'Nothing in This World Is Worth Buying'

A reader has asked me and others to recall a favorite television commercial from childhood and write about it. I declined. Two risks accompany the request. The first, campiness, I find simple to ignore. Camp prompts cheap and easy laughs, and feels dishonest. Laughs should be earned. Nostalgia, too, is cheap and easy. Roger Scruton described it as “an unhealthy state of mind,” and people my age seem particularly susceptible to it. 

During World War II, having returned to England from Italy, Max Beerbohm broadcast talks and readings on the BBC. Of them, Rebecca West wrote, “I felt that I was listening to the voice of the last civilized man on earth. Max’s broadcasts justify the entire invention of broadcasting.” On September 18, 1942, Beerbohm spoke on “Advertisements,” which had proliferated in England, in the form of signs and billboards, during his absence:

 

“[T]he kind of noisiness that had increased more than any other was that visible kind which is especially unbeloved by me. There had been an horrific increase in the volume, the torrential spate and flood of—advertisements.”

 

We don’t have cable so we’re spared the assault of commercials on network television, but like all Americans we know the blight of signs violating roadsides and even the bodies of tractor-trailers. Billboards have grown three-dimensional with the addition of cows, automobiles and oversized beer cans and hot dogs. Even the pumps at gas stations are topped with screens playing commercials, and don’t get me started on online ads and those on the front page of newspapers. Beerbohm writes:

 

“If I were endowed with wealth, I should start a great advertising campaign in all the principal newspapers. The advertisements would consist of one short sentence, printed in huge block letters -- a sentence that I once heard spoken by a husband to a wife: ‘My dear, nothing in this world is worth buying.' But of course I should alter ‘my dear’ to ‘my dears.’”

   

I remember a lesson from the publisher after he hired me for my first job as a newspaper reporter. We were touring the room where the pages were being laid out for that week’s edition. He said: “You’ll notice that the first thing we put on the page are the ads,” suggesting that stories and photos, the nominal reasons I had been hired, were dubious afterthoughts.

 

There’s really no argument about the effectiveness of advertising. It sticks in memory, insidiously, like other traumas. To that degree, it works. From childhood I remember, after sixty years, dozens of jingles from radio and television commercials for breakfast cereal, beer, Cleveland car dealers and even for products I have never purchased, like cigarettes. Of course, I watched an appalling volume of television when I was a kid. I’m reminded by Beerbohm not to get too worked up over such things:

 

“I wish, Ladies and Gentlemen, I could cure myself of the habit of speaking ironically. I should so like to express myself in a quite straightforward manner. But perhaps it’s as well that I can’t; for, if I could, my language might be over-strong for Sunday evening.”   

 

[You’ll find Roger Scruton’s line in On Hunting (St. Augustine’s Press, 1998). Max Beerbohm’s broadcast is collected in Mainly on the Air (1946; rev. 1957).]