Sad news: the Diet Coke bloke is no more. His days of pimping fizzy drinks to drooling women like a shaven meerkat of lust are over, which is sad because he takes with him the reassuringly mid-90s title of “hunk” and leaves a flicky-haired slip of a girl to take up the aspartame-laced mantle. Young Flicky Hair is dithering at the airport, wishing she’d got on a flight. “I should have gone,” she says, dreamily. But wait! Here comes her sassy alter ego telling her to go for it and she decides to catch the next flight. Fuelled by a sip of Diet Coke and a perky Scandi-pop soundtrack, Flicky Hair and her doppelganger get up to all sorts of inadvisable behaviour like flouting airport security and sitting in the front seat of a cab.
Which is quite dull compared to the heyday of the Diet Coke Hunk. After all, he was a man so smouldering he could turn a trip to the vending machine into a debauched hen night, with packs of office-bound women unbuttoning their blouses, shaking their hair loose, and doing that faux-sexy biting-the-lip thing that nobody ever really does in real life. Strong, powerful women of yore spent hours fingering their moistened ringpulls in a perfect bubble of caffeine porn; now they’re so desperate they’ll fork out for a last-minute plane ticket just to get a fumble. And this is empowerment? Flicky Hair can only hope that as she pops the “Please do not disturb” sign on the hotel room door, Diet Coke Hunk is in there putting the needle on the parping Etta James soundtrack that signals some good ol’ fashioned rumpo of the full fat kind.
