On TV Adverts

Arseholes.

Adverts on television have become an accepted misery in our lives. We see them as a kind of Satanic trade - give me documentaries and I will gladly surrender my soul to offers of biscuits. Capitalism has become a thing designed to piss people off as extensively as possible. And it does its job. Every one of the senses is now exploited in the aid of flogging some terrible product which needs all the help it can get. There are even such things as smelly adverts now, little packages of chemicals in beauty magazines and such. Yet these are sadly not yet televised, so I am working outside of my remit. What I find interesting, though, is the assumed distance of the genre; televisual adverts are equal in effect to ushering a cavalcade of salesmen through one's house, steps punctuated by cries such as, 'Do you need faster broadband?' and responses of mine such as, 'No.' For some unknown reason, we are not quite so offended by adverts on television. I think this is a great crime. Remember, there are legions of trained professionals whose lives are animated by the sole aim of exploiting each habit of your sensory faculties in order to sell you some turd.

I just saw an advertisement for Robinsons squash (pictured above), in which two typical boys guzzle litres of this luminous fluid (I believe it's diluted so as to prevent the transference of too much flavour). This all seems great, and the unthinking viewer might (paradoxically) think: 'How charming, this fluid must be delicious!' But no. This advert says nothing of the product whose consumption it advocates. I could pay two pensioners £5000 to ingurgitate vast quantities of camel urine, with broad and delirious grins seared into their aspects, piss foaming around their terrified dentures, speckling their blouses with perfect, golden globules. Any outward inspection would support the hypothesis that these two people were having a fantastic time of it all, but they are of course dead inside, shackled to the economic facts which sanctify their prostitution as necessity. Let it not be forgotten that you can pay anyone to do anything, however abhorrent (trust me). This is why we treat advice from friends more seriously than advice from companies. So in a strange way, the economic coldness of these companies completely undermines their probity - and yet advertising works. Pay some enchanting beauty to pretend to give a cock about your product and it will sell. It's faintly depressing.

This leads me to the Aldi adverts, or perhaps the Lidl ones, for the two chains have agglomerated into one grand, Teutonic purveyor of strange foodstuffs in my mind, and whenever I watch a Lidl advert I immediately think of Aldi, and vice-versa. I have always wondered whether each party has considered that it is advertising in equal measure for the other. Perhaps this is intentional - my immediate thoughts towards a Lidl advert are: 'Fuck off, Aldi, I'm trying to watch TV here.'

The specific Aldi/Lidl advert I am thinking of is some kind of consumer testimonial piece - asking people what they think of the products. It is always, 'I like this one,' gesturing towards the expensive, nice food, and, 'I also like this one,' complete with gestures towards the boxed manure from Aldi. Adverts such as these must be effective, for they are increasing wildly in their frequency. However, to me they seem gaudy, arrogant, annoying and transparent. Here we have testimonials from the company who is selling the inferior product. I scarcely think Lidl is going to pay someone to review their products, receive the crappy feedback, then proceed to spend millions of pounds to tell me how crap consumers thought the product was. Let's not kid ourselves - these testimonials are direct from the company, if only by omission. They may interview 100 people before they find some nationalistic German fruitloop who thinks Lidl's Fizzy Alien Balls are better than Rice Krispies, but in reality they probably needn't go that far - they pay somebody to read a script out loud. So this is a nuanced way for Lidl to tell me how good their own products are, without it seeming grotesque and pompous. When we realise this, it becomes obvious how shallow and vain the whole enterprise is - it is equivalent to having someone tell you, 'Look, I know other people write good poems, but mine are the best.' I would instantly be seized by the urge to maim such an individual, and you should feel a similar contempt for Lidl. Or Aldi.

This said, I must say I find it worse when adverts pretend they're not adverts. I speak of the horrors which last for a minimum of three minutes and usually involve an intolerable interloper who has decided he will populate your field of vision against your will and best interests. 'I'm going to show you how to cook the most wonderful lamb koftas - great for birthdays, weddings, normal days, abnormal days, different dimensions, whatever.' Meanwhile I am usually screaming imprecations at the television, with a volume such that my words will be carried back in time and to the place of the advert's production. These adverts are the unwanted friends of the televisual sphere, the people who assume a large position in your life without your accession. 'I'm not an advert, I'm a nice guy!' they seem to cry. Well, you're not on the TV listings, and anything not on the TV listings will gain no place in my life.

Advertising, quite simply, is the ultimate in the construction of pretext. Companies quite rightly realise they cannot invade our homes without at least some specious bullshit behind it. 'We asked Sally what her sleep pattern was like.' Nobody gives a flying toss about Sally! This is demonstrable by the fact you had to raise the subject of Sally in the first place. If I cared about Sally's sleep pattern, I'd have asked her myself. Just tell me to buy your ear plugs and be done with it. It is the same as if a salesmen were to ask you: 'do you have a mobile phone at all?' - the immediate response is, 'What do you want me to buy?' Sadly, all this artifice is so often ingested as quite alright. There's something entirely 1984 about having such lurid offers hurled at you in your own home. To me this is a kind of totalitarianism - capitalism previously took place only in public life, but now it has been subsumed by the private life. The balefulness of this is hard to appreciate - with branding there is a kind of ownership, and of domination at the very least. It is the idea that there should be no escape from capitalism, and toil, and materialism. We have constructed these tunnels of convenience, bored through the air between producer and consumer, and we can now buy everything at home which, whilst convenient, begs the question - is what travels towards us in these tunnels wholly benign?