What is it with my blog about the TV recording of the IKEA ad which I posted on 10th March – almost a month ago?
I have been blogging seriously (perhaps that’s the wrong word) since December and I now get fairly healthy hits on my blog but, yesterday, the hits went through the roof and early this morning – between midnight yesterday and 0230 this morning – the IKEA blog on its own got more hits than I normally get in an entire day.
Who is up at 0230 apart from me, burglars, comedians and the incontinent?
The answer seems to be that people were re-Tweeting the link to the blog and, also, I got an e-mail from someone saying “Loved your blog… have passed it around the ad industry”.
Maybe ad men have weak bladders and like to see other ad people score own goals.
The hits went even more apeshit later this morning when people other than incontinent ad men woke up.
The irony is I have still not seen the actual ad itself on broadcast TV – only the version on YouTube.
My friend who went with me to the recording is equally bemused about the number of hits on my blog and clearly – possibly permanently – emotionally scarred by the IKEA recording experience, appears to have turned to hallucinogenic drugs because yesterday he asked me:
“Do you think it was a real ad? I’ve not seen it on TV. You’ve not seen it on TV. They surely can’t be broadcasting a furniture ad on television making a joke about women weeing themselves? Maybe they were just pretending to make an ad for some reason and were filming our reactions to it for some other reason. It can’t have been a real ad.”
“But,” I told him. “It’s IKEA. They’re Swedish. They’re not known for their surreal humour.”
“It just can’t have been real.” my friend replied. “Maybe they were researching something. Maybe it was an experiment of some kind. You were there. Did it look like they were filming a real ad.”
“Well…” I said.
But I’m increasingly pleased I was there.
Someone commented yesterday that they couldn’t understand why the audience at the recording didn’t leave.
It’s a very interesting question indeed.
Partly the answer is, I think, that only people on the ends of rows in audience seating can leave without drawing attention to themselves; partly I guess it is because, if a couple leave, it feels to them that it is they who are are the odd ones out, not the people who stay. Partly it may be that, in a bad situation, you simply hope against hope that the horror will diminish.
I guess the main answer is that there is some strange human urge not to move in awful situations: like rabbits in an oncoming car’s headlights. When people are herded together in large groups in a forest or in a camp and know they are going to be killed, by and large, they don’t run. They walk to their deaths. It’s the Auschwitz Factor. I’m sorry if that offends anyone by trivialising the Holocaust, but it’s true. I know they thought they were going into showers at Auschwitz, but the general principle is true. Given the option of certain death if they stay or probable death if they run, people tend to choose certain death. People in forests dug their own graves and stood on the edge of the pits waiting to be shot.
I once sat through Luchino Visconti’s movie The Damned in the totally full late lamented Hampstead Classic cinema. It was the dullest film I have ever seen in my life and, trust me, I have sat through some dull films. Killer Bitch may have had – errm – “mixed reviews” but one thing it certainly ain’t is dull.
The Damned runs 155 minutes: that’s two hours and a very long 35 minutes. It was so dull that, after about four minutes, I actually started to time how long it would be before someone in the movie went into an exterior scene. But I sat through the whole godawful 155 minutes. My problem was I was in the middle of the front row in the balcony and, being British, I didn’t want to cause chaos and draw attention to myself by leaving and getting people to stand up all the way along the row.
It was also a revelation to see how anyone could make a film with mass murder, rape, orgies, Nazis, nudity and every excess you can possibly imagine into such a bum-numbingly dull movie.
Alright, The Damned is the second dullest movie I have ever seen. I actually DID walk out of Football as Never Before (Fußball wie noch nie) after about 40 minutes of tedium. There are limits which even I have.
But, in general, after a certain time has passed, people will sit through something really bad until the bitter end. And ‘bad’ can be good in a masochistic way.
When a really truly bad bad bad comedian is on stage, it draws other comedians who huddle together at the back of the room to watch the car crash of a performance happening in front of their eyes.
In 1980, Peter O’Toole appeared in a stage production of Macbeth at the Old Vic in London which was said to be so awful that people queued there and around the country to see it. I tried to buy a ticket at the time. You couldn’t get one anywhere. It was a box office smash.
As someone who has been involved in live audience shows for TV and for stage – and who spent 20+ years making TV promotions – I was fascinated at the IKEA ad recording to see how inept the production could get and if there were any way they could manage to pull the thing together.
I wanted to see the whole ghastly thing through to the end in case there was any glorious climax where the production team pulled something unexpected out of an invisible hat or the audience turned on the production team, tore them limb from limb and ate their entrails with tomato ketchup (not that there was any tomato ketchup).
After wasting a certain amount of time, you have to calculate if spending more time may result in a lower waste-per-minute average. How that is calculated will probably be studied by some university academic on a £1 million grant. If you hear of that happening, please tell me as I’d like to share a bit of that dosh and make my IKEA ad time worthwhile.
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 
I entirely sympathise with your experience at the IKEA advert recording. Years back, I went to see a sitcom called ‘Grownups’ recorded at the BBC. No, you wouldn’t remember it… when it was eventually broadcast, it was buried after 11pm in the schedules.
The recording of a half hour comedy show (with about ten minutes of pre-recorded outside broadcast shown on the monitors) took around four hours. Worse still, much as you’ve described, we had to watch several scenes recorded multiple times from different angles – because the set they’d constructed, of a living room, didn’t have any open walls. They had to keep tearing down parts of it to allow the cameras to peep in!
Also, it was terrifyingly, arm-bitingly unfunny. The premise of the episode I saw recorded was that one of the male characters in the show had difficulty meeting women, but had met a lovely girl. The denouement of the episode was the revelation that she had died in an accident at a jam factory. Clearly, the expectation was that the audience would be rolling in the aisles with barely contained laughter… but after four bladder-busting hours of watching walls constructed and reconstructed, we didn’t find it particularly amusing.
I distinctly remember the floor manager yelling to the audience “How much did you pay for these tickets?” and someone yelling back “They were free”. This prompted him to yell back, “So why don’t you laugh, for fuck’s sake?”
Pleasingly, a group of students on the back row all yelled back in unison, “Because it’s not fucking funny,” and I recall that this led to a rebellious exodus of audience members.
I’ve learned my lesson – I only go to see panel shows or live recordings now!