The Naff Index: Summer 2022

It's been another bumper year for bad taste...

Welcome to the Naff Index, Summer 2022 Edition, which begins with a mea culpa. (Saying mea culpa, by the way, remains highly, highly naff.) Last year, my introduction was ripely pandemic-flavoured, and filled with all sorts of knowing gags about variants, Pfizer and Matt Hancock. Perhaps I too had lost my sense of taste (apologies), because I clearly failed to realize that the naffest thing possible in 2021 was going on about covid to a captive audience. (Even Matt Hancock has moved swiftly on, you’ll notice, now preferring dyslexia and podcasts — which, come to think of it, go hand in hand, actually.)

This, of course, is very much the reason we continue to commission this report at great expense. The Naff Index is the mirrored edge of snobbery. It is an abyss that gazes back at us. For if we cannot see the statement bumbag around our own waist, how can we take the statement bucket hat off our brother’s head? (Biblical analogies, by the way, remain surprisingly un-naff.) We have often been entreated this year to “be kind” (very naff), and perhaps this is our own small way of doing just that. Until now, you may well have been walking around the playground of 2022 with a cosmic ‘Kick me!’ sign stuck to your back. Allow us a moment to gently unpeel the Post It.