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Julian Cole

Sticking up far ad-free television

Fed-up with the lack of suitable programmes in which to promote their products, big advertisers in the United States have decided to make their own.

A consortium of firms has put up money for family-friendly shows, claiming there is too much sex and violence on the small screen.

This development will satisfy those who foolishly believe the adverts are better than the programmes they interrupt, a claim made so often it is almost accepted as true.

This is a shame, for adverts are no such thing - what they are is brief, sometimes pleasing to the eye, often plain irritating, and quickly gone; not better, just shorter.

The notion that advertisers might want to make programmes terrifies me, though, like many new ideas, it isn't new at all. Soap operas derive from 1930s American radio, when soap and detergent companies sponsored 15-minute daily dramas.

The format moved to television in the 1950s, and the programmes swelled to 30 minutes. Procter and Gamble once even set up a television studio to produce its own dramas, which is interesting as the detergent manufacturer is one of the firms now bemoaning the lack of decent programmes, alongside General Motors and IBM. Just what sort of programmes such advertisers might desire isn't fully explained, beyond the cosy catch-all of 'family entertainment'.

Being advertisers, one thing you can be copper-bottomed sure of is that they will want a good return for their money. Does this mean product placement is on the horizon? Or that that washing powder will be used as a handy plot device, a murder weapon perhaps ("It looks like he was bubbled to death, sir"); but no, that's not wholesome enough.

Advertisers should have no place in shaping programmes, and anyway the demands of making adverts are entirely different.

Adverts sell you something; programmes should be free to explore. Even this analysis is not strictly true, for television adverts often sell themselves and their highly-paid creators, while losing the product in the mists of cleverness.

Also, adverts can be infuriatingly oblique, leading to a game of passing interest for the bored viewer, who can try to guess what is being flogged by the peculiar, arty images swirling before their eyes.

So will these same advertisers make programmes that look intriguing but whose content is entirely hidden until the last minute, when it dawns on you that you have been watching a cleverly camouflaged medical drama?

All of which ties in nicely with the never-ending debate about the BBC licence fee. This remains in many ways a bargain, whatever the self-interested complaints of commercial television companies or newspapers with television interests.

The row over the digital supplement, which has been suggested by the economist Gavyn Davies, mostly ignores the fact that the BBC digital levy would apply only to people watching digital television, whereas at present an estimated £10 is taken from all licence fee payers to subsidise the new technology.

Under Mr Davies' plan, the ordinary fee would come down in price. It has become fashionable to say the BBC ought to accept adverts and a newspaper poll this week found that 65 per cent of people supported that view. Well, more fool them, I'd say.

Once that happens, there will be no advert-free haven left, and the commercial stations will be at liberty to stoop to American levels, in which adverts barge in on the programmes much more rudely and regularly than they do here.

Besides, it is a myth to say commercial television is free. We all pay for ITV programmes every time we go shopping, as hefty advertising costs are built into the products we buy. The BBC has the licence fee; and ITV has a supermarket sweep.

19/8/99

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.