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At first I put it down to my intoxicated state as I looked at the ad on the TV screen over the bar. Also, the sound was turned off. But I saw the ad again in a friend’s house and it really does go like this: a well-dressed man gets into a taxi where he is regaled by the taxi driver’s pearls of wisdom, ending with something like “you should invest in people.” The man leaves the taxi and walks into a board meeting. It turns out he’s Banker, a Master of the Universe. And what does he tell his fellow Masters of the Universe? You should invest in people. In what country would a bank proudly trumpet the fact that its executives rely on fourth hand clichés overheard from the lips of taxi drivers? In what land would your postman offer you financial advice? What country has never heard the cautionary tale about accepting stock market tips from shoe shine boys? Poland, of course.

The (TV) media in Poland has been getting very exercised about the A1HN1 flu lately. It’s running wild in Ukraine. The government here hasn’t bought enough vaccination shots. Somebody died in Poznań but we’re not exactly sure of what. The human rights ombudsman is threatening to take the government to court if jabs are not provided, action taken etc. etc. Thank God for the fourth estate!

One thing the TV is not so concerned about is the steady flow of profits from ads for snake oil cures for the common cold and the flu. These ads constantly encourage people with flu symptoms to pop another pill and go to work with their fellow citizens – which is exactly what you should not be doing if there is (is there?) an epidemic.

You know you’re getting old when something like this not only fails to move you but leaves you baffled, wondering why on earth anyone would want to subject themselves to it. Today’s Gazeta Wyborcza carries an ad for a night of advertisements in the cinema. That’s right: you go to the cinema and watch ads for a few (six!) hours. And it’s not free either! I can’t help the exclamation marks and italics. Imagine paying to watch six hours of advertisements!

Some years ago the EU prevented tobbacco advertisers from claiming their cigarettes were “mild” or “low tar” but now it turns out that people are so stupid they even think fags in a light coloured pack are easier on the lungs than fags in a dark pack. You just can’t legislate away stupidity but I suppose in a few more years it will be illegal to sell cigarettes in white boxes. What a change from the heady days of widespread, well-informed, intelligent debate of fifty years ago! I found the following ad for cigarettes in a 1958 magazine. There are three line drawings and a fourth panel has a picture of the offending articles:

[Picture of couple in cinema. On screen a man is smoking a pipe]

“What a dreamboat! My ideal hero!”

[Girl is cold shouldering her date]

“What a date! I’m batting zero!”

[Couple strolls out of cinema, man with pipe, girl on his arm]

“Why you smoke a pipe too! Mm-mm! You’re for me!”

It’s old news now but still worth quoting:

Greece passed in January 2005 a ‘media transparency law’ that would have prevented 1% owners of media companies from participating in public sector contracts. In April 2005, the European Commission told Greece that the law violated EU law and threatened to freeze funds for Greek public works projects, leading eventually to Greece’s withdrawal of the law. [...] The story dramatically illustrates sensible, democratically needed legal reforms aimed at both preventing corruption of government and preserving the integrity of the media being sacrificed to supposed free trade principles.

(footnote 92, page 212 of C. Edwin Baker’s Media Concentration and Democracy, 2007.)

Baker is an American. Note: he writes the European Commission, not the parliament, which, according to Michael D. Higgins has tried to limit concentration of ownership: not very successfully, evidently, and yet we’re supposed to be interested in who gets elected to it.

One of the banks was kind enough to post a flyer to me advertising their credit card. On one side is written the benefits of using a credit card. Life is too short to read that but the other side has three pictures that say a great deal about the contempt we are to have for each other. Picture one: a man is seen handing his card to the disembodied hand of a shop assistant while talking on his mobile phone. That’s convenience: you don’t even have to dignify the overweight pleb behind the counter with the human speech act: you can save that for the people who count, the ones in your mobile phone’s memory. Picture two is perhaps a little less offensive. It shows a different man and a woman doing their shopping. The same disembodied hand (the shop assistant in all three pictures is identical in his/her anonymity) is accepting the card – from the man of course, not from the woman. In the third and last picture an old woman is paying. In her arms she holds a baby (actually it looks more like one of the oompa loompas in Willie Wonka’s factory). That’s the life: you don’t have to speak to workers providing you with goods and services and your ould one will look after the progeny you spawned with the foxy but penniless chick in picture two.

A good thing about the internet is it allows you to check if that vague feeling you had about the lie of the media land is correct. The vague feeling I had - vague because I don’t monitor newspapers - was that there has been a rash of articles about how this recession is not such a bad thing after all. You know: we (not I) had been getting a bit up ourselves, a bit stressed out by shopping. The vague feeling I have is that a crowd of lifestyle journalists have been giving the impression that a recession is like a holiday - welcome respite from the pressures of eating out, going skiing, investing in a second property and all that. So, have I been misled by quickly scanned headlines, snippets of articles read over shoulders on the bus? Not entirely. Here’s Brian O’Connell in the Irish Times (Friday, Sep 26th): “It’s official: the economy’s bust. Look on the bright side - this is a good time to be a customer…” Amazing: booms are good for consumerism but so are slumps.

Of course, the other good thing about the internet is you can also check to see if someone got in there ahead of you:  “I had written a light-hearted piece for the paper today in which I mentioned that a lot of media people seemed to be actually enjoying recession nostalgia and thinking that this latest recession is a good thing, and I open the Sunday Times and, honest to God, two of their main columnists are actually saying that this recession is a good thing.” That’s from Brendan O’Connor, not normally someone I would read, writing way back in July…

A danger with living abroad too long - and one I have failed to avoid - is to start thinking the second country, in my case Poland, is uniquely rubbish. A return to the mothership reassures you that it’s not just Poland - everything is shit.

I had thought, for example, that Polish advertisers were particularly egregious (”Annual percentage rate 0 - 15%”) but not a bit of it. (I should, in any case, have realised they hadn’t thought up their lies on their own, without guidance from their Western masters.) Take this stunningly generous special offer from an Irish mobile phone company: free calls and texts - for life! Written immediately below the headline offer, and not even hidden in small print, are words to the effect that you have to top up your account by 20 euros a month. On a second glance I noticed that the “free” calls can be made only to other customers of the same company.

As usual, the Simpsons put it more pithily: Homer dons his freshly fabric-softened cap and says “I really can feel three different kinds of freshness.”

Flicking around the TV channels in a friend’s house last night I caught a bit of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. As is usual with Polish TV there was a voiceover (not to be confused with dubbing). As is less usual, he talked viewers through the songs…

Watching a God-awful soap the other night I saw somebody pay for two or three items in a supermarket. The cost was exactly four zloties, which aroused my suspicions. Those suspicions were confirmed when the money was simply received. If you can’t be bothered faithfully reproducing simple things like the fact that everything costs 3.69, the cashier always asks if you have the exact change, you always get handed a receipt (a new, overzealously embraced law) and every transaction is accompanied by the electronic bleep of a scanner, why the hell spend a fortune on mocking up a studio to look like a supermarket? Why not just a bare stage? No props, no make-believe 19th century manors or 200 square metre-flats… Oh yeah, that would require acting.