Ludicrous adverts make me rage at the TV | Steve Canavan

I rarely watch TV. Instead I prefer to shut myself away in a dark room and spend my evenings alone, then wonder why I feel so isolated and fed up.

However, recently I got into something called White House Farm, a drama about an infamous crime in 1985, when a bloke called Jeremy Bamber shot his entire family and tried to convince everyone his sister did it. I thoroughly recommend it. The programme that is, not slaughtering your family and framing a sibling.

Anyway, during nearly every single ad break – and there were many – the most ludicrous advert kept coming on and I became enraged.

Why, for instance, are all car adverts the same? They always involve a man or a woman driving around a trendy city centre, while wide-eyed people stop and stare and gasp and nudge each other and generally look on in awe at the car driving past. I’m not being funny but I’m pretty sure I’ve never looked on in wonder at a passing Ford Focus. It’s a ludicrous concept.

And what is going on with toothpaste adverts? They’re naff too, always set in some sort of science lab and featuring people in white coats staring earnestly into a microscope. Most of these ads end with an unnaturally healthy-looking couple, all smiling stupid teethy smiles.

For the love of god, try something different.

The advert that so got my goat the other night was for Amazon Echo. It’s a little machine people have in their houses, the one you ask questions like, ‘Alexa, is Malcolm having an affair with the girl from badminton club?’, and it responds, ‘yes, it started last April, he’s planning to leave you when the kids go to university’.

Anyway, in this advert a young girl dressed in football kit – nice touch, ticks the gender box – rushes into a house. Her mum shouts ‘how did you get on?’, but the girl doesn’t answer and moodily stomps into her bedroom slamming the door behind her.

It switches to the middle of the night when mum is awoken by a thudding sound outside. Despite the fact it’s surely easier to look at a clock, she says, ‘Alexa, what time it is’.

The machine replies, ‘4.40am’. Mum goes to the window and sees the noise is her daughter kicking a football against the house wall.

They catch each other’s eye, it’s pitch black, then the mother says, ‘Alexa turn on the back yard light’. They smile at each other, then the girl carries on kicking the ball against the wall and mum presumably goes back to bed – though just how she’ll sleep while a football is being repeatedly thwacked against her house is unclear.

I’m not being funny but if I discovered my daughter kicking a football against the house at 20 to five in the morning, I’d open the window and scream ‘Get in here, get your bloody football kit off, and get to bed’. It is ridiculous.

I have first-hand experience of this Alexa thing as my sisters and I paid quite a large sum of money to purchase said machine for my mother’s 70th birthday a few years back. My dad had passed away and we thought it would be nice for my mum to have this little thing to talk to and to generally make life easier for her.

Predictably, though, my mother never figured out how to properly use it and for the past four years she talks to it once a day, first thing in the morning, when she says in a ridiculously posh voice, ‘Alexa, what is the weather like today?’

We essentially paid a three-figure sum for something my mum could discover by opening the curtains.

An outrageous waste of money. We should have just got her toothpaste instead.