Why I fast-forward through the TV programmes to get to the ads

MOTHERS are fighting in toyshops over dolls fashioned after characters from a movie named Frozen. This is to satisfy their children this Christmas.

If I had a few bob to invest on next year’s must-have toy, I’d set up a factory to make Tommy McAnairy dolls. He’s the character in the ad warning you to get your carbon monoxide alarm, because, as he grimly ends the commercial, if you don’t, you may die.

I am nuts about Tommy, partly because he isn’t slender and ethereal, the way canaries are supposed to be. Tommy is thuggish, with a thick neck on him and sticky-up feathers on the top of his head, like a prominent politician who shall be nameless, because you never know where the appearance of thuggery ends and the reality begins. Tommy plays the banjo and sings while sitting on a bar stool, and his uncle, or maybe it was his grandfather, went down the mines, and keeled over, as any well-trained canary does when the ambient air gets low on oxygen. Once your pet canary turned its little claws up, at the bottom of the cage, you, as a miner, knew to get the hell out of there, fast, before you suffocated (or were shafted, if you’ll pardon the pun).

Tommy sings and talks like Ronnie Drew, and I abandon whatever I am doing anywhere in the house when I hear his gravelly tones. I can’t bear to miss the bit where he leans menacingly into the camera and threatens me with death. What a turn-on. It’s an admirably impossible ad that sets out to captivate children and adults alike, deliver a layered message, put the fear of God into them, and make them laugh, all at the same time. Not many full-length movies can do all of that. Even the man in my life likes it.

The man in my life and I are a ratings nightmare. Remember Jack Sprat and his wife? He could eat no fat and his wife could eat no lean, and so, between the two of them, they licked the platter clean. Or pointless fairytale words to that effect.

It’s the same with me and himself, except in relation to TV. He watches programmes. I watch ads. Mostly, he watches sport, some murder, and devotes the remainder of his viewing time to news and the weather forecast. It’s not just that he doesn’t watch ads (he automatically goes to make a cup of tea when they come on). It’s that he doesn’t see the ads. He would make any sponsor despair. Interrupt him in the middle of a football match and ask him about the name on the hoarding around the pitch, and he looks at you in wondering irritation: ‘Is there a name on the hoarding? Is there a hoarding? Why are you asking such a dumb question?’

I, on the other hand, don’t watch programmes at all. Never seen Fair City, Emmerdale, or the X Factor. I did get trapped, one day, in a situation that forced me to watch a bit of Coronation Street and, in the office the following morning, wondered aloud how the hell it was so popular.

“One of the characters last night lay with his eyes closed for so long, he might as well have been dead,” I said, only to find that the character was dead and that this was the high point of the Corrie season. I can’t remember how he died. Maybe he didn’t have a carbon monoxide alarm.

Even an unwilling glimpse of a soap opera establishes that they’re all about boring, moany people who spend most of their time in the local pub, who have affairs with each other with a singular lack of enthusiasm, and whose death rate is astonishingly high, even given their alcohol consumption. The real reason for the die-off of characters in soaps, of course, is that actors playing the characters get ideas above their financial station, or decide they want to do more serious work, and so their character falls off a roof or gets one of those ailments that requires a lot of chest-clutching.

The people in the ads are so much more attractive than the people in the soaps. My absolute favourite is the girl in the burglar alarm ad. She is a sunny little dote, so she is, when she accosts the burglars in the house and cheerily chats them up, explaining how she rang this key-holder and that key-holder (the key-holders popping out of alcoves and going ‘hi’ to the two flummoxed crooks), until she reaches the front door and announces that, having done all of the above, she then — sorry — rang the Guards. You’d take her home with you, just for her bouncy charm, although you’d probably have to pay Eircom PhoneWatch for a loan of her time.

She’s up there in attractiveness with the guy who looks like an overweight Colin Firth and whose life is dogged by vehicular disaster. Since I am possessed of a car which passed its NCT only a week ago, on its fourth tryout, I have particular sympathy with this bloke, whose neighbours crash their cars into other cars, while he winces and accidentally locks his own dog into the boot of his own car. Only that she clearly has a family of her own, I’d love him to meet the woman in the ad for a competing insurance company. She has her act much more together, but fate has it in for her, too, although in a nice way: The masked wrong ’un who reaches into the passenger seat of her car, to nick her handbag, is terribly nice about it. He apologises and gives the impression that to live up to his professional self-designation of ‘thief’, this is what he has to do.

The only person in an ad who seriously deserves smacking is Michael Parkinson, who comes on (I suspect this is on the murder, rather than the sports channel that himself watches) and announces that people often ask him to name his favourite guest.

“Tough question,” he says (which it isn’t) before failing to answer it (so why was it raised in the first place?) and going on to peddle some awful form of insurance that — if I remember it rightly — ensures that when you pop your clogs, your family won’t be impoverished by having to bury you.

I would prefer if my family were not impoverished by burying me, but I’m not that pushed if they bury me at all. If, to quote Tommy McAnairy, I end up dead, I won’t care if they put me in the black wheelie bin.

Although, now that I think about it, the brown bin might be better — I, and the rest of its contents, being organic and therefore guaranteed to break down quickly in the local landfill.