The dullest man I've ever met isn't actually ex-England footballer Michael Owen
But he has read his autobiography. And fuck all else.
The dullest man I’ve ever met was a Scouser studying business at Sheffield Hallam University. He was so dull, his (self-appointed) nickname was literally just “Scouse.1”
He was dull in the way some people just are. His favourite film was Spider-Man 2, his favourite pizza topping was cheese, his favourite beer was Fosters, he said “LIVING THE DREAM” with alarming regularity.
And he proudly claimed to have only ever read two books. Both of them autobiographies of ex-Liverpool footballers.
No wonder talking to him was like pulling teeth. We’re talking about a man of such staggering incuriosity that there’s a 50% chance the best book he’d ever read was “Michael Owen: Off the Record” by famous incurious dullard Michael Owen.
If you only read shit like football autobiographies, you’re going to end up as an incredibly boring man. Which is just one of the things that crossed my mind as I re-read ex-England fullback Stuart Pearce’s autobiography “Psycho” last week.
In it, the eponymous Psycho explains that he picked an incredibly strong lineup for his first game as Forest player-manager, and excitedly showed it to his Mrs. A woman with precisely zero experience as a footballer or football manager.
“You’ve not picked a goalkeeper, love.” was her withering reply.
However many hundreds of games for Forest and England and whoever else, and he’d forgotten to pick a goalkeeper.
Is this a roundabout way for me to segue into a confession like “I forgot to put a single call-to-action button into a twelve page copy deck once, even though I’ve been doing this for 15 years?”
Would it’ve finished with a takeaway like “even if you’ve done something forever, you can always make stupid mistakes, so read it back and have someone else check too.”
Who knows. “Scouse” certainly doesn’t. Because doesn’t read anything. The boring fuck.
This is mint - I think - the website of an Altrincham PPC company
This is copy from Dark Horse’s website. They’re a PPC company in Altrincham. If you’ve never been to Alty, it’s quite a nice middle-class suburb. There’s a market with fresh flowers and £8 cheese toasties. You can buy Trappist Ales and artisan honey. It’s not quite the neon noir dystopia presented here.
But that’s by the by. The Dark Horse website might be absolutely mint. It might be a perfect example of committing to a tone of voice as your point of difference, and using that to skewer the competition in an industry dominated by hollow promises and shattered dreams.
As a copywriter, I think the true-crime-Tumblr-meets-Twin-Peaks-fanfic approach to copy here is just spot on. And that the website design really compliments and elevates the whole thing.
But I showed it to my Mrs, who’s a big fan of true crime sort of stuff.
“It’s florid and up its own arse, love” was her withering reply.
My nickname in halls, by contrast, was “Misery Arse.” It wasn’t ironic.