Petra Starke: Not happy, Jan! The golden age of Aussie TV commercials is apparently over

Not happy, Jan! Goodbye Rhonda and Ketut. So long Emperor Nasi Goreng. The golden age of classic Australian TV ads has apparently come to an end, writes Petra Starke.

I blame MasterChef.

Thanks to my new obsession with the remixed and reheated cooking show for the last six weeks, five nights a week and 90 minutes a night, my TV has been stuck on Channel 10.

Not only has this resulted in a chronic case of Pete Helliar overexposure, it means I’ve been forced to watch a lot of commercials. And I mean A LOT of commercials.

Do you know how many commercials there are in a standard broadcast of MasterChef? Neither do I, but I’m gonna guess it’s somewhere around, ooh... 700,000. And at the risk of sounding suspiciously like someone who groans when they get up and regularly uses the phrase “back in my day”: they’re all TOO LOUD.

I don’t know if it’s a sign of me getting older or TV commercials getting more annoying but these days they increasingly have me reaching for the mute button.

Like that one for insurance with the people on horses YELLING and the crowd of people YELLING and everybody YELLING.

Or the one for pork that’s just people yelling “PORK!”. How inventive. I do hope someone won an award for that.

And the milk one with the woman shrieking “EVERYBODY’S FREEEEE!”. (Yes, I know I’ve complained about this before, and I will continue to until that ad is sent back to Satan’s dairy farm from whence it came).

If they’re not loud and annoying, they’re just annoying.

Like the Coles ads with Curtis Stone that pop up every 10 minutes to remind you how much you used to enjoy The Emotions’ Got The Best of My Love, back when it was still a fun disco song and not the eternal nightmarish backdrop to someone shilling marinated chicken pieces.

Or the endlessly repeating one for Bulla ice cream where they say it’s “the creamiest and premiumiest”, which is frankly grounds enough to report it to ACMA.

“Did someone say KFC? No? Did someone say Menulog? No? Did someone say lack of original ideas? Yes – every single ad on Australian TV!”

The thing I’ve been wondering in between MasterChef segments is: when did Australian ads stop being good? Back in my day (see?) Aussie TV ads weren’t just noisy, attention-grabby bits of video designed to be blunt-forced into your cerebellum through endless repetition. They were often miniature pieces of cinema, thoughtfully shot, with plots and characters and a script – and best of all, they were funny!

Remember Emperor Nasi Goreng and his Great Wall to keep the rabbits out of China?

Remember Rhonda and Ketut? That campaign was so adored they turned it into an ongoing soap so we could watch MORE of it!

Remember “G-O, G-G-O?” Remember literally every Yellow Pages ad ever? “Not happy, Jan!” is still one of the funniest lines that’s ever aired on Australian TV – and it was in an ad.

(You know, the internet has been responsible for lots of terrible things in modern life, including the popularisation of eating laundry liquid pods and the rebirth of Nazism, but killing the Yellow Pages and their ads has to be up there.)

Maybe it’s a change in which companies are advertising, maybe it’s fewer ad dollars being spent, or maybe we just lost our mojo (that’s an advertising in-joke, it’s actually quite clever, go ahead and look it up if you like) but somewhere along the line we Aussies mislaid our sense of humour in advertising and replaced it with stupidity and shouting. (Which, come to think of it, is kind of what happened to the internet too.)

Modern Aussie ads? Not happy, Jan!