Television
To the moon and back
John Diamond
If you want to determine the precise rate at which the material world is speeding towards its doom, spend a depressing hour or two in front of the Lifestyle Shopping Channel on satellite TV. Me, I can't get enough of it. Older readers will remember Britain's own, original shopping programmes like Jim's Inn CI say, Jim — that's a super new lawnmower you've got there! And so quick too! A Lawnmaster, isn't it? I bet it was awfully expensive!' 'Surprisingly enough, Tom, it was less than five guineas! And that included this sturdy grass-box to catch those pesky lawn clippings!') with the late, great Jimmy Handley, who spoke almost entirely in exclamation marks. Lifestyle Shopping is the same, but without the grip- ping plots. This is to say that these adverts last 30 minutes each, come with hosts, pre- senters and special, special guests and pass themselves off as TV shows. I give you, by way of example, Amazing Discoveries, with your host, the affable Michael Levey. Each episode of Amazing Discoveries has cordial Michael and his audience struck dumb — but not half dumb enough for my `Would you mind if I flicked a duster over your window on the world?' liking — by some brilliant new discovery which the rest of us first saw at the 1968 Ideal Home Exhibition. Given the show's transatlantic provenance, what is truly amazing is that Michael plays foil to the very same British hucksters who were demonstrating them at Earl's Court. You know the men: the ones touting amazing vegetable cutters from which they produce mounds of autoclaved tomatoes and from which the rest of us extract chunks of tasty and nutritious jaggedly sawn finger-joints. Each night Michael runs on, promises us that tonight we'll be really amazed and introduces us to John, a dapper little Briton, already stripped to sell in his braces and bow tie, who, beserker that he is, immediately sprays a car with lighter fluid and sets fire to it! Michael can't believe this! Put it out at once! That fire will surely cause unsightly carbon marks all over the bonnet! No, no, says John and whips out a can of Aurio. Whoosh! The mark has gone! Michael is gobsmacked! The audience cheer! But that's not all! You know how it is when a car gets old? Well look at this! Whoosh! Old car is new! Michael is speechless! The audience go wild! Can this really be advertising?!
Well, yes, it can. At intervals the reassur- ing words 'advertising feature' are flashed up on the bottom of the screen. Like we thought this was Panorama or something, right?
Throughout the demonstration dapper John explains the technology behind Aurio.
What this is, you see, Michael, is Space- Age technology, Mike. They're polymers, Mike, like what went to the moon, Mike. The space shuttle was protected by poly- mers, Michael, and the thing is, Mike, that this is a polymer too!
Well so is a potato a polymer up to a point. But nothing gets on Amazing Discov- eries unless there's a chance that Buzz Aldrin himself used the hi-tech product to
make tasty and nutritious French Space- Fries as he was circling the Earth, and so every item is reduced to its scientific basics.
Polish is a polymer, rust is oxidisation, a dishmop becomes a product of space-age fibre technology. It's like listening to a man whose scientific knowledge was culled from the Eagle in 1962.
The upshot of all of this is that every ten minutes the advertising show has its own internal advertising break in which an excited British voice tells us who to ring to give our credit card number to. And here is revealed the most Amazing Discovery of all: the reason that none of the articles on sale here is available in the shops. For you would have thought that were the amazing car polishes or vegetable choppers or dish- mops as amazing as they tell us, then every shop in the country would be scrambling to sell them. But then if you saw a car polish on sale in your local Halfords at roughly £11 a jar, would you buy it?
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