Doesn't Chris Addison do those annoying insurance adverts with Andrew Alexander? Being beaten to death with a sack full of broken house bricks is too good for him.

Yes, yes he fucking does. One of Andy Parsons' redeeming moments (there are few) was pulling Addison up over his salary after a rather uncalled-for hair-loss joke.

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"Common Sense is the collection of prejudices aquired by age eighteen" - Albert Einstein

Apparently Frankie Boyle has a new show coming up on C4, called The Frankie Boyle Variety Show. I don't know about anyone else but I'll be very intetested to see what it's about.

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"Now get those trousers off before someone dies!"

I like them! Very well done for insurance ads. And it's a bit inverse-snobbery these days to object to actors taking the advertising shilling...

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Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening.

As ads go they are less irritating than most.
It's perhaps a sad fact that actors/comedians can earn more money for doing an ad than for doing a whole BBC series. They can then use that money to fund new projects. Personally I'd rather suffer irritating advertisements and have new programmes made.

Fortunately I don't even have to suffer them because I have mastered the use of the remote control.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

I think that if the money's going they are entitled to earn it.
Apparently the guy from Go Compare has now paid off his mortgage and is financially secure for the next few years. How many of us would turn down that opportunity?

You can argue against advertising splashing so much money about, and how it is the consumer who pays in the end, but it is now embedded in society to such an extent that it would be very difficult, short of the advent of the Workers' Paradise, to get shot of it.

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Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening.

Exactly, we are where we are and, if we have to put up with advertising, I'd rather have it featuring people I admire and find entertaining than people I don't.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

I accept the existence of advertising, but it does seem a bit tawdry for people to do it who don't need to. I don't mind the Go Compare bloke or a struggling actor.

Ben Elton didn't do adverts, did he? I quite like that. I can't see why he's not supposed to write musicals, mind.

That's a rather inconsistent argument. Where would you set the line at not being rich or famous enough to do it? Would you means-test it? Or leave it to market forces...

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Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening.

I have no problems with ak-tors and comedians making adverts, I just find the ads bloody irritating when I've seen them for the squillionth time. Serves me right for watching the Wright Stuff in the morning on Channel 5. It doesn't matter when I turn the show on there's always the same adverts: missold PPI, Compo4U and feckin' Direct Line.

That's the real issue, isn't it? You see them so often, and if they were rubbish to start with (and I'm looking at you, British Telecom) you get irritated. Ad streams with continuing stories can be well done, especially if talented actors are used. Like Addison, Alexander Armstrong and the others. But expensive, so over-repeated.

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Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening.

All too often, adverts come along that are quite nice and entertaining, but represent just the tip of a marketing iceberg, and before you know it you're being bludgeoned to death by the concept.

The Budweiser "Whassup?" ads are a case in point. At first they were quite charming - beer being sold through connotations of friends having a good time, in jokes within groups of friends and so on. But it's all rather neutered when you realise that even at the start, they were planning a whole string of ads, parodies and the rest of the marketing juggernaut. Or the bloody meerkats.

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

I wonder how much cocaine was snorted in the advertising agency's blue-sky-thinking-pushing-the-envelope-run-the-idea-up-the-mast-and-see-who-salutes meeting?

'Hey guys, Compare the market sounds a bit like, y'know, that fuckin' rat squirrelly thing that stands up a lot looking cute'

'What Tarquin? Compare the stoat?' <giggles>

'Nah, Compare the meerkat for fucks sake.' <more giggling>

'Don't make sense Tarqs, ol' bean, all meerkats look the fucking same'

Scene goes on for 94 more lines...

I think the meerkats and Go Compare have been cleverly rotated and frequently updated, so they become less OH GOD GO AWAY and more "hmm... wonder what the next will do".

I have to profess that I was disappointed when the original Go Compare advert was rebroadcast just a few weeks ago.

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Changin' avatars like there's no tomorrow

Michael bloody Parkinson springs to mind