‘I like the adverts; it's the programmes I can't stand.’ This famous riposte constitutes, in some respects, a defensible position. A case could be made, though it would not be a very significant critical activity, for the relative merits of television commercials over the programmes that interrupt them. Certainly, in terms of production values, many commercials display flagrantly the fact that they have had ten times as much money spent on them, and the discipline of working within a one- to three-minute format can have the effect of sharpening narrative skill and honing wit.

Insofar as television commercials have been discussed critically, it has been in terms such as these, apart from the very necessary ideological critique laid on them by, among others, the women's movement and public bodies influenced by it. By and large, however, television commercials have been conceived of as ‘other’ among television's output, as separable from programmes and discussable in different terms, even within those critical stances which adopt a ‘flow’ model of the evening's viewing. Substantial work has been done on, for example, news and current affairs, soap opera and sitcom television programmes, with regard to their overall shape, the working practices of their personnel, their ideological tendencies and their relationship to the institutional framework out of which they come. Such an approach, of course, requires programmes like News at Ten, Panorama, Coronation Street and It Ain't Half Hot, Mum (BBC, 1973–81) to be conceived not as separate, autonomous objects, but instead seen generically – as having formalised structures and relationships and being subject to transformations connected to events within both television and film practice and wider society. Analogous critical work on television commercials would have to begin by pointing to the similarities, not the differences, between one commercial and another.

Over the several months in 1984 during which the original version of this essay was written, two motifs seemed particularly novel, striking and recurrent within television commercials. One of these motifs was the statue which moves. The first commercial to include this was for biscuits: statues in a fountain become animated in response to the degree of enjoyment experienced by figures seated by the fountain as the latter eat the biscuits in question.