Reel lives

Hercules takes a flying leap at the Grim Reaper, complete with scythe, astride his horse (don't ask: it's a long story). They tumble towards the edge of a precipice, and sure enough, they fall towards a flowing river of lava.

The Hero, now alone, finds himself in the Presence of the Light, residing in the wonderland of Rime, Hoarfrost, Ice, and all those other terms the Inuit use to describe water that is no longer liquid.

In the real world - or is it? - there was a time when advertising agencies bombarded us with images of the Family, or the so-called already extinct species, New Man.

Now we are being given the other side of the coin, in no uncertain manner, with the emphasis being on unfaithful husbands (not necessarily in an adulterous context), on the foreign television stations; I wonder how long this trend will take to catch locally.

There's the hoary old story about a man braking hard and finding a woman's shoe at his feet. He tries to chuck it out of the (closed) window, and therefore induces his wife to visit a shop while he surreptitiously gets rid of the item in a conveniently-placed skip, following a flashback of the good time he had in the car in the company of some nubile young ladies. Alas - the shoe belongs to his mother-in-law, who had been sitting at the back, and who had probably eased her footwear off to alleviate the pressure from her tootsies and bunions.

The other advertisement features a Darby and Joan couple, stolidly impassive in front of their television sets. He announces he's off to pay the electricity bill. During his sojourn he takes in a chess match (he wins); a ride on a motorboat; a mixing session in a discotheque, and, a couple of seconds at a terminal through which he actually does pay the bill. His wife remarks that he looks whacked out; he mentions a queue.

Then of course there is another in the "limited edition" (which probably means, scoff a lot of them because you never know whether or not they might be on the market ever again) Algida ice cream; the series has unfortunately been named after the Seven Deadly Sins, and this time it's the turn of Envy.

The term also turns up again in the advertisement for the Peugeot 307; those who do not have it go to any length to prevent those who do from enjoying it. They half-bury it in sand, re-park it on its roof, drop a grand piano on it - or even 'merely' deface the advertisement-within-an-advertisement.

Are we so jaded that in order to work on our psyche, adverts must now appeal to our baser instincts?

Last Sunday's Ghal Dinja Ahjar (PBS) treated, among other topics, how the media conditions into believing that what it thinks for us is what we would have thought all along, and how it is the right think to think. Venturing obliquely from the main message, it was all to easy to see how a child, having been an ordinary pupil in an ordinary class, suddenly became a member of a lower social order because of misguided parents' orders.

One of the BBC news jingles bears an uncanny resemblance to the one used by RTK in its bulletin of religious news. I wish these foreign stations would cease aping us.

For reasons best known to the people at Super One, the September 8 marathon in aid of the Eden Foundation, to be celebrated at Bay Street, "had to be cancelled". Far be it for me to conjecture why, and to go to press with what I have been told from several; different quartets, which all had their slightly different version of this saga to impart (after all, it's a long time till the next regatta, and the next Eurovision).

I am reliably informed, however - at least on that everyone agreed - that a press conference is being held tomorrow, at which we will finally be informed that Net TV will host this event next Sunday (see above), and told which station(s) will have links, and which presenters (sorry, personalities) will do the honours, and which expenses, if any, will be borne by the relevant entities.

When all is said and done, I don't see why people who help those who are not as able to help themselves, ought to be treated as if they were on an ego trip - even, as has happened, in other cases, when they actually were. The rest of us, at the same time, were probably busy doing nothing.

A person being interviewed was described as ovvjament the sous-chef. A dish on yet another cookery programme was tart tal-pumpkin. And the football player, after some nifty foul play, was ovvjament, m'ghandniex xi nghidu, jitlob li hu bla htija. Every time a record gets dedicated from one's familjari, I imagine hordes of black cats, owls, and other creatures traditionally affiliated with witches to swarm out of the radio.

I wouldn't say the word qarib is unknown to our radio journalists - however, they tend to use it in the wrong context with the word 'future', when they really mean qrib.

We were also invited to purchase the pieces tad-dinner set, which include il-bawl taz-zokkor and il-gagg tal-halib, and compounding the mistakes we were offered them ghall-prezz ta'...

Truth be said, although several people appear to find this type of programme soporific, hundreds more lap up the 'bar-gains' that are on offer - especially if, as they watch, the droning voices hypnotise them and there's a telephone close at hand.

The creatures were a cross between a platypus and a mole. Their (Italian) name was Sabbini (creatures of the sand). They used their beaks to burrow through the rock, gnawing out tunnels and nesting places.

In fact, the cute creatures we saw scampering across the screen in Solaris never existed at all; they are merely 'virtual' evolutionary animals descended from today's puffins.

Even if you do believe this wild theory is the truth, it is rather improbably that one of the sleek creatures will find a way into your home; the change is envisaged to take millions of years hence.