ADVERTISING KNOWS NO MORALITY.

Am I alone in being increasingly annoyed at the way washed-up ex-tv personalities appear in adverts ? We are infested with them.

Michael Parkinson, June Whitfield and Frank Windsor (anyone actually remember him ?) have all appeared with horrible regularity advertising insurance-type products none of them would touch with a bargepole. WHY ? For the money, of course, and demonstrating that they have absolutely no personal integrity whatsoever. These advertisements are aimed principally at elderly and vulnerable people and are utterly immoral in nature.

These three are far from being alone and are joined in this pantheon of deceit by many others, both well-known and long forgotten. Anyone unfortunate enough to forget to change channels when the adverts appear may well catch the likes of Martine McCutcheon advertising something or other, and then there's Lenny Henry, Bill Giles (the former weather reader, for god's sake !), John Cleese, Honor Blackman, Judith Chalmers and many, many more.

A tiny handful of adverts are, of course, of a different type and seem to be made like mini-fims or TV Soaps.

These probably started with 'Katie' and the OXO family a long time ago, but have also been successful more recently, firstly with the wonderful Nescafé couple, then Renault's 'Nicole and Papa' and now with BT's little family saga. These, at least call for a degree of acting from the particiapants and can be quite diverting. Along the same lines, but obviously very different, are the Meerkats, a brilliant piece of lateral thinking and far more worthy of an Oscar than most of the tripe that actually gets awarded the golden statuettes.

But we can't get away from the fact that most adverts are incredibly simplistic and play to the hopes and fears of the audience. They use underhand methods to 'con' viewers into believing that whatever's being promoted will somehow improve their lives and/or is a fantastic bargain, when the truth is almost certainly very different. Far too many 'personalities' happily lend themselves to this wholly dishonest practice; no doubt, counting their tainted earnings helps them forget how thoroughly ashamed of themselves they should be.