Eurostar ads: pot-bellied statues playing darts and snooker

[John Ashworth]

Cheeky French Eurostar ads for London Olympics show pot-bellied Greek statues playing darts and snooker

Spoof Greek statues show naked men with beer guts clutching darts and snooker cue

By DANIEL MILLER
PUBLISHED: 09:44 GMT, 15 June 2012 | UPDATED: 11:15 GMT, 15 June 2012
Daily Mail

The French are taking le mickey out of Britons by showing them as pot-bellied darts and snooker players in a Eurostar ad campaign for the Olympics.

The cheeky posters feature two spoof Greek statues of naked men with beer guts pursuing the popular pub sports.
Instead of holding the iconic discus, the figures are clutching darts and a snooker cue. And the usual chiselled physique has been swapped for paunches and man boobs.

And to make them appear absolutely authentic, even sections of the cue and dart, as well as the men's noses and 'other parts', have worn away with erosion.

The posters are aimed at attracting the French to take the high speed train to London 2012 - possibly to poke fun at our Olympic aspirations.

They were designed by Paris ad agency Leg with whom part British-owned games sponsor Eurostar has been working for more than a decade. The ads are the latest in a series that play on French stereotypes of English culture.

Previous ones have featured a redesign of a British banknote displaying Mr Bean in a tiara, a nose-bleeding, redheaded hooligan, shoddy lookalikes of the Beatles and an elderly man dressed up as Queen Elizabeth II.

While we like to portray the French as histrionic, unreliable, treacherous, usually on strike and obsessed with food and sex, they see us in two categories - the traditional bowler hatted brigade whose women wear tweed skirts and head scarves or those with lime green hair and studded noses.

But playing on national stereotypes in advertisements can be a delicate matter - snackmaker Popchips recently had to retract a series of ads featuring a browned up Ashton Kutcher doing a ludicrous Indian accent.

But Leg president Gabriel Gaultier insists the Eurostar ads are in good fun and have been universally well received.
The 'sculptures' were created in digital 3D and based on photographs of overweight, pub-going types.

Mr Gaultier said: 'They are an homage to English popular culture. The public awaits the next ads religiously, wondering 'what will they think up next?'

As for the reaction across the Channel, Mr Gaultier said there has been little because Leg's ads do not appear in England where Eurostar focuses on the means of transportation rather than on what awaits passengers on the other side.

He added: 'High-speed trains are not particularly exotic in France. We are used to it after 30 years. For the English, however, it is still absolutely new.'

Eurostar spokeswoman Catherine Bayles said: 'This new campaign has been created by French advertising agency Leg to celebrate Eurostar's partnership with the London 2012 Games.

'It has been running in France this week - a tongue in cheek campaign playing on the age old Franco British rivalry!'