EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE

“Product placement” is to be allowed on evening programmes on ITV. Hurrah! It’s what I have been waiting for: the clinching factor that ensures that I will never ever watch an ITV programme again. After all, once The South Bank Show has finished its final run that began at the weekend, there will not even be a residual sense of regret at missing any of ITV’s naff programming.

It tells you a lot about broadcasters’ contempt for both the audience and, more bizarrely, its own output. What is “product placement” for? Why, to catch the attention of the audience and drop a cookie-like presence into its brain so that when, god help it, it next goes to buy, say, “oven chips”, it will be sure to buy the brand that was “placed” on the telly.

But if you’re looking at the product, you’re not looking at the programme. What is the point of poor, unregarded Piers Morgan struggling to wrest every nuance from his subtle but definitive appraisal of the caterwauling of some no-talent more than ready to be god’s next gift to the showbiz if the audience is transfixed by the can of cola that he is the while throwing down his neck in a wincingly reluctant attempt to fulfil his obligation to the sponsor? How can we be sure that we are keeping up with Miss Marple’s reasoning as she reaches for the conclusion of her analysis of the way the easily-overlooked facts point to the least likely person in the room as the murderess when our concentration has been shattered by our noticing that the livery of the carefully displayed packet of tea biscuits that the dear lady simultaneously reached for is not quite in period with the noticeably branded computer games console not so very idly discarded on the arm of her armchair?

It’s bad enough that in-programme advertising breaks destroy the rhythm and continuity of movies and other material that was not designed for interruptions and impose an infrastructure of such interruptions on made-for-television programmes that otherwise would lay out a seamless argument. Sport has become unwatchable on television (unless your brain is inured to tuning out visual interference) because the venues, the equipment and indeed the players are festooned with logos and slogans. There have been sporting events (and music gigs too) where bouncers have refused entrance to ticket-holders unless they surrender some item they are carrying that bears the brand name of a sponsor’s rival. Lately it seems – the only sport I see on television is in snatches on news bulletins so the developments that I notice may have been a long time coming – there are animated hoardings around the edges of football pitches, expressly designed to take the eye and so rob the play itself of attention. In other sports played on greensward (but not yet in football, I think), sponsors’ logos are painted in perspective on the grass so that they are readable from the master camera position but appear merely as weird shapes from any other angle. What would happen if, say, a sliding rugby player did such violence to the logo that it no longer performed its promotional function? Would the game have to be stopped so that a re-spray could be effected? Are there painters standing by against that very eventuality?

More seriously, why do clubs want to collaborate in such destructive exercises? Don’t they care that viewers are distracted from the play? Because believe me, if the advertising did not succeed in its aim to take the eye from the sport, the advertisers that pay big money to be allowed so to disfigure sporting venues would not go to the trouble.

Truly, the thick end of the wedge that came into British broadcasting with the setting up of ITV in 1955 has arrived. People still argue that the BBC should give up the licence fee and be made to take commercials. Do these people not recognise advertising for what it is: pollution and mendacity in neon?

You may guffaw at the ferocious speech made in 1952 in the Lords by John Reith, the BBC’s first Director-General, against the prospect of commercial television: “Somebody introduced dog-racing into England; we know who for he is proud of it, and proclaims it urbi et orbi in the columns of Who’s Who. And somebody introduced Christianity and printing and the uses of electricity. And somebody introduced smallpox, bubonic plague and the Black Death. Somebody is minded now to introduce sponsored broadcasting into this country”. I find myself in Reith’s corner. In my view, television advertising has been the single most destructive, corrupting influence in Britain over the last fifty years. It has indeed been our Black Death.

Over the years, advertising has encroached more and more on the output. A so-called commercial hour – the amount of programme left in a one-hour slot after allowing for the advertising – has dropped and dropped. On ITV, twenty or so years ago, it was pretty rigidly set at 52 minutes. It now hovers just above the 45-minute mark, below which it fell some years back on American television. Half-hour programmes made for peak viewing routinely run to 23 minutes. In some slots, particularly those for American imports on Channel 4, the first ad break can intrude as early as before the first three minutes of the episode have wholly elapsed, even before the series title sequence. In the present advertising slump, late-night transmissions often carry nothing but programme trails during the commercial breaks; even so, the culture demands that the transmission must still be interrupted, even if for fewer than 90 seconds.

Advertising is a blight. It is a blanket of lies laid across the urban and rural landscape, a succession of promises that cannot be delivered and guarantees that will not be honoured. It undermines our self-image, promotes greed and acquisitiveness, proposes absurd ideals of how we should look and live and consume, distorts and undermines language and makes prostitutes of all those actors and others in the public eye foolish enough to be corrupted by its easy money. (“Oh but it’s far from easy. It’s really concentrated and very demanding” – “Selling dodgy financial services is harder than playing Lear? Then you’re not playing Lear right”).

Advertising insinuates itself into our most intimate places, our most domestic circumstances, undermining our assumptions that our surfaces are clean, that our bottoms are properly wiped, that our periods do not impede us, that our children are properly cared for, that our time is not wasted in preparing food that we can buy ready-made, that our teeth are sparkling and our breath sweet, that we have not missed the opportunity to sue for compensation or to compare prices on some website, that our homes smell of the most harmonious blend of chemicals, that we have full cover and have acquired every diversion that our children might fancy, that we conform. Adland rarely posits any world that is not spotless, flawless, whole, wholesome and antiseptic. On the rare occasions that it breaks out from the lovely home of Norman and Norma Normal, it courts danger and is usually slapped back by some busybody body or other. The centre of gravity of advertising has grown more down-market, vulgar and flash in recent years because that’s how society has leaned. But it remains quintessentially conventional. Try this simple test: when did you last see an ad that featured somebody Jewish but not funny?

Product placement is the second wave of the commercials marauding out of their designated “breaks”. The first was the sponsorship of programmes that allows a single brand’s brief promo to top and tail each fletch of each episode that falls within the deal. It’s noticeable that the programmes on ITV and Channel 4 (and, for aught I know, on Five if I ever watched it) that seal sponsorship deals are always proven successes – long-running regulars or US imports. (In the latter case, you wonder what the sponsor is financing. Do the acquisitions people make their bids for bought-in programmes in consultation with would-be sponsors? That would give advertisers an actual say in programme policy, something that is supposed to be a breach of the various channels’ respective charters).

Now we are to have brands and logos flourished within programmes, doing potentially fatal violence to the suspension of disbelief that drama requires and the trust in fair dealing that, for instance, competitive game and talent shows depend upon. Such product placement is already familiar in roadshow movies made in Hollywood and after the Hollywood model. The James Bond franchise, for instance, has long attempted to defray a portion of its eye-watering capital costs by embracing placements and even endorsements, but this element has grown more irksome of late. Notoriously, Daniel Craig’s Bond now sports a particular brand of wristwatch. I don’t wish to give it any more free publicity so let’s call it The Crapola. In Casino Royale (which, as it happens, has its terrestrial premiere on ITV this coming Saturday), Bond is asked if his “nice watch” is a Rolex and replies stiffly: “No. Crapola”. That this perfectly stilted exchange has been dragged in kicking and screaming merely to allow the production company to take the Crapola Corporation for hundreds of thousands of dollars is never going to be justification enough for a bad filmic moment.

What kind of numbskull invests in a watch purely because a fictional character is characterised as favouring it? It’s not as if Ian Fleming designated Crapola as the brand of watch that 007 would wear. This is not an artistic, character-driven choice, it’s a pragmatic, fund-raising imposition. Down and down go the standards and no one cares as long as someone makes considerably more moolah than is strictly necessary. So stand by for the inevitable arrival of this sort of inorganic intrusion in ITV’s regular programming next year: “It’s extraordinary that you should perceive that he did the murder, Miss Marple. Whatever is your secret?” “Lil-lets, of course”.

007 Omigod ...