Painkillers and Pillows

I have long been of the opinion that it is easier to find entertaining and thought provoking television by watching the commercial rather than the programmes even if the thought occasionally is "Oh my God!" A couple of ads caught my eye the other night which really brightened up the shows they were slumming with.

The first commercial was for pillows. A voice over announced in serious tones that things live in your pillows. The word "ecosystem" was used. Apparently after a certain period of time pillows become home to a wider variety of life forms than the Amazon rain forest. I must admit I approached my bed with a certain amount of trepidation that evening. I stared at the pillow for five minutes just in case anything moved. Nothing did so I plumped up my pillow, no doubt causing widespread carnage, and went to sleep. Here is my simple rule of thumb; if it is too small to be seen it isn't a life form its a disease. Not that I felt any better about resting my weary head on the sleep conducive equivalent of Typhoid Mary.

Naturally the pillow company had a solution to the problem of pillows acting as larger, fluffier plague rats. Each of their pillows is stamped with a date, prior to this date they are pristine, gleaming examples of pillowy goodness. After this date they become rancid disease bags that will burn your face off as you sleep. The implication is, of course, that after this date you should rush out and buy yourself some new pillows or, you know, clean the ones you've got. Personally I think the ad made a tactical error by using the word ecosystem. With ecosystems under threat all over the planet I doubt if environmentalists are going to be pleased by plans to exterminate one completely. I don't particularly want to have to cross a picket line of jeering greenies waving signs like "Save the pillow mite" every time I decide my bedding needs to be changed.

Commercial number two was noteworthy for the incredibly low opinion the ad makers apparently had of their target audience. They were advertising one of those codeine analgesics which are good for headaches, muscle soreness and crushing a dozen into your last glass of bourbon when you couldn't be bothered making another trip to the bottle shop. To their credit the advertisers didn't emphasize that last point. What they did do, surprisingly, was give a number of sensible and simple suggestions you might want to implement rather than taking their product. A glass of water, some fresh air, a rest. Any of these could indeed help with a headache or muscle pain. Alternatively you could go out to the chemist and spend good money on a box of pills. Obviously the advertisers think their target audience will find things like drinking water, breathing outside and going to sleep too much like hard work. What's depressing is they're quite possibly correct. Let's get something straight right now; if you find the preceding methods to be too difficult to contemplate then you don't need an analgesic you need a complete blood transfusion. It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to have a priest standing by either.

I think it was the cheerful assumption that their target market are a pack of wretched, bone idle deadbeats that made this commercial appealing to me. It was a mistake to run the pillow commercial immediately afterwards though. The kind of people the analgesic marketers were targeting are unlikely to go to the effort of changing their pillows even if there was a colony of mountain gorillas living in it.