Personal column

Brian Inglis

"What makes us tick?" the Advertising Standards Authority asks in a full page advertisement, replying to recent criticisms.

Mysteriously, most of the page is devoted to a tick (the 'kind used' when -checking off a list)

blown up to about fifty times lifesize. This means that it comes out looking muddy, as print does under a microscope; the intention presumably being to remind us that an advertisement which at first sight appears nice and clean may on closer investigation prove very grubby indeed. The Authority, the ad says, is "an independent body set up by the advertising industry to make sure that advertisements don't break our code." In fact, the Authority is dependent on the advertising industry, which set it up for the same good reason that the cinema industry set up censorship, to protect itself from government regulation. The code, the Authority claims,„ "demands what you have a right to expect: that all advertisements should be legal, decent, honest and truthful." It would be comforting to believe that the members of the Authority can define what is, and what is not, decent, honest and truthful, a problem whose solution has baffled saints and philosophers throughout history; but in practice they are constantly guilty of one form of intellectual dishonesty, amounting to indecency, which they do not even pretend to justify. The implications of an advertisement are much more important, from the point of view of its pulling-power, than the written word. The implications of most cigarette advertisements are that smoking is a healthy thing for the young to do. But do you hear the Authority telling the tobacco companies to refrain from this particularly nasty type of deception? You do not.

Nor are you likely to, so long as there are ministers around like Dr David Owen, "deeply regretting" last week that the industry does not listen to his advice. If they don't, why doesn't he make them?

The drug market

Easily the most dishonest advertisements, though (and on occasion, some of the most indecent) appear in the medical magazines; yes, even the Lancet and the British Medical Journal. Both of them take elaborate pains to ensure that reports on the effects of drugs are not printed until after elaborate and protracted trials; yet both allow drug companies to advertise those drugs with dubious and misleading claims, which sometimes actually conflict with what has appeared in reports of tests. In The Medicine Men, to be published shortly by Temple Smith, Dr Vernon Coleman cites a number of cases; the most notorious being the launching of the anti-rheumatism drug, Naprosyn, a couple of years ago, when the company, Syntex, actually managed to get their product plugged by a disc jockey on BBC radio. The line the promotion took was that there were few reported side-effects — unusual in such drugs. As Dr Coleman found when he investigated, this was correct; few side effects had been reported because, so far as he could ascertain, no trials had been undertaken of the drug in general practice (for which it was being marketed). When patients, hearing it was the greatest, began to clamour for it, reports of side effects soon began to flow in.

Now, Syntex admits that treatment with the drug can bring on rashes, abdominal disorder, epigastric distress, headache, inability to concentrate, insomnia, thrombocytopenia, tinnitus, vertigo and prolonged bleeding time. This 'does not prevent Syntex from recommending Naprosyn "for peaceful nights and active days". The activity, presumably, consists of rushing to the chemist to get drugs to treat the prolonged bleeding time, vertigo, tinnitus, thrombocytopenia, insomnia, inability to concentrate, headache, epigastric distress, abdominal disorder and rashes.

Traffic problems

1 was heartened to read a report by Charles Cook in the Guardian that the Superbus, in Los Angeles, and the Dial-a-Bus, in Harlow, are both in their different ways attracting customers. The difficulty of sorting out the traffic situation in towns has been that private car owners do not care to switch to buses so long as the bus service is slow, uncomfortable and inadequate; but the bus service must be slow, uncomfortable and inadequate so long as private car owners block the streets. Bus lanes, in London at least, only touch the fringe of this problem; and for the life of me I cannot see the point of having bus-and-taxi-only streets, if no effort is made to enforce that rule (have you ever seen Oxford Street without a stream of private cars and vans?) The present condition of the motor industry should surely provide an ideal opportunity to lay down a policy for planned phased withdrawal of the private car not just from city centres but — at least in rush hours — from all main bus routes; with the motor industry providing, instead, alternative transport ranging from the Superbus (for commuters from a distance, with a buffet, television and whatnot) to the Dial-a-Bus, providing the equivalent of branch lines on a railway, but with the supreme asset of door-to-door flexibility.

BBC English

In his radio programme, Whatever happened to BBC English? David Lloyd James provided

some nostalgic examples of the old announcer style ("no contrived hesitations, no mannerisms"); but he rather timidly refrained from illustrating the horrors which Bernard Levin

has been denouncing from his Times pulpit. Bernard is wrong, though, to blame the

teleprompter for the growth of the habit of saying "thee Prime Minister" or "ay grocer's daughter." It could be heard on radio long before the teleprompter was invented; one of the by-products of the process whereby radio was liberated from Reith, with individuals striving not for faultless speech but for ordinary colloquial cadences.

One of the recordings Lloyd James included was of that highly skilled radio performer A. J. Alan; and it was liberally bespattered with 'er's, to lend verisimilitude. As it happens, the contrived 'er' sits more easily before a noun: and "thee, er, Prime Minister" is legitimate. When `er' became a sign of amateurishness, or nerves, it went out of fashion professionally; but the 'thee' remained. Television's contribu tion was simply to convert what on radio had been an affectation into a necessity; because an announcer who sounds as if he is reading from a script (which he is) while looking you in the eye will also sound odd, even shifty. To convince you that he is not deceiving you, in other words, he has to deceive you, with pauses and, yes, even deliberate fluffs.

Personal pet aversions: (1) the way Independent Television News reporters sign off with name, location and a plug for ITN.

(2) the Dalek of Jerusalem: BBC's radio man in Israel.

(3) weather forecasters who say 'maximum values' when they mean simply 'maximum temperatures:

Brian Inglis, who was editor of The Spectator 1959-62, has most recently published The Forbidden Game: A Social History of Drugs (Hodder and Stoughton £4.95)