Give me a (commercial) break!
By Philip Whiteland - 28/04/2008
I think it was the talking sleeve that finally provided the straw that booked the camel into the spinal injuries unit.
My theme here, ladies and gentlemen, is advertisements on television and radio. Before I go any further, I should say that these often provide the best form of entertainment in both media and are frequently superior to the programmes that they support, but there are exceptions…
Like the talking sleeve. I know that television advertisements are not necessarily national, so this particular innovation may have passed you by. The essentials of the story are that a family, apparently crippled with a multitude of health problems, are on a car journey and find themselves lost on a road in a thickly wooded part of the countryside. The reason that they are lost, it transpires, is that the mother of the family is unable to read the map despite having lenses in her glasses that would double as the bottoms of jam jars. Whilst fretting over her optical shortcomings, she takes the opportunity to also worry about the other health problems affecting her family, such as her husband (back – which he indicates by clutching his shoulder and wincing) and her children (teeth – precious few of them left and prime candidates for dentures before puberty I shouldn’t wonder).
Apparently the modern innovation of the NHS is an alien concept to this poor lady and she is reduced to taking health care advice (in the form of the initials of the health care company concerned) from the sleeve of her cardigan, which has miraculously (and rather annoyingly) gained the ability to talk. Comfortingly, another car passes by, also equipped with a talking cardigan sleeve, so she is clearly not alone in her choice of medical advice.
This advert (and if you haven’t yet seen it, I would urge you to seek it out) has only served to convince me that the makers of these 30 second wonders tend to fall into two camps. The first camp consists of those who really want to make a feature film but haven’t been ‘discovered’ yet. For them, each advertisement is an opportunity to show the world what they could achieve if only they were let loose on something they could really get their teeth into (an ambition that will forever be beyond the children with the talking sleeve). The second camp is made up of those who are convinced that the rest of the world is populated by idiots, hence such things as the talking sleeve.
The first camp design adverts of breathtaking beauty and artistic elegance which leave the average viewer wondering what it was all about. These were probably the same gang who designed those poster adverts for cigarettes back in the 1980s. Do you remember those? The only way you could tell that they were for cigarettes at all was by the Government Health Warning at the bottom. I’ll bet they were doubled up with laughter at the sheer irony, back at the advertising agency.
The second camp, like the poor, have always been with us. If memory serves me correctly, ever since we first had a television in the late 1950s, a certain brand of washing powder has been getting whites whiter than the previous version of the same powder. Surely, there has to come a point when it just can’t get things any whiter without risking the eyesight of its customers? Or will some poor, unsuspecting person open their washer one day and lurch back, hands clutching their face screaming “Oh My God, the whiteness, my eyes! My eyes!”
The really clever trick is to create a demand for a product which fills a need that no-one ever felt before. Anti-bacterial soap for example, or those sprays and wipes that eliminate germs that no sensible person would ever expect to find lurking in their house in the first instance (unless you really have reason to believe that your kitchen is crawling with MRSA). It’s a wonder that our parents and grandparents ever survived long enough to have offspring, or that we survived infancy for that matter. And don’t get me started on that group of women who are supposed to represent the Sex in the City cast. As they sit around the café table, keenly discussing bowel movements and the means to make these more comfortable (another product you never knew you needed) you begin to yearn for the solid dependability of “you’ll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent”. By the way, when did the female digestive system cease to function? Was there some sort of announcement that I missed? I’m referring of course to the terrible problem of “slower digestive transit” and the range of ‘good’ bacteria with slightly unbelievable names that we are now supposed to ingest to ensure that our food shoots through (with pain-free results).
Of course, we’re told about these things by people who clearly do not inhabit our world at all. Well, certainly not our country. In evidence, I would submit that annoying child sitting on the toilet, in a bathroom large enough to hold formal dances. In an unconvincing British accent, of indeterminate origin, he witters on about the fact that the wall-mounted air freshener is exhausted and his doting mother pops in to help this, presumably foul-smelling, infant, and they both giggle and beam with pleasure. Now, it should be clear to anyone with half a functioning brain cell, that this gleaming family is American (if it was British, he would be getting claustrophobia from being trapped with the foul odour in an en-suite the shape and size of a broom cupboard) and that the British dialogue has been dubbed over the American original to try to convince us that this is an everyday picture of life in the UK. At least, in this situation, there is a reasonable chance of the words matching the lip movements.
A more recent trend is for adverts to be imported (along with the products) from the far extremities of the EU. Here we are asked to believe that the women concerned (and it is usually women), who could easily be reciting a particularly challenging passage from Proust, are actually saying, in an Essex accent, “I just poured it on and the dirt was gone!” or something similar.
The raison d’etre behind any advert (television or otherwise) is to persuade the public that they are going to get something more than they could possibly expect for the price. Hence the car adverts where the particular version, complete with every whistle and bell possible, hurtles around a chicane whilst the small print across the bottom informs the wary that this particular style will cost approximately twice the price that is splashed in vibrant colour over the screen above. Anyone reading this, in detail, in the time available, would have to be a speed-reader par excellence. This sort of thing reaches its peak when the same advert appears on the radio (minus the chicane, obviously) and the small print has to be read out by someone sounding like a chipmunk on amphetamines. Another example is where some revolutionary new beauty product is on display and the large type reassuringly tells us that this has been determined to be particularly effective in a scientific study, whilst the small print tells us that they asked 6 people in the street on a wet Sunday in Scunthorpe.
I’m sure you’ve all got your own pet likes and dislikes. Those adverts that send you screaming into the kitchen to make a cup of tea (even if you don’t like tea), those that immediately engage you and actually improve your evening’s viewing and finally, those that you can’t stand but which you keep being reminded of because of the irritatingly catchy tune that you CAN’T STOP WHISTLING!
But now, its time for a commercial break…