ADVERTISING ON T.V.

One of the things I noticed this time I was in the U.K. was the amount of advertising on television. During a one hour programme on an ITV channel, there would be four breaks for adverts. This was, to put it mildly, intensely irritating.

There is of course advertising on television in Denmark as well. The smaller independent channels have similar amounts of advertising, which I presume is one of the reasons they stay small. However, the big advertising channel here is TV2, which is owned by the Government. They have advert breaks; but they make sure that they are between programmes, not during them. In particular, they don't interrupt films; I can live with that.

The U.K. is following the trend of the United States, which has had wall to wall advertising on television for decades; and I anticipate that that trend will eventually reach Denmark. However hopefully not for a while. Sometimes it helps being a small backwater with a minority language.

Walter Blotscher