Are you forever pressing the blue button on your Sony Bravia TV to remove the annoying iPlayer banner that pops up top right, advertising the red button? Only to have to do it again each time you switch over to a BBC channel.
Well, you might be delighted to hear that there’s a Bravia TV setting you can change to stop it coming up in the first place, so no need to dismiss that pesky banner ever again!
The steps to achieve this are as follows:
Change channels to the channel you want the banner to disappear from e.g. 102 BBC2
Press the settings (cog symbol) button on your remote control
Scroll left to ‘Settings’ and press select (the middle select button with the cross hairs symbol on your remote)
From the Settings page that appears select ‘Channels & Inputs’
Scroll down to ‘Preferences (Channels)’ and press select
Scroll down to ‘Interactive application’ and press select
Scroll down to ‘Application for (CH 102)’ and press select to untoggle (“CH 102” will vary depending on which channel you were originally watching)
That’s it you’re done!
You can repeat the process for each channel you want the pop-up banner removed from (e.g. 101 BBC1).
Alternatively, press select on ‘Enable interactive application’ to toggle off banners for all channels.
You can still use the red button to bring up iPlayer – it’s just the pop-up advertisement of its availability that has been removed.
Why was the original video removed? We can only guess. Maybe it was considered politically incorrect and/or not something the brand wanted to continue to be associated with. Feel free to leave a comment if you know for sure.
The trend was itself started by another trend video, “Boots and a slick back bun” or “Boots and a slicked-back bun”, the original of which remains on Tiktok
Why was the original video so popular? Perhaps the fashion style archetypes described resonated. Certainly, the outfits are commonly seen in London and have become almost a kind of standard uniform for young British girls.
The “lyrics” have become a shorthand to describe a look using a concise and catchy 5-beat formula that can be syncopated.
“Boots and a slicked-back bun” duh duh-duh duh duh duh
“Cowboy boots and a blowy” duh duh duh duh-duh duh-duh
“Sambas and a little red bag”duh-duh duh-duh duh-duh duh duh
The New Zealand skin care brand took the concept and extended it from the sartorial to physical and other attributes.
“Gen Z boss and a mini”
“Itty-bitty titties and a bob”
“Five foot three and a attitude”
“Secret product and a trench [coat]”
“New Frank Green and a sneaky link”
“Fake tan hands and a hoop”
Writers often use character descriptions to create an image of who a person is in the reader’s mind.
Readers/viewers often recognise such characters from their own lives, perhaps because society and families create people whose bundle of traits is so similar they could have emerged from a cookie-cutter or jelly mould.
These viral videos condense such character descriptions in an ultra concise and catchy way, making them easy to understand and process.
Of course everyone is an individual but stereotyping is something all of us do to characterise the information around us into more easily understandable chunks. Stereotyping doesn’t just apply to people but is particularly useful in any domain where there is complexity.
This technique of employing two or three key descriptors for characters is also hugely useful for writers to ensure the characters that gradually take shape in their minds become coherent and then remain consistent.
There are of course other aspects to these videos which might explain why they went viral, including the political, economic, social, legal, technological, and environmental aspects.
Clearly, from the comments at the time, a flavour of which is in the ironic reaction video subsequently released, it ‘triggered’ a lot of people and both the original content and unfiltered honest reactions to it may have connected with viewers and made them feel less isolated in their own life experiences.
GI Chow 