Jazz FM / Marks & Spencer Advent Calendar

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking ‘this title sounds a lot like one of them mental pages in Viz.’ I remember them well. The Elvis Presley Dambusters Clock Plate of Tutankhamun and such like. It is, but not as interesting. Or clever or funny. Actually, it isn’t at all like any of those.

The premise is simple. Open a door and enter a competition a day for 25 days. I know. Advent calendars have 24 doors. Don’t shoot the messenger. Anyway, they were all wine prizes. Livers set to ‘Shane MacGowan’. The issue I had with this was that I had flagged up in good time that I’d done this type of thing for Magic and Brent Cross a couple of years ago, so if they wanted a similar thing I could reskin it and use that and they didn’t really say anything about it. I didn’t fully realise the world of pain I was entering.

For starters, reskinning something can often be easy in principle but very time consuming to undertake. This was one of them. Thinking logically, there are still going to be 25 separate prizes, whatever happens. That’s a lot of stuff to hack through. They didn’t think about it logically and only decided it was a goer three days before the first of December. Cheers for that. The pi√®ce de r√©sistance; rather than the Jazz FM account manager going ‘look folks, we’re short on time so this is what’s going to happen…’, they effectively flopped their balls in a cup and let M&S’s colossal bank of on-brand PowerTwats™ run riot over everything, pissing about with a million different layouts and colour schemes and trying to modify the functionality. NO. This is a reskin of something that already exists. Stop meddling with how it works and get me some wine content like you’re supposed to be doing PLZ THX.

Three eighteen hour days later it just about got done. I swore I’d boycott M&S after the experience but them falafels draw me in like a magnet.