Adverts on TV - really beginning to get on my nerves!

General Discussion
1

I suppose we must be grateful that we can enjoy english language TV far from home, but we do seem to be paying the price in the form of quality.


We have many "free to air" channels to choose from, but really there IS no choice - all these extra channels just show the same programmes week after week with something shown on one channel being shown again on another the following day or even the same day, but later. Even the non commercial BBC now does this, repeating content on BBC 3 or 4.


So much of today's programming is cheap TV - reality shows, cooking, house restoration, documentaries - no actors required, no stage sets, nothing expensive. They are merely carriers for the real source of income, adverts!


It is the commercial channels, notably Channel 4 which seems to repeat the drivel they call entertainment on More 4, 4 Extra, More 4 & 4 seven. ITV come a close second, repeating the same films week after week on various channels.


What really makes it worse is the fact that almost every ten minutes of TV is interrupted with five minutes of advertising! Adding insult to injury the adverts are stunningly unimaginative nowadays & are repeated "ad infinitum" ( no pun intended!).


The worst examples at the moment are the Vauxhall Mokka advert which tells us not to "blend in" by buying a car which looks exactly the same as at least half a dozen other cars! Then there is the advert for Enterprise car rental which at the end tries to link its UK & American background by using the pronumciation of the word "aluminium", the englishman correcting his american colleague by pointing out that the word in english has a U in it, as if the american spelling, aluminum, does not. It is, of course an "i" which is missing, making the joke at the end wrong & pointless. This rather important mistake made it past god knows how many approval meetings & is still part of the commercial.


I wonder what happened to the companies which gave us the "Hamlet cigars" & other creative adverts? If we are going to have to sit through 20 minutes of commercials every hour (more if promotions of other TV shows are included, although they will be on it 15 minutes time) it would be nice if these adverts were at least a little entertaining.


At least I do not have to pay for such poor quality viewing, which I suppose is the aim - to make us give more money to Mr Murdoch!


What happened to sitcoms & drama shows?

2

Monty Python's Flying Circus

Like this David?

1 Like
3

But I know who Osama Bin Laden is, too, but I have never supported him!

Surely brands should be remembered for more than just annoying people? I would not choose a car rental company who can't even spell.

4

What do you think made us old men grumpy if it wasn't grumpy old women?

5

The point of advertising is to build brand awareness… Mark’s namecheck of awful ads proves that the admen have earned their money.

Ads only fail when the viewer can’t tell their Martini from their Cinzano…

6

Absolutely right Chris. The only time I wear a baseball cap is when I cut the grass on my lawn tractor as my ear defenders don't fit under my straw hat. It's amazing how many trees I bump into so it must be a loss of brain power. I rarely, if ever, bump into trees whist driving my car without said hat so it must be true ;-)

7

Part of the fun of this group is that we CAN complain about things to each other. I'm sure that we all have greater problems but mine are not really things I feel I want to share. For instance, my OH is away until September so I am on my own at the moment & on a wet evening the telly is my only company. If I turn it off the house can seem a lonely place...

I prefer to keep things light!

8

I wish that's all that was important in my life to complain about, you don't have to watch them, you can turn the TV over, or even better, off!!

9

Seems fair enough to me. Aluminum it is then:-)

10

With you on the baseball hats. I was once told that if you put one on you lose 10% of your brain power which increased to 50% the moment you put it on back to front

11

I am a great supporter of hats save the baseball/hoodie combo. My dear old dad used to wear a bowler with black jacket and striped trousers every day, not forgetting the correctly rolled brolly. In fact in the 60s in London you had to take a sort of lesson on how to walk with a brolly properly, in order to distinguish oneself from other ranks. I jest not. Some great friends owned a large factory in the Midlands where hundreds were employed making distinguishing headgear. It's closed now but when the former owner died there was a forest of bowlers.

12

Yonks ago, working for a car tuning firm in Carshalton, I corrected my American boss for saying "Aluminum".

"It's aluminium," I said.

"Since we make two thirds of the world's goddam 'aluminum', I think we can call it what the f*** we like!" He replied.

13

Not so, Doreen.
French TV is full of commercials, some of which you would recognize, like the well-known stair lifts and silly women obsessed by wrinkles, as well as the constant pushing of headache remedies.
But they also have some of their very own. If the ads are to be believed, practically all French women have leaky bladders and constipation and are always calling in the repair man because they have failed to use a water-softening product in their washing machine.
And of course there is food, often promoted by men with silly English accents - as if they would know anything about the subject!
Strangely, not much advertizing appears to be directed at men. I can only conclude that it is the women who are in control of the family purse.

14

I have a TV for watching RUGBY, I don't have UK TV & go & make pots of tea at half-time so I'm clueless about advertising. I did spend a bit of time years ago analysing advertising with my children so they would know it for what it is...

15

hahaha, so glad that I'm not missing out an anything. I don't watch TV, As has been mentioned, it's all crap, Hearing people going on about how much of a hero some twat like Bear Grylls is, even though they have no idea that his shows are nothing near the reality, and he has a medical crew, a team of drivers, and some guy to hold his water bottle while he wipes his brow on camera.
As far as adverts go, my dad once told me never to buy any product that had advertising on television. didn't think much of it then, but looking back, he was right. Especially the food. Seems the ability to fill food-like products with chemicals and sugars is directly related to the frequency of the adverts on telly.

16

Hi Simon,

You are quite right - a good way of integrating into a new environment would indeed be to read the local newspapers and watch the local TV! However I have been here for fourteen years now so I would not really regard France as a new environment! French TV is generally equally as poor as its UK counterpart with the added annoyance that any show with an interviewer has that person half hidden behind a huge microphone so that often you only see a pair of eyes & ears behind a big black blob. French TV humour is also a little less sophisticated (though only just) & often spoken quickly in a dialect I sometimes find difficult to follow anyway.

I also enjoy a full english breakfast sometimes, chinese food & the odd curry, not because I am nostalgic for the UK, China or India but simply because I like them.

I think my criticism of TV & advertising could be applied to most countries today where the need to keep shareholders happy takes priority over everything else.

I take the point that quality TV is expensive to produce but I would have thought out of its annual income of £5066,000,000 the BBC could afford at least a few decent drama series!

17

After I sold my California home, I had to move out immediately. The buyer had come in with all cash (he was a Brit), instead of the customary wait for the mortgage paper to clear. Since I was still waiting for my French long stay visa and had a few months left before leaving my job, I rented a place with a friend who was going through a divorce. He placed large screen Sonys in every room, all running all the time. I used to go from room to room turning off the ones not being watched, but they'd all be back on again within the hour. I was never so glad to arrive in the quiet French countryside. I did buy a TV hooked up to the antenna on the roof, for the purposed of learning French, but French TV can be extremely tedious.

I discovered some websites that offer streaming TV series (all episodes of past and present seasons) that solved the commercial problem with corporate TV and lets me watch what I want, when I want. These sites also have UK and foreign shows. I became rather fascinated with a couple of Danish series (English subs). There is no need to be a slave to corporate television.

http://www.alluc.to/

http://watchseries.lt/

PS: I do recommend the installation of AdBlock to your browser. It will shut out all of the annoying popups riding along with the video streams.

18

Actually I guess what we'd really like is BBC/ITV -1hr? So that all those 9pm programmes could really start at 9pm!

19

Depend what size dish they have plus its not a straight line you have or have not we are in the Tarn with a 80cm dish and get nothing just the odd movie channel

20

I don't have UK TV, fed up to the teeth with it when I lived in UK. Don't watch French either, just German, a number of channels with no adverts. A fair amount of some of the old UK stuff on there, Midsomer Murders etc plus a number of German, Swedish and Italian TV dramas. Some of the German ones filmed in the UK, a nostalgic look at the scenery for expats. All dubbed. Of course one has to understand German, but there we are, more choice and many with no ads whatsoever.