"Asteroid" by Pete Moore

Dodging adverts on telly is childs’ play, and it has been fairly easy ever since video cassette recorders came in.  Every time someone asks me if I’ve seen the one with the meerkats, or the opera singer, or the gorilla playing Phil Collins’ drumkit, I can honestly answer “no”.  I’m of the belief that if I want something, I’d go out and buy it (budget permitting) – or, at least, that’s what I’ve convinced myself.

Of course, if you were brought up to think that ITV was a bit common then the job was already done for you by the BBC channels, and still is.

Radio’s even easier, especially since the mergers and takeovers in UK commercial radio have led to so many similar channels that I would never want to listen to anyway.  Capital (no prizes for guessing its comedy name) is a London station that is spreading itself over the Earth’s surface like a fungus from outer space.  Its rivals are much the same.

The one place where consumerism has me captive is at the pictures.  It’s rather tricky to blunder through a darkened cinema, looking for a free seat, when the adverts and trailers have nearly finished but the film has yet to start.  The timing isn’t easy either if in a multiplex, especially when my home town boasts Europe’s tallest cinema and I have to go up several floors from the box office to the screen.

I should have known we were in trouble when Pearl and Dean were sidelined from view.  It’s still a very important advertising carrier for many British cinemas, but in the 1970s, with a (Britpop-era) revival in the mid-1990s, it was a very visible presence on screen.

If you’re too young, or too foreign, or suffering from memory loss, this lot:

The jokes about the adverts they used to carry have gone way beyond observational comedy and into folklore.  The generic series of still photographs of people enjoying a meal that would lead to a clumsily inserted caption advertising a Chinese or Indian restaurant “just minutes from this cinema”.  The pornographic enjoyment of the sort of hotdogs that could only ever be bought in fairgrounds or, unsurprisingly, at the pictures during the interval.  (Yes, you read me correctly.  Films were often run with an INTERVAL.)

All this may sound daft, and like some logical extension of a Donald McGill seaside postcard, but it was pretty harmless and sufficiently clumsy and unconvincing to not really jar with the film itself.  Star Wars, or the latest Disney feature, was at a good arm’s length from it all.  And the Pearl and Dean brand itself was not obtrusive – the jingle above (all 18 seconds of it) was out of the way in a flash.

Now, regardless as to whichever film I see, I’m confronted with endless presence of these bastards:

So imagine the scene; I’m settling into my seat to watch some realist drama about a  Parisian child protection unit, or something, and two oversized sweeties come on to plug the latest Big Momma’s House sequel for what seems like an age.

They are like some CGI version of the Chuckle Brothers, there to shatter the illusion of any film that comes within their range (and it’s a very big range) and I really do wish they’d fuck off.

Strangely, I don’t mind the Orange film spoofs.  But despite the message behind them, people still don’t switch their bastard phones off.