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.
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]
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.
On one of the few remaining broad footpaths that hasn’t been turned into a narrow carpark I have noticed a strange phenomenon more than a few times of late. A pedestrian approaches from behind (I of course am walking along minding my own business). The footsteps draw closer and closer until the walker overtakes me and then pulls in in front of me, sometimes slowing down after the exertion of accelerating to overtake so that I in turn have to overtake him. People definitely spend too much time in their cars.
Sitting on a bus one day I saw three different people reach for their pockets at the same time. This is usually a sign that inspectors have got on and I reached for my ticket. But there were no inspectors. The three people each took out a mobile phone. Mobile phone companies here constantly pester you with unbelievably bad special offers – I suspect that all three passengers were with the same network and received the same invitation to spend more money.
Maths has been made a compulsory subject in secondary school again. This is not the belated repair of some Communist era neglect. Maths was decompulsorised post 1989.
You should be very afraid. A poster campaign is currently advising us all to take AIDS tests. “Women cheat too,” the posters cheerfully remind us. Another set of posters urges us to take our flu vaccinations, helpfully pointing out that “the flu can kill too.”
And now for Saturday night at the movies. It’s well-known by now that non-Polish films are generally ruined by being accompanied by a voiceover (one voice does every character). But it’s worse than that. A quick survey of commercial TV channels last Saturday showed that Polsat devoted 22% of film time to ads and the lottery; TVN devoted 14% to ads; for TV4 the figure was 17% and on TVN7 it was 19%. This is why watching films on TV is such a marathon event. The most modest of films balloons to a two-hour plus epic. It’s especially tiring for the little kiddies: the 100 minute film “102 Dalmations” (Polsat) had 25 minutes of ads. On the other hand, if you’re watching late-night B-movie slashers things are a little better. TV4’s percentage of ads shown during films would be 21% if the horror film “Dorian” (2.10 am) were left out of the calculations. A cynic might even say that the presence of “Dorian” and its mere 6 minutes of ads makes the TV channel look good by bringing down that percentage. A cynic, that is. Just a cynic.
Word comes my way of a book by the name of There’s an Egg in my Soup by one Tom Galvin describing his experiences as an Irishman in Poland. It sounds awful but that may well be the fault of the publicity machinery behind the book. Here’s the cliché ridden summary on the publisher’s website:
Queues for groceries, unfathomable bus timetables, inexplicable traditions and truly bizarre soup – this is Poland in the mid-1990s, where Tom Galvin innocently went as a trainee teacher… Tom spent five years dealing with long and freezing winters, lack of good food, loneliness and hardship, as he discovered the misery as well as the joy of Polish life. He returned in 2007, to find surprising changes to the country that had been his home for the first years of his working life.
Queues, bad food and hardship – ah yes, brings back memories. To be sure – of the eighties, not the nineties, but perhaps his publishers have picked up the Polish authors’ fascination for accurate detail: how else could Mr. Galvin have spent five years here in the mid 90s and only return in 2007? I might add here that Polish bus timetables, despite recent slips in standards, are models of clarity and accuracy especially compared to the miserable specimens on display (sometimes) in roaring, modern Ireland.
Galvin is also ill-served by Bridget Hourican’s lazy, preening (”my own Grand Tour was spent in St Petersburg and Budapest”) review in the Irish Times. She spills the out-of-date clichés too:
“Your bathroom’s full of cockroaches? I have to share a communal loo.”
“bread queues and unravelling Orwellian bureaucracies out east”
“For five years he lived in an apartment with no TV” (the horror! The horror! Next we’ll be hearing that he had no car!)
Which brings me to my point: Poland is a thriving, thrusting, dynamic, modern state. Socially, culturally and aesthetically, it could not be further away from the stereotypes peddled in the west. As this clip from a popular TV show will demonstrate:
On a bus stop I saw an ad for Telekomunikacja Polska* and Orange and Dell computers. It’s accompanied by a lavish (read: finger-down-the throat) TV ad campaign. It’s a great offer: you can go to a shop (Orange’s I think) and - wait for it - buy not only a computer but also connection to the internet. And that’s it! I think you’ll agree that presenting the opportunity to buy two things in one shop (e.g. fruit and vegetables) as an “offer” takes some neck. I went to their web site and checked the details. Here’s one of the “benefits:”
laptop DELL do odebrania w dniu zawarcia umowy
a Dell laptop yours to collect on the day you sign the agreement
In other words, when you buy the computer, you get to own it. There’s also an allegedly promotional price, carefully quoted without the VAT - you can do the sums yourself, mook - but no indication of what the computer would cost in any other shop, or what it cost before the “promotion” or what it would cost if bought outside of the promotion. But hurry! The so-called promotion lasts only as long as stocks but in any case not longer than until the end of the year.
Meanwhile Vision Express is running a charming TV ad for all the sniggering teenagers out there in need of glasses. It shows a guy reading the letters chart in an optician’s. The letters are “OMG,” “WTF,” “STFU.”
* A notorious abuser of its monopoly. But not to worry, it’s a private monopoly.
As you approach Kraków, or any other town in Poland, it becomes clear that when it comes to advertising billboards, anything goes. Confirmation of the abundant evidence of the outraged senses comes this week on the pages of Polityka, from the lips of one Jacek Maria Stokłosa:
Several years ago all provisions concerning protection of public space were removed from building and roads statutes. All in the name of the broadly understood free economy. However, the belief that the market would on its own regulate the chaos, because, for example, shopkeepers would see the advantage of creating elegant streets, proved illusory.
Anyone who really believed that had obviously not being paying attention to the aesthetic feast of the senses that is commercial Polish television.
Advertisers are easy enough targets at the best of times: a car manufacturer is trying to persuade gullible Poles that its new car can see around corners. (Cretinous slogan: “C’mon” - in English of course, though it’s a German firm operating in Poland.)
But when they supply the ammunition themselves… Here’s the slogan of one ad agency: “Wyobraźnia pod kontrolą” - “Imagination under control.” And they call it a creative industry.
I came across an ad in a current affairs magazine today. Here it goes: “Most women put quality first! 100% fewer hot flushes, 94% less excessive sweating, 98% less sleeplessness. [brandname]. Active extract SE 2000. Choose [brandname] medicine whose [sic] effectiveness and safety have been confirmed by scientific research!”
Phew, I thought. Those other medicines that had the side effects of excessive sweating, hot flushes and sleeplessness must have been awful. I wonder what it is that they (and [brandname]) cure?
I know what you’re thinking: of course those aren’t the side effects: they’re the symptoms (of menopause) that the medicine treats. But I cheated: I didn’t tell you that the ad features a big picture of a woman aged about 28. Threw me right off the menopausal track. I was under the impression women stopped having periods in their 40s and, more usually, 50s.
If Three Monkeys is worth reading, it's because of the calibre of our contributors. A small regular group of writers publish in Three Monkeys, but much of the work is submitted by emerging writers worldwide. If you have a piece that you think would fit well in the magazine, check our submission guidelines here. We'd love to hear from you.
