To be honest, I’m getting sick of turning on my TV. I’m sick of turning it on and instead of being able to watch a continuous stream of adverts I have my fun spoiled by utter crap such as quality programming, original content, thought provoking documentaries and as many classic films as I can manage to squeeze into my day. It was only yesterday that I sat down and just about managed to catch the end of a fantastic advert for Santander featuring Ant and Dec. Of course, as soon as that had finished I had to endure some dreary, irrelevant and inconsequential documentary about chronic underfunding in a children’s leukaemia ward, for what felt like at least eight minutes, before the adverts were resumed and I got to see the whole advert from the start again. As you can imagine, this perked me right up, not least because those Santander adverts featuring Ant and Dec are just so funny, and to my delight it was followed by a sequence of brilliant adverts for women’s razors, the new Kia Toss, finding a career path at Greggs, cleft palates in Africa, how to arrange my own cremation and, to top it all off, a real masterpiece for Haribo which featured grown men sharing some sweets in an unlikely setting but, and get this for clever, their real voices had been replaced by the voices of children to make them seem both educationally subnormal and deeply annoying at the same time. I nearly soiled myself laughing, though deep down I knew I was laughing at the notion that if you want to sell things to idiots all you really have to do is to treat them as such.
I thinks it’s great that there are so many adverts filling up the dead space between programming on our TVs. To be honest I can’t really remember what it was like, back in the day, when you could switch on to a channel and find nothing but programmes about stuff, full on and uninterrupted, playing one after another. And this could last for pretty much an entire evening if you let it. But now the people who control what happens on your TV have realised the error of their ways. They’ve clocked on to the fact, and just in time, that what viewers really want isn’t a stream of unpunctuated content that has little chance of being entertaining but instead crave a near constant reminder of a load of quality products that they didn’t know existed but now know they absolutely must have in their lives. Indeed, it’s only in the last few months that I’ve realise that the programmes aren’t there for our distraction, relaxation and education but are in fact squeezed in between adverts simply to provide a useful timeslot in which to respond accordingly to the last items or services we saw advertised. As a case in point, I missed the entire second half of an Emmerdale (which I’m not complaining about) the other day because I was busy ordering a self-motivated lawn mower, donating money so save some half-dead bear, putting a down payment on a slick new Range Rover that I don’t need and will definitely look like a twat in and, because why not, booking a slot for my own cremation with Co-Op Funeralcare (I think I’ll go for the end of September 2057, which is a fudgy slab of optimism if ever there was one).
In truth I wish I could find a way to pay for more adverts. Only a year or so ago you could tune in to Netflix and Amazon Prime and there wouldn’t be an advert in sight, but then these streaming platforms decided that they would charge me the same as normal, only very kindly throwing in some lengthy advert breaks as a bonus. What’s cheeky is that they are now trying to tempt me into paying them more money to get rid of the adverts, but I want to know how I can pay more to get continuous advertising and just be done with all that dreadful original content, content which no-one can ever seem to decide for sure is good or not; for instance, everyone raved and drooled over Baby Reindeer but if you sat back and took in, just for a second, what you were wasting your life watching you’d soon realise it was, ultimately, not much better than a bit shit. Adverts are just so much easier to digest, and if you forget about one it will always pop back up again to remind you in sharp fashion, usually within the lifespan of the same cup of tea you made between Tipping Point and The Chase. And speaking of Baby Reindeer, I worked out the other day that you could fill the entire running length of that series with 1,074 adverts for Wickes, played back to back. I think you’ll agree there just isn’t any competition. I wonder if you can get cremated like that chap in The Wicker Man with Co-Op Funeralcare? I should try and give them a call, next time their advert is on, which should be any time in the next four minutes, regardless of which channel I choose.
So we all know what an ideal world looks like, don’t we? That’s right, over time people will stop making new programmes and films altogether because there won’t be enough time scheduled between adverts to actually show them. The last programmes to die will be Friends (the last thing the last human being on earth will watch is almost certainly going to be an episode of Friends) and empty repeats of stuff with Rick Stein, Alan Titchmarsh or Claudia Winkleman, content with no actual meaningful content, and yet also content that will serve as a comfort blanket and a reminder that once upon a time there was crap out there so crappy that it almost made adverts look edible and that we simply hadn’t given advertising executives the respect they deserved. Either that or it will just be the news left all alone – content made up purely of people and misery. War, death, idiots and adverts. Forever.
And if you think that the boundless ocean of time on TV is just too big to fill with advertising then you’d be flat wrong, because these days you can have an advert for virtually anything you want. Retractable spatulas, Foxy Bingo baby care, how to spot a stroke and the life enhancing benefits of Anusol. The Postcode Lottery, upholstering your hamster, bespoke shed installation and another go at a plug in air freshener which can effectively disguise the stench of a decomposing body for up to four weeks. Tesco Clubcard, dinner up The Shard and a laugh-free birthday card. Go to France, come to Dubai and leave your aches and pains behind by avoiding Syria altogether. The fire pit logs, abandoned mogs, Subway chilli dogs and a clutch of eminently sponsorable endangered frogs. It is also worth noting that for the rest of time no repetition of a puerile jingle will ever compel me to automatically “trust a trader”. And, in case you thought I’d forgotten, a tribute to the one product that adverts sell so very, very well: bullshit. For what would adverts be if it wasn’t for the endless quantity of bullshit that we all need to be sold across every second that we are alive and kicking? And it’s that bullshit which, if we’re being honest, will only serve us best when we’re dead; provided, that is, that we have already made some very reasonably priced arrangements with a friendly local crematorium. Which is what I was supposed to be doing in the first place, before I got distracted.
G B Burton. 22.02.2025
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 