Do you ever see something on your TV so annoying that you feel like throwing a brick at the screen?
Me, too!
So, if you’re fond of your TV, never let me into your house if I’m carrying a brick.
Currently top of my loathe list are Christmas adverts for supermarkets and department stores.
Usually filmed in August, most of them feature a smiling family wearing reindeer-patterned jumpers, crammed around a table so enormous an entire forest was felled to manufacture it, tucking into a mountain of turkey, beef, vegetables, Yorkshire puddings, beer, wine, fizzy pop and indigestion tablets.
No, it’s not like that in my house either. I never buy fizzy pop!
Before these ads were unveiled, several newspapers claimed viewers ‘couldn’t wait’ to see them.
I suggest that’s hype, fuelled by the PR companies behind the stores.
I can’t believe that even 10 percent of the population lead lives so dull they get excited about Christmas TV commercials, made to persuade us to part with our money.
These ‘tinsel and turkey’ commercials pale into insignificance compared to one for a well-known electrical goods superstore which I couldn’t believe the broadcasting authorities allowed on our screens.
It features a shop assistant trying to sell a customer a 50-inch HD TV with 360 degree Surround Sound. The assistant cheerfully says, without a hint of irony or one iota of shame . . .
“It’s what Christmas is all about”!
Seriously?
I’m aware not everyone’s religious these days and that atheists, Pagans, agnostics and Jedi Knights don’t believe that centuries ago in Bethlehem a certain baby boy (and not a sausage roll, as a chain of bakery stores recently suggested) was born in a manger.
Fair enough.
But, until shops start selling Christmas cards featuring “50-inch HD TVs with Surround Sound”, most of us know what Christmas is really all about.
Pass me that brick!