I don't like adverts and I didn't like it when they installed mini-TV screens on the back of taxicab headrests. I don't regard it a pleasure to watch nubile teens stroke their Nivea-clear skin while I make my way home on the Metro. I almost broke down and wept when I saw three middle-aged men, dressed in silver space suits and dark glasses, lumbering around Shanghai with 21-inch flatscreens strapped to their back.
However, in all my years of suffering, I have never experienced the levels of loathing that I now reserve exclusively for the person in charge of advertising at Zhaoqing Television.
Zhaoqing is a small city, two hours west of Guangzhou, nearly 2,000 kilometers south of Beijing and more pertinently for the purposes of this column within broadcast range of Hong Kong. It's my home away from home.
One of the many benefits of living in Zhaoqing is the fact that I can receive both of Hong Kong's English-language television stations. Indeed, every night, at 7:30 pm sharp, I settle in for a dose of English language news on Pearl, followed up by a steady, predictable diet of syndicated reality TV shows and third-rate movies on ATV World. What, alas, is even more predictable, is what happens when program controllers in Hong Kong decide to take a commercial break.
A button is pressed somewhere in the vaults of ZQTV and suddenly a mass of cleavage fills the screen. With the assistance of Benny Hill-inspired "boiiiings" and a theme tune that would have made Barry White blush, the peddlers of a new corset-styled rib strap demonstrate how their "revolutionary" product has changed lives.
One woman, for example, begins the ad looking as pale, hunched and dismal as a Victorian street urchin and ends it athletically sprinting across a tennis court with a Cheshire cat grin and a chest that has been hoisted towards the heavens.
Aside from the extraordinarily excited male narrator, the only other male voices we hear are those of a group of office workers who greet their newly-endowed secretary with exclamations: "Wah".
The legality of the advert could be questioned on several fronts but that isn't the issue. The problem is twofold one, the advert happens to be an excruciating four minutes long and, two, has appeared during every single break on both Pearl and ATV World for the last three months.
In the course of Pearl's 30-minute evening news program, for example, there are three commercial interruptions two of which occur in the last 10 minutes, either side of the weather report. During each one, the same four-minute advert appears.
Torture, I have concluded, isn't all about severed digits or orange jump suits. It's far more banal that that. It's being forced to endure the same thing over and over and over and over. The power of advertising is a remarkable thing.
(China Daily 01/09/2007 page20)
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