Great BBC “Penguins” spot for April fools, promoting the BBC’s marvellous iPlayer. But watching it on the iPlayer itself just highlighted something again that had really bugged me when it first appeared last year. Here’s the final frame as it appears at the end of all broadcast ads, screenshot from the iPlayer itself, hence the quality:

…and here’s the tagline as it appears in the top right of the site:

The comma-free (and all upper case) broadcast version makes the most grammatical sense, but the web version isn’t actually wrong, it’s just had its sense changed. So whereas on telly it says “Our content is unmissable and the iPlayer makes it harder to miss”, online it seems to mean “We make unmissable content – that fact is unmissable”, thus completely missing the clever wordplay element specific to the on-demand nature of the iPlayer. It’s a clever line without the comma.

April 2nd, 2008 by Ad.
It's all about the stuff and nonsense, telly | No Comments »