5 posts tagged “swearing”

Quite a lot of the f word in this following segment of bloopers from the 2006 series of Life on Mars, but some of these are very funny. The first, and the last three, are among my favourites. Liz White’s bloopers are rather adorable.

I saw this movie, Sexy Beast, years ago and again last year when staying with my friends Amanda and Paul in Christchurch. It stars Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley. If you are used to Ben Kingsley playing rather dignified roles, this will be a surprise. He plays a psychotic East End hood.
   I was trying to find his ‘No no no no no no no’ line only, but this is the closest YouTube has. Excessive swearing: be warned, and don’t play this around your kids (if you have any).

This video is doing the rounds in France and is the number-one result for searches on Dailymotion for Sarkozy. The story: it’s an agricultural show and President Nicolas Sarkozy turns up. There’s a bloke in the audience who won’t shake the President’s hand, because he says he could get himself dirtied up. The President tells him to ‘Bugger off, you dumb bastard,’ which is about as accurate as I dare make the translation. (Various translations on the ’net differ, especially around the words pauvre con that M. Sarkozy actually utters—it can be as harsh as ‘dumb c***’.)
   I know, his opponents are saying this is not very presidential, and some are crying out that they do not like how President Sarkozy is so “hands-on”. It’s odd: I’d rather my head of state be hands-on, meeting the people, being the Ordinary Bloke.
   I will say that M. Sarkozy’s language could have been a lot better though, but I am willing to bet we antipodeans have a greater stomach for our PMs getting colourful.
   However, our head of state is technically HM Queen Elizabeth II. We may wish for her to be more hands-on, but we only expect that language from her husband.

Last year, I blogged about the above campaign (although Google no longer indexes my blog properly since I switched to new Blogger—ironical, since Blogger is owned by Google—so I can’t show you the link). It was known for its use of the word hell, which I believe Americans took exception to, and the British took exception to bloody. Still, it’s a beautiful compilation of imagery, and one blogger said that if we had had jiggle TV in the 1970s, maybe it was time for jiggle advertising (by the well endowed girl on the beach).
   What got me posting was seeing the below parody made by the chaps at Fair Go, the consumer affairs’ show, of their comparable version from New Zealand. I have not seen Fair Go since, probably, the year they gave the best ad award to the cat-and-bird NZI commercial (‘Maurice was very depressed. What would he do with no TV? You guessed it’) since I never know what time it is on. I think that show was around 1989.
   Still, good to know that Kevin Milne (Fair Go’s own Ken Barlow) and co. are still on form and concocted the below for a laugh.

La pub pour le tourisme australien, et une parodie néo-zélandaise. La version originale australienne a inclu les mots bloody hell: il y avait des problèmes en Grande-Bretagne et aux États-Unis, mais ils sont les parties du discourse en Australie.

In case Americans think I am rude because of the limitations on their network television, some cussing quickies. The following words are acceptable on New Zealand network television and everyday speech before 9 p.m.: asshole, arsehole, bastard, bollocks, bugger (despite its connotations), bullshit …
   Because of American and British television, fanny and fag have entered usage here with dual meanings, though often the British one is preferred.
   About the only one that comes on after 9 p.m. that you don’t hear before is the f word, which makes movies that air at 8.30 p.m. really weird: censored for the first half-hour, then free reign after that.