A Winter Novelty.

TV adverts are a novelty to me. I only watch the TV during the dark period when there’s a fire in the grate and the current book has grown too heavy to hold. (Lolita, for example, is causing some disquiet at the moment.) At such times the trends, the methodology and the social implications provoke some interest and the need to make notes. Today’s are offered here for what they’re worth.

1. Adverts for products relating to bodily functions have become rather more explicit than I remember them, and those excretions which belong in the privacy of the toilet bowl for as short a time as possible are now sitting cheek-by-jowl (which is almost a pun) on the Christmas dinner table with the strangely contrived lump of matter which the supermarket chains would have us you eat to provide their genesis.

2. A theme is becoming evident. The TV screens are replete with a seemingly inexhaustible array of pretty young women, the size and brilliance of whose teeth and the expensive regimentation of whose hairstyles extinguish any trace of personality which might previously have been present. This, it appears, is the dominant idée fixe of the 21^st century.

3. Adverts for over-the-counter cold & flu relief preparations exaggerate the efficacy of their products to such an extent that they’re effectively dishonest, which is supposed to be illegal.

4. Let us suppose for the sake of our muse that the people who devise TV adverts are really very clever, and really, really understand the minds of the many to whom they aim their manipulative messages. If we assume this to be true, then even a cursory glance at their efforts would lead the average alien from the wasteland to have serious doubts as to the state of the minds of the many, would it not?

5. I confess to an attack of pomposity, but please don’t hold it against me. The fault lies elsewhere.