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May 6, 2005
Near enough is good enough
A few years back, might have been a dozen or more, there were ads on Aussie TV which had an animation of Captain Cook getting half way to Australia and then saying, words to the effect of, "Ah stuff it, who can be buggered going all the way to that place?"
The point of the ads was to say, "What if Capt. Cook", (who supposedly discovered Australia), had said, "near enough is good enough?", where would we all be then eh?
If you were already living here at the time, or your great-great-great-grand uncle was you might say that we'd all be pretty alright thanks Cookie me old china. Even if you weren't related to the original inhabitants you were still left wondering the what the point of running the ads were. They were part of a drive to improve the general character of al Australians, who presumably had been deemed to be lazy fat-arses who needed a pep talk in-order to reach the high level of go-gettedness achived by nations like the US.
Norm, the quintessential fat slob was the poster boy for the
whole campaign. The problem with the whole campaign was that it felt like the people repsonsible for it had, at some point said to themselves, "Eh, that'll do, near enough IS good-a-bloddy-nuff!". I mean the ads said, things like "Life be in it!" and "Give it a go!" and it's spokesman was a self-evidently fat slob. Obviously shouting out, "If you are VERY FAT YOU WILL SOON DIE!" wasn't deemed necessary. That was a bit of overkill, you don't want to scare the punters off, you just want to get them up off their couches and "Give Frisbee a try!", then you can go sit down again.
Posted by IndianInk at 10:52 PM | Comments (1)