And Now The Ads

 I used to enjoy the cinema advertisements, the ones you see before the film and before the trailers.  They are now but a shadow of what they used to be having changed significantly even in the six or seven years that I have been back going to the cinema.  They are now dominated by public service adverts for the British Army and the Royal Navy, the National Lottery and things like getting jobs in child care, breast cancer awareness which much as it is an important message it goes on way too long, the King's Trust (Trust always spoken with a northern accent vowel) and being told that 900,000 young people are out of work, the equivalent of the third largest city in Britain.  (This always begs the question for me as to why do we have vacancies and why are we told that it is vital that immigrants keep coming to fill the vacancies when so many of us are out of work?)  That is a rhetorical question so don't bother to answer it.  The other advert is for funerals and at that point I cover my eyes with my hat as the ad shows the lifespan from birth to death of an elderly woman going through all smiley things in life and skipping through the decades until  one day flowers and death. Does this really make people sign up for funeral plans?

 I used to like the Virgin flights adverts.  They don't come up anymore.  I suppose so many people are streaming at home that the advertisers are deserting the cinemas.   (It is a sad time for cinemas and with Warner Bros taken over by Paramount having pipped Netflix at the post.  Either one of them winning is not good for the cinema industry.) 

 Back to the ads.  Apart from those there are a few EV car ads which with cars at £35,000 to £50,000 plus and all looking the same (SUVs)  do not hold any interest for me and not at all like the old days of ads for Minis and Cortinas and the odd Jaguar and Lotus which I think we all took a bit of interest in and wondered which one might be the latest Bond car and did the Lotus have a Norfolk registration of interest to us yokels. 

There remains one advert that comes up every time I go and that is an annoying holiday ad for TUI holidays where a very slim girl with a big smile dives into a perfect swimming pool with no screaming kids and no sunbeds filled with towels/and or bodies and nothing the slightest bit imperfect or vile having earlier got on to a plane loaded with smiling people not all scrambling to place their wheely suitcases in the overhead locker and not all hot and sweaty and squashed in but all sitting peacefully and smiling at the camera in perfect clothes of course. 

I was just reading that a lady, described as elderly, aged 71, (elderly?)  went missing in South Africa on a TUI holiday so all was not so hunky dory with the lovely swimming pool and the lovely blue sky.  (TUI used to be Thomson Holidays in case you are interested and they got swallowed up by a German company who were engineers or manufacturers I think and reinvented themselves as a holiday company). She has never been found, no remains, nothing, and it is thought she was murdered for her body parts which sell well on some South African bush markets for witch craft.  She walked alone when I would probably have already gone to bed if on holiday even if it was broad daylight and not too sure of the area, but that is by the by.  She disappeared.  The holiday tour went on without her and that was the end of the poor 'elderly'  British woman.  TUI still run the holiday but have declined to tell guests about the incident because they do not want to scare them.  I always have that funny feeling about TUI when I see that advert described above of the girl diving into the swimming pool.  I now feel like 'told you so'.   Nothing is ever as hunky dory as that on holidays.