The Girl Who Doesn’t Get Enough Screen Time

Girls Aloud – an okay, pretty generic girl band. But wait! Who’s that girl they’re sticking on the end and trying to make us not look at?

Mmmm, Nicola.

It’s Nicola Roberts! The girl they claim is ‘the ugly one’. No, really. Let’s take a look at the rest of them, shall we?

Ol� One-Eye
She’s only allowed to have one eye visible at a time.
It’s in her contract and everything.

Oh dear lord no!
The ‘fit’ one. Allegedly. Married a footballer, so she must be a real classy lady.

I used to work with a girl who looked a lot like this.
This girl’s got plenty of time for singing.
Just as soon as she finishes her homework.

Er� nice bra.
Somebody told her that wearing just a bra was glamourous.
Wrong kind of ‘glamour’, love.

It’s pretty obvious where the ‘ugly one’ claims are coming from – the other, odd-looking girls. And it’s annoying me that she doesn’t get enough screen time in their music videos. Let’s take, for example, the video to their first hit, Sound of the Underground. It’s 2:54 long. 174 seconds, more than half of them dedicated to close-ups on individual singers. So you’d expect there to be at least 17 seconds of close-ups of the lovely Nicola, wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be wrong. There’s ten seconds, maybe eleven. And I’m counting two-shots, where one of the other girls is sharing the frame. (Nobody else gets that treatment.) For the first thirty seconds or so, the video shows us a four-piece group, with the ginger one mostly pushed out of frame (and on the left, where most people won’t notice, too!).

Now you know me, folks – I’m not one to sit around just moaning when something constructive can be done to fix the situation. And when I started this article I intended to correct this injustice by making my own music video, using all the video footage I could get of the lovely Nicola and creating a sort of a montage homage. (Arf.) So I ‘acquired’ about two and a half gigabytes of music videos and began snipping away. In the end I was left with about a minute’s worth of material. Not even enough for one song.

Mmmm, Nicola. Again.

In conclusion, Nicola Roberts is lovely, and Girls Aloud’s music video directors are terrible people who should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

5 Comments

  1. Oh, if were only those few minutes! The hours of ‘music’ I’ve endured for you, our beloved reader! And with the comet mere years away, too!

    Y’know, one day I’m going to have review about a thousand games, all in one day. The things I do to put off the inevitable…

  2. the picture of the girl with the “1 eye contract” and the other 1 with the comment about homework is the same girl! also the 1 about marrying a footballer is the wrong pic. Before you start writing opinions about something it would be advisable to do some research before hand! =S

  3. A mere bagatelle, my dear. I care not one jot for the other four who are clogging up the videos – I only have eyes for Nicola. And as I mentioned in the article, it was going to have a very different ending, with a montage dedicated to her – only there wasn’t enough material in about thirty videos to put one together.

    And as for doing some research – I’m sure that any long-time reader of this fine periodical will be aware that no expense is ever spared in maintaining our journalistic integrity. But I am but a mortal man, and there is only so much Heat magazine I can stand.

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