Over the Christmas and New Year holidays I have been watching more television than is ordinarily my wont, believing it to be a sacred duty at this holy season. Speaking of which, why the hell wasn't 'The Italian Job' on this year? A generation of children may grow up in ignorance of the real Christmas story, namely that Our Lord Michael Caine saved us all by leading a gang of cockney thieves to steal £3 million in gold bullion from the Fiat factory in Turin. Remember the parable of the Three Wise Minis.
  One very annoying trend I noticed is the tendency of TV stations to save all their best stuff for their subscription cable offshoots and then taunt you about it.
  'Over on BBC Knowledge in a minute, an interview with J.D. Salinger, shot full of caffeine and sodium pentathol and talking garrulously about his life and work. Here on BBC 2 now, I Love Last Saturday Evening.'
  'Just starting on Film Four, the first in our Truffaut retrospective. Here on Four, Top Ten TV Terrapins.'
  'Over on ITV2, Pamela Anderson giggling in a jacuzzi. Here on ITV1, a slightly wet turd being pulled around on a piece of string.'
  Of course, it's only television. We are alive for an infinitesimally brief span and we really should find more glorious things to do with our time. Only people with no arms and legs should watch more than a couple of hours of TV a week. But anyone with no arms and legs would almost certainly be a war veteran, and those people deserve better than Pro-Celebrity Llama Enemas With Davinia McCall.
  Having to pay to piss your life away watching television is the final insult. Free TV is part of the social contract. The deal is, they give us free telly, we don't burn down the Houses of Parliament. So let them shape up or else.
  Another thing I noted, this with more amusement, is that the ad industry appears to be gearing up for one of its periodic truth-in-advertising bouts. There is an old and libellous theory that by watching enough TV ads you can tell what the current drug of choice is in ad-land at any given time. If it's coke everything's frenzied and manic. When they're on hallucinogens everything's anthropomorphized, e.g. if they wanted to sell you a coffee cup they would put arms and legs and a grinning face on it and it would dance around and go, 'Hello, I'm Mr. Cup!' Every so often, though, they detox for a while, and lose all imagination. The combination of delayed hangover and the confessional honesty inculcated by their rehab programs induces a grimly realistic mood, resulting in, for example, that ad from a couple of years ago for some D.I.Y. product or other the slogan of which was, 'It does what it says on the tin.'
  Personally, I do not endorse this view. I subscribe to the 'Bewitched' theory of advertising and think that every now and again their mothers-in-law put a spell on them to make them tell the truth.
  It's that time again, anyway, judging by several of the ads I saw over Christmas, e.g. the car one that said, 'It's a Skoda. Some people have a problem with that.' Or the one for a cell-phone that concluded, 'It looks ugly but it works.'
  In other words, 'We know this product is unpopular or looks like shit, but, I'm going to level with you, this is a tough brief. Give us a break, you try selling this pig.'
  Such honesty is poignant coming out of an election year and I would like to see the trend extended to party political broadcasts:
  'Vote for us. We're corrupt and unprincipled, but we won't actually murder you in your beds.' (Come to think of it, that is pretty much the way the established order has been sold to us for the past fifty years.)
  The other thing that struck me watching adverts is that it is now absolutely impossible to get away from those ads for ambulance-chasing lawyers trolling for people who have been hurt in accidents and may be entitled to compensation.
  Personally I feel some of the alarm about compensation culture is misplaced. It's good, for example, to hold corporate types to account if they cut corners on safety or something. And I know that I for one am never happier than when I am able to blame my misfortunes on some other bugger. But things are clearly getting out of hand. Some corrective to the sort of attitude the ambulance-chasers' ads are designed to foster may be needed. I intend to make some adverts encouraging people to look on the bright side and stoically endure misfortune. I want to start a company of forthright, manly types of a sort we really only know from old war films now, whose business it would be to buck people up:

  'Been hurt in an accident? What beastly luck. Still, chin up. Worse things happen at sea. Call us now at Affable Square-Jawed Chums and we'll pop round and smoke a pipe or two with you. Just look at these case histories:
  'Douglas Bader. Lost both legs in a plane crash. We told him it wouldn't do to brood about it and gave him a manly punch on the shoulder and he was happy as a lark in no time.
  'Pongo Skeffington. Chap I met in Africa. Decapitated in tribal uprising and re-animated as headless zombie by witch-doctors. Tough case, inclined to mope a bit. We got a drink down his neck and told him to snap out of his funk and he went on to play cricket for England and father 17 undead children.'

  But no. It may be too late at this point to return to the old values of stiff-upper-lip and muddling through - I certainly wouldn't want to give up whining. It might be more feasible, though, to promulgate the psychoanalytical idea that there are no accidents.
  Thus, I would like to run a series of ads featuring Sigmund Freud or some paid impersonator:

  'Haff you been hurt in an accident? Tripped on a loose paving stone? Slipped on ice? Been squashed flat by a runaway steamroller? Had a derailed freight train plough through your front room? It vas your own damn fault! You vanted it to happen! Call me now for therapy or the rest of your life you vill be making like der klutz mit der slipping on der banana peels and der feeding your tie into der cash machines! Mind you, I blame the mother mit der early toilet training. That's it, ve vill sue your mother!'

10/01/02
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