Why is there a depressingly accurate generalisation that the better an advert is, the less frequently it will be broadcast?
For instance, there was a fantastic advert for Wagon Wheels in which a cowboy asked for eggs for breakfast and was offered a very silly, very fast, very dextrously spoken list of ways in which an egg might be served. Naturally, this list got sillier and siller, also further and further away from real egg serving techniques. (It culminated by mentioning bizarrely-named footballer Ugo Ehiogu.) You had to be there, but it was tremendously silly. Naturally, I only ever saw it once. By contrast, sodding blue telephones asking you if you're looking for a low-cost loan have been cropping up twice a day for the last eighteen months.
Attempting to answer the question, I guess it could well be true that the less frequently you see an advert, the less it irritates and the more rose-tinted an image you have of it, rightly or wrongly. Indeed, when you only ever see an advert once, you carry a highly idealised memory of its good parts in your mind and seldom remember its silly parts. That's a boring explanation, though. I'd still pay good money for a tape with the first generation of Tango adverts, the ones with Ray "Butch" Wilkins giving a voiceover, albethey an inspiration for copycat violence or otherwise.
Steve Le Fevre, host of passable interactive "Bob's Full House IV" show "The Biggest Game In Town", has parlayed his experience fronting a live national game show into a role as the spokesman for an online loans company with a digit 4 in its name. Not a step forward in my book - indeed, the sort of probable artistic suicide from which it is all but impossible to recover.
Sadly, Derek Griffiths, a minor deity of children's TV for those of us born in 1970s Britain (indeed, possibly one of the very first black children's TV hosts in this country along with Floella Benjamin?) has no better web page about him than this. Gap in the market, methinks. He appears at #42 in this affectionate list of minor TV presenters, which gets the spirit of Griffiths' achievements correct. Anyhow, I heard a very familiar voice on an advert for Portland Direct (cheap holiday company) today. As the Griffiths face doesn't appear on-screen, it's forgivable - but, Derek, surely there have to be better ways to make a buck. For instance, wouldn't Derek make a fantastic minor celebrity for a stunt on Banzai?
