A Matter of Timing

You’ve waited all week. The fire is on, the beverage of choice on the coffee table and the cushions suitably plumped. The credits to your favourite programme roll and then you get a full 3 minutes of the show before… advert break.

Annoying isn’t it? Why can’t an advert break be halfway through the programme? Why is it 3 minutes in?

The reason is that you are trapped. It’s a good programme and the network knows it, so they can force adverts on you, confident that you’re going nowhere. Billy Piper is just about to get her clothes off – are you really going to go channel surfing and risk missing it? I think not…

On the other hand, the adverts are after about 20 minutes during that rerun of M*A*S*H. It’s 2:00am and you and a student in Keele are the only people watching. They’re not going to risk losing you quickly. If they put the adverts on, you’ll flick over and start watching Tour of Duty on another channel. By the time you get to the adverts, you figure that you might as well hang around to see if Hawkeye gets away with this week’s jape.

Most of the time, of course, every channel seems to have adverts on at the same time. I’ve got 17,000 channels available and sometimes I stubbornly refuse to watch the ads. The trouble is that by the time you have flicked through 17,000 ad breaks, you have forgotten what you were watching in the first place.

There is, however, one certainty when it comes to adverts. As soon as tea is ready and you switch on the Simpsons it is ALWAYS the break.

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