Mad man not loving TV ads

I am in the market for a cross between a serious and sophisticated piece of electronic equipment and something that will incorporate a mind-wave-reading device to prevent me from feeling I am wasting a third of my life by being forced to watch television advertisements that interest me not in the slightest.

The gadget I have in mind is a filter-cum-player that will cut in as soon as TV commercials/promotions appear and replace their boring repetitiveness and largely mindless chitchat with something more mentally challenging, such as a Tom and Jerry cartoon, a Road Runner chase or a view of a meadow so that I can watch the grass grow.

I accept that we live in a word of advertising and self-promotion and nowhere is it more blatant than on television.

I believe we are badly served by our television stations who mostly treat the viewing public as a gawping captive audience prepared to accept anything  at any time. 

However my beef is not so much at the programs, although they are at times pitiful, but at the ads. Look at it this way. From an average two-hour long film on commercial television, take out 40 minutes for ads. Twenty minutes an hour or a third of that viewing time is spent having to watch largely irrelevant, and always repetitive, material. Muting the sound is some help. Going for a short walk can also ease the frustration.

And then there is the timing of programs. How many of them finish at the scheduled time? Hardly any. Again is this a deliberate ploy to ensure that we stay with that station because we have missed the beginning of something else on a rival station? And then, as if to rub salt into the wound, our screens are cluttered up with that wretched station name or number in various strengths and positions. As if we didn’t know what station we are watching. Are we so feeble minded that we have to be constantly told of where we are? My proposed device would also eliminate this.

And if you think you can escape by watching the ABC, think again. It almost puts the commercial channels to shame with the volume of its own promotions. Between every program there is sometimes up to a three-minute ad session and the clips of programs are so repetitive that it is an immediate turn-off to watching the complete production. Over the course of 24 hours, enough air time is drivelled away with promotions to run a complete new program.

Equally irritating is the longstanding habit of frequently finishing  programs up to four minutes early so that the ads may roll. Then there is a one-minute news break following by another two- to three-minute commercial break. Must we have ads on all the television channels? Let’s face it, it was bad enough when SBS went ‘commercial’!

The final straw was the recent cricket Test match when the station seemed to be doing us a great favour by allowing us to see any of the cricket at all. The indecent haste to get to the advertising was pathetic. Ads between every over, pop-up ads and banners across the screen for one of the sponsors interspersed with inane twitter messages and worthless trivia that added nothing to the game. 

Here I need to extend the complexity of my gadget into its mind-reading mode to discern between irrelevant material and material I actually want to see.

Perhaps one answer would be to go back to the old-fashioned licence system where the viewer pays and fewer ads might be necessary. 

I want something more technical than the human digit on the mute button especially in this digital age.