Colonel K

A little over a year ago, so it turns out, KFC (the company formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, before deciding the world fried might be becoming a bit of a hard sell these days) changed its logo. I didn't notice because while KFC had apparently advertised the change to low orbital surveillance satellites from the Nevada desert, I'd somehow neglected to be in low orbit or on any of the agenda setting websites showing the resultant images, which are so popular with the hip, young secretively seasoned fried chicken consuming demographic.

The realisation has only just reached me because a recent bus journey took me past two KFCs in fairly quick succession, a funky new one and a tired, old, unchanged since the late 90s one.

You know what, the last 10 years have been kinder to Colonel Sanders than they have to me- he's got younger and I think a little bit more hip, with his "jacket off, apron on" attitude and "down wiv da kidz" jaunty trapezoid backing. He also has to my eye a ghost of young Rolf Harris and particularly cheery Desmond Tutu about his expression, and may even have shed a pound or two in weight.
When I was a lad he was making cameos in Little House on the Prairie which was what simultaneously a quarter of a century and a century and a bit ago, though to be fair he was also writing his company name in full, Wimpy was a sit down restaurant with waitresses, and Pizza Hut didn't deliver and had a sensible hut roof rather than some squiffy faux scribbled nonsense on its logo.

Good for him, as a puritan lefty killjoy I obviously wish his empire had not spread so far as to have two branches within a five minute bus ride half a world from Kentucky (or K as it's now known), and that his TV adverts weren't a) so desperately transparently constructed to imply it was okay for young parents to succumb to kids' pressure and buy his wares instead of making real food, and that they could be both middle class and skinny if they did, and b) so rubbish, but he's looking well on it.

It would be nice if he'd managed Elvis better too, obviously.