Clever ads? Oh, give me a break! (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Clever ads? Oh, give me a break!

8:29am Friday 13th January 2012 in Our View

I am seething, yet again, about something I have seen on the TV.

Most people get wound up by Question Time or Newsnight or Celebrity Big Brother. Not me. I get ratcheted into an over-coiled spring by the adverts.

After my latest rant, my wife looks at me in despair. “Why are you so bothered? It’s only an advert.”

I can’t help it. My most recent hate-target is the series of ads for a well-known electricals retailer, where the staff gather to hang mobile phones in the shape of a snowflake, or blow-dry ice-cubes. What is this telling me? Why do I want to shop somewhere where all the sales assistants are off sellotaping a hundred digital cameras to a Smeg fridge? I want to go in, buy a kettle, and come out, not be walking around an abandoned shop for half an hour where the workers are applauding like Oompah-Loompahs in a back room because all the TV remote controls have been Blu-Tacked together into a scale model of the Angel of the North.

I also loathe most bank ads, especially the ones where the staff are tossing it off in some kind of in-store radio station, laughing uproariously because the handles fall off their mugs of coffee. They are supposed to be bank staff, not DJs.

Who goes into a bank and cares one jot that Vanilla Ice or the Lightning Seeds is playing over the tannoy while you’re trying to get them to remove the exorbitant charges they’ve levied because you went tuppence overdrawn for 37 seconds?

It’s this kind of distancing from the lives of real people that led to the banks ruining the economy. Stop playing records and start doing some banking!

And if the handles fall off your mugs and you just laugh about it, what kind of message does that send about your infrastructure and security? Why the hell should I trust you with my money?

Then there’s Max Beesley, an actor I have a lot of time for, who’s stalking up and down the TV screen, literally berating people for not getting off their backsides and applying for new jobs.

Beesley glares at us like we’re something he’s trod in, and snarls that we shouldn’t be such useless, feckless, wastes of space.

If we don’t upload our CVs to whatever jobs website he’s promoting then we’re about as useful to contemporary society as a spider which some kid has pulled all the legs off. He hates us for not getting a new job. We disgust him. We might as well just go to bed and die there.

The ads leave me wiped out, empty, a sodden, sobbing wreck. Thank God there are programmes on in between so I can pull myself together, and prepare for the next onslaught.