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After the Ban: What Happened to Tony the Tiger and Friends?

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It’s exactly one year since the government banned all brand mascots from appearing on the packaging of sugary breakfast cereals marketed at children. The ban also covered advertising, ensuring that iconic characters like Tony the Tiger and the Honey-Monster – beloved of the breakfast table for decades – would never be seen by children again, except maybe in old photographs or on-line shrines.

While it could be – and frequently is – argued that the ban was good for the hearts and waistlines of our nation’s children, it had an undeniably devastating economic and psycho-social impact on the brand mascot community, many of whom have struggled to pick up the pieces of their lives and careers.

Cecil in happier times.

Tony the Tiger – real name Cecil T. Entwistle – is perhaps the most vocal member of the ‘Breakfast Club’. I met him at a Soho bar at 11 o’clock in the morning to discuss how he’d coped since the ban. He was already drunk. Truth be told, he’s drunk a lot these days – just pick up any copy of The Sun or Heat magazine to see the proof of that – but this time he had perhaps some small justification for his behaviour: he’d just settled his fifth divorce.

“Do you want to know what’s Frostie?” he asked with a caustic grin. “That bitch’s mother. Good fucking riddance to both of them.” He downed a gin & tonic. “I hear she’s fucking the Coco Pops’ monkey now…” This seemed to amuse him greatly, and he started singing his old rival’s TV ad jingle: “I guess she’d rather have a blow of Coco’s cock.”

He gave a sad little laugh, picked up another G&T, swirled it around, and then downed it, too. “You can BET that little fucker turns the milk chocolatey.”

He downed another. Then another. Then another, before spinning down memory lane like a tornado.

Coco the Monkey: shagger

“See, I had it all, man. Money, power, pussy on tap – I’m talking primo, free-range jungle pussy: lions, tigers, bears, Dorothy, the little dog… you name it. I had a platinum litter box, Versace tail-caps, balls of wool as big as buses, open-top fish tanks with genetically-modified basking sharks in them – man, they were fucking delicious. I could scratch where I liked, piss where I liked, lick my own balls whenever I liked – and, boy, do I like doing that. Man, it was grrrrrrrr…”

With a sudden and terrifying ferocity he threw a glass across the room, shattering it against a wall. “I can’t even say my own CATCHPHRASE any more, can you believe this shit? Covert advertising!! Covert advertising my hairy orange arse!”

Tony brought a clenched paw down hard on the table. “They take my face off the fucking boxes, and GUESS WHAT? The kids are STILL fat cunts!”

Tony Tiger was probably the worst hit financially and professionally by the ban. A matter of hours after the ‘Tigers and Monkeys on Boxes and That’ 2018 Act came into force, Tony gave a heated interview to the BBC, at the climax of which he asked: “What am I going to do now? Work in a fucking bank?”

He now works in a bank.

Or rather he did. Later on the day of our interview I learned that he’d been fired from his position as clerk for stealing stationery, and eating his line manager. He’s now waiting to hear if he’s been accepted for the next series of Big Brother.

By mid-afternoon on the day of our interview Tony was alternating between sobbing into his hands, and ranting that Jamie Oliver was a Jewish conspiracy. As I walked through the door of the pub into the daylight beyond I left him with a karaoke mic gripped in his paw, shouting ‘GGGGGGGRRRRRREEEEEEEAAAAAAAAATTTTTTT!’ into it over and over again as the words to ‘Sweet Caroline’ flashed up on a giant screen behind him.

I pity him. But his lot is a pleasant one compared to those of some of his contemporaries.

Of all the ‘Breakfast Club’ mascots, Honey Monster was the one who seemed to accept the end of his career with the most grace and the least rancour. He had options. For a time afterwards he worked as Boris Johnson’s body-double, but was fired for being too competent and handsome. He also enjoyed critical and commercial success with his autobiography, ‘Would Still Taste as Sweet’, becoming a darling of the talk-show circuit. He dated both the Nesquik Bunny and Count Chocula, releasing hit singles with both of them. No matter what he turned his hand to, his intelligence, wit and playfulness shone through. Perhaps as a consequence, no-one realised just how lost and shattered the Honey Monster was at his core, and by the time they did it was too late: not just for Honey Monster, but for his victims, too.

In January last year he suffered a psychotic break while at a reunion party. During a ten minute rampage he snapped the necks of Snap and Pop, eviscerated the Lucky Charms’ leprechaun, and battered the Milky Bar Kid to death. When police arrived at the scene they found Honey Monster sitting calmly in an armchair drenched in blood. When asked to explain what had happened, he just shrugged and said: “The Milky Bar Kid is on me.”

Professor Weeto as he looks today.

When detectives investigated Honey Monster’s house they found over 20,000 pictures and photographs of Jamie Oliver, all with the eyes cut out. Well-known celebrity psychiatrist Professor Weeto appeared as a defence witness at the trial. He said that in his professional opinion, each of Honey’s victims had been a proxy for Jamie Oliver – the moon-faced chef who’d been instrumental in bringing the era of the brand mascots to an ignominious end. Weeto then appealed to the jury to acquit the Honey Monster on the grounds that Jamie Oliver ‘was a total fucking arse-piece.’

They didn’t listen. Weeto later said: “It’s hard to convince people a defendant isn’t a monster when his name literally has ‘Monster’ in it.”

Could Hioney Monster be described as a ‘cereal killer’? I asked him.

“Fuck off,” he replied.

Honey Monster was sentenced to life imprisonment in HMP Glen Michael, where he now spends his days in an underground isolation cell behind an impenetrable Plexiglas wall, reading, thinking and shitting in a bucket. When I met him he was in a characteristically loquacious mood.

“Sugar has become emblematic of the struggle against freedom,” he began. “That sweet, refined nectar is nothing less than a stand-in for our souls. If we lose our right to imbibe sweetness and to impart it to others, then we lose ourselves. We lose control. We, the cereal mascots, were painted as harbingers of corruption, enemies of youth, monsters, and we were summarily executed for our crimes by that taste-bud tyrant who sits upon his throne in the hypocritical heaven of his rich man’s paradise. I used to be so angry about what he did, but thankfully I’m at peace with it now.”

The person you described there, I asked. Do you mean Jamie Oliver?

The Honey Monster reached inside his pants, shat violently on his hands and clapped twelve times, sending foul fireworks of faeces shooting into the air, into his mouth and everything. He rubbed some of the slimy brown mixture into his eyes, before nodding calmly.

“That’s the fella, yeah.”

Oliver’s luxury Ivory Tower

I wanted to ask Jamie Oliver if he felt responsible for what had happened to the mascots. We met on the top floor of his ivory tower, in a room shaped like a giant quinoa and spinach patty. Dark storm clouds pushed against the curvature of the window. Now and then a flickering tongue of lightning would pierce the gloom, lighting up the clouds like electrocuted jellyfish.

Oliver stood with his arms folded against his chest, a cloak of organically-sourced hemp billowing around his body thanks to the air blasting up through powerful jets he’d had installed around the room for that express purpose. No small wonder that Jamie Oliver has won the prestigious ‘Most Pretentious Cunt in the World’ award six-years-running.

“Do I feel… responsible?” he asked himself, re-positioning himself as the interviewer. “DOES A BOOT FEEL RESPONSIBLE FOR SQUISHING AN ANT?”

Tragic

I repeated the question. He walked up to the window, and gazed out over the clouds. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time.”

I pointed out that I hadn’t actually said anybody’s name. He turned to face me with hatred in his eyes.

“There will be NO food in the future. Only air that’s been filtered through a free-range hen’s lungs, and scented with jasmine. I HAVE SPOKEN.”

I made my excuses to terminate the interview and started walking towards the lift. Oliver rushed over and grabbed me by the arm.

“Mate, you don’t have any Mars Bars or Turkey Twizzlers on you, do you? I’m fucking starving.”

I was glad to be leaving this spaghetti junction of human and cartoon misery behind me. When I was perhaps half a mile distant from Jamie Oliver’s tower, I turned around and looked at it. I couldn’t help but reflect that the moral high ground is an incredibly lonely place. Few have escaped the brutal domino effect of the mascot ban, even its own architect, who has been left in a fugue of madness and low blood-sugar.

All stories, however tragic, usually have at least one happy ending, and this one is no exception. Crackle – lucky to have left his encounter with the Honey Monster with his life – has risen Phoenix-like from the flames of death and loss to embrace something of a career renaissance. He’s going to be presenting Britain’s Got Talent alongside Declan Donnelly.

“Crackle and Dec,” he smiled, “Who would have thought it?”

Dec shoved him. “Dec and Crackle, you little cunt.”

The Recipe for Kitchen Nightmares US

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Gordon Ramsey Kitchen Nightmares

I know Kitchen Nightmares is a heavily-manufactured, manipulative piece of reality TV guff, but I can’t help but love it. I also can’t help but notice how each episode is constructed pretty much identically. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. But you still watch them all, because they’re immensely entertaining. God bless you, Ramsey, you angry little shit. Here’s how things go down: every single time.

  • Ramsay arrives at the restaurant, and makes some bitchy comments about the decor/menu/the discovery of a rat on the doorstep.
  • The owner tells Ramsay that the restaurant is losing money, which they can’t understand because the food is awesome. Ramsay’s concerned frown and receptive eyes betray the fact that within the hour he’ll have them in tears after shouting at them like they’re the unwanted step-child of a second marriage.
  • Ramsay orders three items from the menu, and declares each in turn the worst dogshit he’s ever tasted in his life. The serving waitress agrees with Ramsay’s assessment, and adds that the owner, her employer, is a waste of space as a human being, and a terrible manager. She’s pretty sure the owner won’t mind her honesty once the show is broadcast.
  • Ramsay rampages into the kitchen and discovers a rotting corpse beside the pizza oven. The owner gets defensive and says, ‘What’s your problem? That’s our mascot: Davey.’ Ramsay then discovers that none of the food is fresh, and all of it is kept in plastic bags beside a heater, next to a cardboard box filled with arsenic and rat shit.
  • Ramsey’s jaw muscles go into over-drive as he unleashes a volley of vile swear words at the owner. The words are bleeped so we viewers are spared the horror, but Ramsey’s such a clever curser that even the rhythm of his bleeps spells out a verbal attack in Morse Code. The owner sulks like a baby, and then tries to blame the staff/their partner/the Norse God Thor for how shit they now realise their restaurant is.
  • Ramsey gathers all of the staff together. He itemises the worst things about the restaurant: the Chef’s Specials written in dust on the wall; the fact that semen is an ingredient of the clam chowder; the twenty-three cats that live in the dining room. He then says ‘bland’ and ‘no passion’ sixty-three times whilst jerking his finger around like a conductor having a stroke. The chef says he was only following orders and blames the owner for everything, including 9/11. The chef goes on to confess that he would rather brush his teeth with bird shit and gargle a vial of AIDS than eat the diseased muck his kitchen serves to customers. ‘Anyway,’ says the chef, ‘I’m a bricklayer and I don’t even like cooking.’ He further confesses that ‘he’s never heard of eggs before.’ Ramsey stares at the chef like the chef’s just sharted on a child, and then calls him a c***.
  • The owner threatens to kill the chef and then accuses the staff of being lazy thieves who spend their time texting instead of working. In fact, it’s so bad that they text the customers asking for their orders, and then text these to the chef, who promptly ignores them. A mouthy Polish waitress tells Ramsey that the owner spends every night crying at the bar, cradling his dead mum’s ashes and throwing olives at customers. The owner throws an olive at her, but a beef olive this time. The rest of the staff just sit there smiling and blinking because they’ve just arrived from Puerto Rico and can’t speak English yet. Ramsey tells them all to fuck off, and storms out.
  • Ramsey observes a typical night at the restaurant. The owner thinks, ‘This is my chance to show that British bastard how awesome my business is.’ We all think: ‘This show’s not called Kitchen Awesomeness, you fool.’ Lots of customers pour in because they want to be on TV. They agree that each dish on the menu is dogshit, and send everything back. A feral cat jumps up and steals some salmon from a customer’s plate, which is snatched from its mouth by a rat. The rat gets involved in a salmon-related mouth tug-of-war with a cockroach, which is only ended when a waiter crushes them both under his heel. The waiter places their fresh remains on a plate and serves it to another customer. He drizzles some sauce over it and says it’s their ‘Vermin of the Day.’ Ramsey rustles up a smile that conveys both smugness and hatred.
  • In the kitchen, Ramsey sees the chef vomiting over a breast of chicken, and then chucking it straight into the frying pan. Ramsey goes bat-shit mental, and the chef just shrugs, and then scratches his balls. With the chicken. The owner, too pissed by now to walk, starts crying because he can’t live up to his dead parent’s restaurant-running standards/is about to lose his marriage/can’t afford to keep his business going/it’ll make good TV.
  • Ramsey screams, ‘Stop what you’re doing! I’m shutting this kitchen down! You’re going to bloody kill someone.’ Sure enough, a customer keels over into a bowl of spunky clam chowder. The owner drags the customer’s corpse into the kitchen and puts it next to Davey.
  • The next day the entire staff watches a film on a giant cinema screen. It features every single person in town telling them how shit their restaurant is, and how much of a cock the owner is. The owner either a) cries and vows not to be such a cock in future or b) says it’s a Jewish conspiracy.
  • Ramsey gets the set designers from Prisoner Cell Block H to revamp the restaurant. Then he devises a new menu and cooks up some samples. Every dish is now ‘rustic.’ When Ramsey uses the word ‘rustic’ we know he really means ‘microscopically tiny portions at double the price.’ The staff are like, ‘Wow, these taste so good it’s like a world-class chef made them.’ Uh-huh. Because they were. By now the audience know that there’s zero chance Chef Cum Chowder is going to be able to match that standard once Ramsey buggers off.
  • Despite some before-the-last-ad-break editing that suggests relaunch night is going to be a disaster – it’s not. Well, we can’t have Ramsey’s reputation wrecked by a bunch of filthy plebs. Ramsey tells them they achieved it by themselves, and should be proud, even though they clearly didn’t, and they shouldn’t. Ramsey hugs them all, which is tense and unnerving, like watching a cobra giving somebody a hug.
  • Ramsey strides outside and gives an awkward recap to the audience, during which he swishes his finger like it’s a fencing sword, and keeps jerking his gaze down to the ground and back up at the camera again like a serial killer battling ADHD.
  • The restaurant closes down.