Conquistador Coffee

I’ve had the managing director of Conquistador to see me this morning and he’s very unhappy with your campaign. Very unhappy. In fact, he’s shot himself.

Short and sweet, this. But don’t worry, the levels of insanity don’t suffer because of it. The sketch sees John Cleese as an advertising agency boss, lambasting Eric Idle for obliterating Conquistador Coffee’s reputation with a succession of disasterous ad campaigns. Notably comparing the product to vomit, offering a deceased canine for every jar purchased and claiming it caused various unsettling diseases. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense but we’re here now so ah well.

The cleverest thing by far is the fact that Idle’s character is called ‘S. Frog’, which he reminds Cleese of every time he mentions his name. Which you just think is then being weird. Yet when you look at the script, you can see that he’s actually saying words that are phonetically letters as well – ‘ah, Frog’ (R. Frog), ‘why, Frog?’ (Y. Frog), ‘I want to have a word with you, Frog’ (U. Frog) and so on.

The logo is fairly obvious if you’ve ever been to a shop in your life. Any shop. There will be one of these nearby. It’s not Starbucks, let’s put it like that. So riffing on that with a bit of Conquistador helmet avec plume. That’s French, not Spanish. Or Portuguese. Did the Iberian lads team up when they were doing their pillaging? I can’t remember. Probably not.

Whether they did or didn’t, I personally can’t do coffee with the caffeine anymore as it gives me the shakes too much. I don’t even have real milk in it. I can almost feel the rage in you coming through the screen.