime, and hey presto: a bad magic trick. Penny (lady) then says that he loves that one in a so not wooden or sarcastic tone at all. The screen even wipes across so we don't know if the experiment actually worked. It's not reliable enough. I think he's having us on, personally. Have a look at him and ask yourself if he's a trusted man.

Don't let the mug shot fool you. A quick internet search tells us Barry Scott is a fraud. He's not called Barry Scott at all. He's called Neil Burgess. You can tell. Both his names in his name are first names. Barry and Scott. That no where near an intelligent name for a character. You can't take them two names seriously. Barry was one of the Chuckle Brothers. And as for Scott...well I've looked through Wikipedia's comprehensive list of people with Scott in their names (and there is a lot) and I only know a couple. Not many though. Even bizarrely, Barry doesn't even get a mention. But since he's not giving us his real name, how can we trust him that Cillit Bang works too. Or even if them other bottles were as important as the Power Grime and Lime and Grime.

*Actually, after doing a bit of research on the internet (after looking at people with the name Scott in their name), the Cillit Bang website says this...

Quite clearly in that list of various materials, it says copper. Pennies (coins again) are made with copper. It's why they're called "coppers." It looks like Barry/Neil/Whoever he say he is, hasn't been in doubt about this and read the label on the bottle. They do however suggest you use Brasso on brass!



Bang! And...oh...it's exploded