We are told to always read the small print, with good reason I suppose.


I am almost sure however, that no-one has actually investigated the history of the small-print. Where did it start? When? Why? Who was the first person to get caught out by it? Has anyone ever died because they did not read the small print?


There must be thousands of little anecdotal tales about small print, thousands of tales of woe of how people lost their house, car, spouse, dog, virginity, to small-print. Ok, sure, there are consumer reports and endless TV programmes documenting how Mrs Smegma-Jones of Scunthorpe was ripped off by the bank etc, but never before has the small-print occurrences been linked together to acknowledge the very breadth of its existence.


Everyone knows its there – hell people even read the garbage now (and then afterwards think they’re bloody Magnus Magnusson). I am even convinced that now that we as consumers are aware of small-print, that the small-printers have even cut down on the amount of lies that there used to be. To begin investigation it may be wise to read the small-print of adverts from the ‘70s, and then perhaps compare them to the small print now.


Of course, just as the sun scorches through the crack of the curtains into my eyes each morning narrowly blinding me, the internet, the young child of the information desperate eWorld, has its own particular brand of small-print. The difference with say, the newspaper advert small print and the internet small-print, is simply a question of size.


No longer is the small-print small. The small-print on the internet is f**king huge. It’s the king size Mars Bar of small-print, in fact it cannot be called small-print, yet like the Tannoy, the Hoover, and the Roller-Blades, before it, small-print has stuck as the terminology for the rules, the Ts & Cs, the junk, the bumph, the jargon, the text-book, the lot…. I could go on (actually I never realised there were so many terms for the small-print!).

The irony of small-print on the internet is that it is soooo large, so incredibly vast, so amazing large, that it cannot fit on the same page as the product they are trying to sell you – so what do they do? They give the small-print its own page – its own page? It’s the bloody small-print!! It’s own page? Has the world gone mad? No longer is the small print small, it’s bloody ginormus, so vast in fact, that it now commands its own webpage, probably even its own UR bloody L. Actually, without me creating an ulcer about it, the small-print has actually, instead of growing to the size of Wales, got even smaller on the internet (so ignore my little rant there). It has been reduced to a single iddy biddy tick box.


Tick here if you agree with the small-print


Genius! You don’t even have to read the small-print anymore, because:
(1) its soo f**king huge you would need to book some time off work to actually read the bastard things

(2) its easier just to tick the box and live in blissful ignorance
(3)you just want to sign up to bigboobsisters.com so much that you’re quite prepared to pay the consequences later

(4) you only have 3 days to live
(5) you have already been bankrupt once and it wasn’t really that bad, or

(6) you are using someone else’s credit card.


Tick the box – superb! No more worrying, no more glancing over the APR that increases by 500% every year, no more trying to decipher what it means by ‘your home is at risk if you do not keep up repayments..’ just tick the box la la la la and everyone’s happy.


Of course, small-print is not just negative clauses designed to ruin you at the first opportunity. Small-print can also refer to the minor news-bites in the paper, the odd sentence that’s not dwelled upon in conversation, the chance meeting in the street etc. For example, in today’s Evening Standard I happened to read a news-bite that surely in its tabloid partners commanded a grander exposure. In no less than 4 lines the Standard informed London that a celebrity mind-reader is to take part in Russian Roulette (yes with a loaded gun) live on TV.
Wow, I thought. Now that is TV. Screw your Big Brother reality shiter, forget your Painting Rooms and Gardening banality, stick your Fawlty Towers repeats… a man is going to take the 1 in 6 chance of being the first man to blow his brains out live on prime-time television. Oh yes, and if you weren’t watching when poor Tommy Cooper died in the act (jus’ like that) on that fateful Sunday night, then this is it folks – your only chance to see a real death live on the idiot box! Now that’s news!!


And only found in the small-print – Always always read the small-print – so that when this mind-reading tosser DOES blow his head clean off, you can turn round and say – I was there, I watched it happen, unlike all your friends that are going to miss it (and wonder how they could have missed such a monumental event). The small print – not as insignificant as it looks obviously.


Another small-print snippet I noticed in The Standard a while back was - Win a Hotel! Again this was only a small piece about a Scottish hotelier who thought that he would make more money to lottery off his castle-like hotel instead of try and sell it – genius. I read the article, emailed it to a few friends, and of course, me and a few other nuts are dreaming of a life of kilts and fairytales. Even if none of us win (1 in 360,000 chance – I like those odds) at least that piece of small-print brought fun and hope to any otherwise boring morning at work!


I love the small-print and long may it reign. It holds mystique (what are they trying to hide?) answers (oh so it’s only applicable to pregnant baboons), it has wonder (what the hell does cross caliterization mean), it has charm (real offer may not actually exist), and sometimes it holds the keys to something unique (so pay attention to the little things!)*

Follow up:

*Offer ends yesterday, buy now pay for the rest of your life. Any similarity to any other offer is purely coincidental and does not actually exist.**





** this is not true***








*** the above is a complete lie