FORWARD THROUGH THE AGES TV

I never felt the same way about them again. Mr Coutts said something about them just being a way of getting us to buy things we didn’t really want or need. I fell out of love with ads after an art lesson in middle school. I swear that the absurd feeling of head-to-toe wellbeing I get from every evening’s first drink is in some part the result of hardwiring laid down by that advert.

It was the one with a row of bare-footed coppers whose toes started moving as soon as the Heineken was swallowed. Why did they do that? Did kiddies’ pester power really drive oven cleaner sales? Those who campaign against alcohol advertising won’t be surprised that Heineken adverts hit home, featuring this nondescript lager refreshing “parts other beers cannot reach”. It was because in the advert there was a nice cartoon face on the thing. I remember asking my bewildered parents if they used a particular oven cleaner, which was called something like Oven Pad. It’s funny which ones stick in your mind.

FORWARD THROUGH THE AGES TV

How can TV adverts work any more?Īs a kid I used to like watching adverts I think I even started recording them. I realised I hadn’t sat through an ad break for what felt like years.

When the ads came on, especially before the invention of remote controls, we had to actually sit and watch these things. And here’s the thing: you can’t fast-forward through them you have to watch them! It’s incredibly annoying, which is strange when you remember that for most of us it was always this way. The only downside of All 4 offerings is that something weird happens every 15 or so minutes: the film stops and some adverts appear. I’m currently puzzling my way through a very dark Croatian spy thing called Guardian of the Castle in which Yugoslav-era spooks do an awful lot of brooding and the odd bit of killing. In this country we’re blessed with Walter Presents, the oddly named and, to my mind, underpromoted bit of All 4, Channel 4’s free-to-air video-on-demand service.

Forward through the ages