Fred Basset by Alex Graham for June 18, 2024

I know, right! Some of them can get so dramatic, and you gotta wonder, although most commercials nowadays are for cars (who cares?) or drugs (really don’t care) or some other snoozy thing. I’d love to see a paint commercial.

If Fred is colorblind, he may wonder why people use paint.

Anything to get your attention, right?

I probably won’t comment tomorrow. I will be going with some friends from our town of Chester in Cheshire to the town of Ludlow in neighbouring Shropshire. It is just a daycation so I will be back on Thursday.

Fred how did you turn on the TV ?

Yellow paint?

Here in the U.S. most of our advertising is something along the lines of “Without this drug, you cannot survive!”(Then proceed to tell us about the 100 horrible side effects)

A beautiful girl always grabs everyone’s attention. Make or female

Commercials drove me off of TV back in the ’70s. Never returned.

Poor thing. They don’t allow prescription drug ads. He’d be lost here. He’d never figure out that the ED drug isn’t to make you a better dancer or that when it’s a bunch of fat girls dancing, it’s a diabetes drug ad.

In Chicago,we are being treated to cartoon dancng bears singing about wiping their butt and human women telling us how they stink “down there” and here’s a deodorant special for it. And they play over and over. Disgusting.

I remember a commercial for colored contact lenses that infuriated me. It showed a romantic, foggy scene, a train pulling away. A woman standing in the back of the train, waving. A guy running after the train, also waving. Voiceover (male): I’ll never forget her; her hair as golden as a wheatfield…her eyes as brown as…as brown as…[rewind sound] as BLUE as the summer sky…" As a brown-eyed girl with low self-esteem to begin with, it made me so mad that I literally screamed, causing my husband to come running from the other room to see what was wrong.

Nice! How about the musical tribute to that most expensive of drugs, Jardiance?

Only slightly related…but I miss analog TV and stereo. I understood how it all worked. But I never kept up with digital stuff. Oh well, I’m old.

Could be worse, it could be any ad that ends with somebody telling you to talk to your doctor

I would love to see no more commercials!

Often I’ll remember a commercial but I couldn’t tell you what it was for.

Sounds like an ad for LBJ.

Fred a lot of commercials stink

Now you’ve got me thinking of a paint commercial from when I was a kid—but it was local to the Philadelphia area. A neighbor kid came up on Phillies player Tug McGraw painting his house and asked, “Hey, Tug, is Mrs. McGraw making you paint the house today?” “Oh, no!” Tug answered. “I’m doing it because I like using MAB paints, blah blah blah…” Then his wife poked her head out the door… “Frank Edwin McGraw, you still haven’t painted the front!” Tug smiled sheepishly. The kid said, “Catch you later…Edwin?!”

How about those old ads for…how shall I put this…feminine hygiene products? Just once I’d like to see an ad with a guy strolling through a field of flowers, with a voiceover saying, “Jock itch is a problem that affects us all…”