Telly ads

I was just watching Modern Family on the telly. "We'll be back in 6 minutes," said the message as we went into the adverts. I went to get a brandy and a snack. The programme came back on, I turned the volume up - 20 seconds more of Phil and Gloria and Mitchell and then WHAM "We´ll be back in 60 seconds." Groans from the sofa. Programme back on. Another 20 seconds and another WHAM "We'll be back in 2 minutes." Luckily there was nothing at hand to throw.

There are no adverts on the public channels anymore so a 90 minute film takes 90 minutes to show. It's much better than the olden days when there were (I think) 18 minutes of advertising every hour. One of the favourite tricks was to put the last crop of adverts on just before the end of the film. The denouement is seconds away - adverts - final 45 second scene of the film and it's all over. Infuriating especially at 2am.

So public telly has got much better. They still have long trailer slots from time to time but generally it's fine. The commercial channels have reduced their ad time per hour too but it still feels to be quite a lot of advertising especially when they use the end of programme trick.

One broadcaster, Mediaset, which has about five or six channels on the free to air digital stuff bases its advertising breaks on it's key channel. So on Tele5 the ads flow into the pauses in dialogue, the natural scene changes or the host talking us into the break but on the other channels the action suddenly stops mid sentence. There seems to be no routine to the ads at all. They're just there. Bizarre.

Mind you UK telly seems to have lots of ads on a regular basis which is probably equally annoying.