Air Mingus

So you are a document burner, right? This week I present ‘Document Burning’, Reeves. There is a difference.

We’ll go design first on this one, as that’s fairly obvious. And we’re looking at an Irish airline that isn’t Ryanair. The first word ‘aer’ means ‘air’ (shocker) in Irish and ‘lingus’ is an Anglicised version of ‘loingeas’, meaning ‘fleet’. So ‘air fleet’. Knocked it out of the park, lads. As the introduction of the word ‘Mingus’ kind of removes a lot of the Irishness, I’ve taken it back to ‘air’ here because why not. The colour scheme is retained though, so everybody’s happy.

In the bit (from series one, episode three), Vic’s nemesis Graham Lister unveils a new act on Novelty Island titled ‘Document Burning’. Said act features Lister setting fire to an education certificate owned by boxer Lloyd Honeyghan, a passport belonging to Alan Whicker and Vic’s plane tickets to Barbados. What’s weird about it, is the tickets appear to be enclosed in some kind of red envelope and bear no resemblance to any iteration of Aer Lingus’ logo and branding.

So what is the Mingus bit all about? I can’t be 100% sure, but presumably it’s a reference to the sadly missed jazz legend Charles Mingus. For the uninitiated, Mingus played the double bass and the squiggly thing over the lettering is an attempt at something abstract representing flight utilising the shapes used to indicate a bass clef on a musical staff. The shape previously being a shamrock (for obvious reasons).

But you never know with these two. It could just be that it sounds a bit like Swedish pancake pushers Findus.