Well this rant’s been brewing inside me like an extremely pleasurable fart on Christmas afternoon. Only for longer. And less pleasurable. Okay, so it’s not at all like a fart - truth is, I’ve only used a simile in this opening paragraph to make myself sound clever.

The good ol’ days of advertising - nothing wrong with this advert at all!

The thing is, advertising clearly works or else companies wouldn’t spend millions of pounds on them, but how? How is it possible that an advert that claims to give your hair a healthy “looking” shine (that’s healthy looking, not actually healthy) actually succeeds in selling more of their product?

Or how about the shampoo that claims to give your hair “20% more radiance”? 20% more radiance? That’s a bit like saying “Makes your hair look 53.6 units better”. Totally outrageously and obviously unqualifyable. It can’t be proven nor disproven. And yet the product continues to sell.

And talking of shampoo, since when did shower products start containing nano-bot technology? You must have seen them - they’re the spinny gold particles that mystically attach themselves to strands of hair and mend all the jaggy broken bits, magically transforming said hair into perfect all-new super strands. It’s clever stuff!

Or my personal favourite, the air freshener that claims to destroy smelly particles. Huh? Wha? Call me daft, but what they’re basically selling us is a spray that erradicates atoms - doesn’t that sound rather dangerous? What happens if I spray it on my dog? Or does it somehow only target floating particles… like, say, the air that I need to breathe? Boy, no wonder the ozone layer has a hole in it if we’re all squirting atomic destructors into the atmosphere.

But lets not be hasty - let’s give them the benefit of the doubt - that they somehow have the technology to target only the specific particles that cause bad odour, that aren’t structural in any way or something vital to inhale. In which case, boy these air freshener research scientists are clever chaps. Shouldn’t they be working for the Government or something? They could revolutionise mining - need to drill a hole 1000ft deep? No problem - one squirt of Glade and you can atomise those pesky dirt particles and have the oil out for about £2.95.

So how can all this advertising rubbish work? Well I’ve asked myself the same question and the theory I’ve come to I call “The Catherine Tate Effect”.

The reason that crap products with rubbish adverts continue to sell is the same reason that Catherine Tate is still on TV.

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