Today I’m happy to bring you another installment, prompted by a newer campaign for Scotland’s Homecoming, which uses Dougie MacLean’s sentimental song Caledonia (plus Sean Connery, Lulu and others) to help remind us how lovely Scotland is.

It’s not the first time MacLean’s song has been used in advertising. Scottish lager brand Tennent’s ran ads back in 1990 – a mere four years after the McEwan’s ad – which also successfully tied together that song and a dollop of sentimental Scottishness to sell their rather pissy brew. But we’ll draw a veil, because the ad is a classic of its type.

Before I give you the video itself, here’s the plot (warning: spoiler).

Cue music – “I don’t know / if you can see / the changes that / have come over me”… And our floppy-haired hero (this is 1990, after all) is in (pah, spit!) London, on a grey, nasty day. It could be any day. He’s a yuppy, on the make, but hey – we have to make a living, even the dreamers.

We start underground, away from any light, at the apparently unholy hour of 8.15am. He clambers aboard a packed tube. He sees other unfortunates struggling to find their way around The System. It is a grim, dog-eat-dog world, far from care-free Caledonia. “In these last few days / I’ve been afraid / that I might drift awaaay“…

Surfacing to the packed streets, he sees a cyclist fitting a mask to guard against the filthy air of England’s filthy capital (a scene pictured above). He sees those ghastly Londoners arguing in the street, because that’s what they do. Finally arriving in his glass-fronted yuppy hive he pins on his name badge, enters the packed lift with the other drones… and, as we take a close look into his eyes, says inwardly: Fcuk this for a game of soldiers. “That’s the reason / I seem so far away todaaaay“.

Go on yersel, rebel!

Striding out, he chucks the namebadge back, taking a suspicious look from a security guard, lobs his briefcase in a bin lorry – attracting the ire of one of London’s many gargoyles – and before you can say “downshifting” there’s Edinburgh castle lit in Scotland’s permanent sunshine.

Now he’s on Princes Street buying a newspaper from a friendly man and – in a moment – entering a civilised bar mostly filled with pleasant women drinking Tennent’s lager. His friends await and, as Frankie Miller sings “Caledonia’s everything I’ve ever had”, our hero finally sups his pint of suds.

And just when you think the drama’s over – his laughing face transmogrifies into a newspaper page being held by a women standing – wait for it – on the tube. She looks wistfully into the middle distance, and we fade to black. She needs a lager too. The cycle begins again.

The ad follows what we can now identify as a pattern in Scottish bevvy ads in my youth, which is to rail against the prevailing Thatcherite, capitalistic ethos of the day, in favour of breaking away and enjoying more traditional pursuits, such as the bevvy. You’ll recall that the McEwan’s ad from 1986 was noted for being based “on ‘The myth of Sisiphus’ by Albert Camus [...] meant to show ceaseless and pointless toil as a metaphor for modern lives spent working at futile jobs in factories and offices.”

This ad, I think we can agree, is another chip off the Camus-esque block. Do enjoy.

“What if you started a television season and nobody watched? From behemoths such as Heroes to new shows such as Fringe, US television is in the middle of a ratings freefall as viewers turn away from escapist dramas and tune into politics instead.

All the superpowers in the world aren’t enough to make people stop worrying in times like these and some of America’s biggest hits have suffered – on ABC Grey’s Anatomy drew 17% fewer viewers to its season premiere this year, Ugly Betty was down 15% while NBC’s Heroes, coming off the back of a much-criticised second season, slumped 29% from 14.1 million to 10 million viewers.”

Maybe the need for escapism will come later as things really begin to bite. And it will; as Mrs Tosh points out, despite the schadenfreude of some who claim to be enjoying the fall of finance’s big beasts, this crash will be harming us all. There’s true drama being played out as we discover how financiers and politicians deal with it, because their action – or lack of it – will determine our prosperity for years to come. The ratings – including a 57.1m audience for the first Presidential debate – show just how strongly TV viewers know it.

So, that famous Halifax CardCash ad from the mid 1980s, featuring the first loft-living Yuppie most of us had ever seen. He woke up with perfect hair but no money, no milk and a hungry cat – but it was fine, because he could get some cash from a hole in the wall. A drama played out to the MOR sounds of Lionel Ritchie’s Easy Like Sunday Morning. Glory days for British advertising.

…and a TSB ad from the days when bank advertisments didn’t feature that damned Howard – they just grooved, baby:

* In my evening paper sub-editing days, “Happier days” was the cliche kicker of choice when adding a caption to a picture which showed – say – someone happily posing with the family they would later go on brutally slay. As in: “HAPPIER DAYS: cold-blooded axe killer Bob McFinty is all smiles with his wife and mother-in-law in this picture, taken only days before his frenzied attack.”

I should say that the cliche made print only when the chief subeditor didn’t spot it – he hated it, for reasons I now understand.

Extensive Googling revealed it was produced by London musical group/collective/gathering/trip-hoppers UNKLE, whose stuff I’ve liked in the past, not least the atmospheric Be There featuring Ian Brown (the video, shot on the London Underground, is smashing, in a slightly postgraduate-film-school-project way).

Anyway, the BMW music now has a proper name – Trouble In Paradise (Variation On a Theme) (iTunes link) so you can all go off and play it very loudly while not driving a BMW.

* I’m staggered I posted that back in February of last year. If I didn’t have complete trust in WordPress’s ability to get the date right, in the cold, mechanical, unsentimental manner so typical of blog software, I’d be convinced it was earlier this year. How time flies, etc.

Witness something historic unfold after the singer wearing angel wings overcomes early microphone problems to deliver his falsetto, operatic-style introduction to his demonic lead-singing friend.

The strike is all about writers getting some of the money made online from new distribution channels such as video downloads. There’s an irony there, because you have to imagine that this strike, combined with those ongoing trends towards on-demand entertainment via the internet, DVD and Tivo, could prove devastating to the conventional broadcast TV that makes the serious money.

Faced with strike-hit schedules full of dull repeats and unscripted reality shows, viewers are doing other things. They’re turning off the broadcast TV. They’re developing habits which, in a rapidly changing world, may not be undone. After all, it’s rare people are offered choice and then volunteer to hand it back.

What was holding me back from finishing that drafted post was an apparent complete lack of data about changing habits. It seemed to be the question nobody, with the odd well-hidden exception, was talking about.

Well, that’s changed in the last few days. The numbers are finally in, and its bad news for networks. More than a third of Americans have changed their media consumption habits because of the strike, with the heaviest TV users being hardest hit – and making the biggest changes. They’re watching DVDs. They’re surfing the net. They are – Good God! – reading more.

While this World Screen report tries to paint a positive picture – saying the strike makes scripted hit shows even more important – they leave the most telling line to the end.

Michael Dowling, the CEO of Interpret, [says]: “As top shows disappear from prime time, viewers may go back and view critically-lauded TV series they missed the first time around, play more video games or watch more movies on DVD. Interpret’s past research has demonstrated that consumers’ media habits are already splintered, and the strike is accelerating those changes.” [my emphasis]

There. Habits were already “splintered” – the much heralded atomisation of media, and its consumption, has already hit TV, just as it has print and radio.

Now, a third of viewers may not sound like a great deal. But the US is a big country, and US TV producers seem to lose their jobs over pretty tiny shifts in audience figures. If even one percent of the US population doesn’t get back to its former levels of viewing – or even just changes the way it views TV – it seems to me you’ve got a problem.

Opinion is divided on what happens next. Robert J Elisberg, writing in the HuffPost, suggests the networks will fold because there’s just too much money at stake. But we shouldn’t be surprised that the networks are rattling sabres too – NBC boss Jeff Zucker is already talking of a revolution in the lavish ways US television is made, largely because of the opportunity the strike has afforded networks to cancel contracts and change the way things are done.

That revolution may happen whatever the outcome of this strike. It’s hard to imagine that revolution won’t come to the UK too, even if the BBC finds itself with higher barricades than most because of its public funding. Although even that’s not entirely secure, it seems.

Either way, it’s hard to imagine this strike not having a huge and lasting impact on the production and ratings of traditional network television.

“I’ve wanted to do this for 10 years or so and now the tools are all in
place. I don’t really know whether twittering my way around a two-week
assignment is a good idea or not. I think it is. I think it could be
quite compelling for people who are into that sort of thing. And it
certainly wouldn’t take that much time,” he says.

He’s doing it while others just talk, as usual. So may his Twitters run true, his Facebook friends be many, and hurrah for the Beeb taking the chance.

Believe the TV 2.0 orthodoxy, however, and all this will look very old fashioned quite soon. A network’s ability to
aggregate an audience starts to matter less in a world where TV
delivery over the internet, in to personal video players at the user’s end, liberates the audience from caring about network provider or schedule.

Then,
the only thing that matters is the owner of the content, and their
policy towards selling it to you. If they’re not up for selling their new hit show to you,
because they’re trying an old network-exclusive ploy (“only available on Sky One!”), you’ll just nick
it for free [download here]. Only televisual "events" – created and owned by a network
and of greatest value when viewed live (think: Premiership football)
will be an effective lock-in in this new age.

For pre-recorded
stuff, you’d imagine that most content makers – often not the network
actually broadcasting the shows – might soon start thinking that
cutting out a large bit of the downstream value chain, by selling
direct from studio to consumer, looks like a fun idea.

It’ll suck to be a network then, that’s for sure.

Content production’s not going to be all a bed of roses; marketing costs will go up, as the audience fragments and it becomes harder to pull the kind of big crowd that big productions need. And the rise of user-generated information and entertainment, and the barriers to entry to new pro-level rivals, will mean the market gets more crowded.

But, on the plus side, producers will free of the tyranny of schedules and chickenshit commissioning editors. Content will be sold direct to the viewer by the producer, by the episode, or the series (rather than by the bundle). Margins on content should rise.

Meanwhile, competition for content delivery will be based on one thing; price of connection. Margins, for networks without significant content, will fall; it’s hard to differentiate a pipe.

In today’s world, the ongoing squabble shows just how ripe the current system is for revolution. The Sunday Telegraph reckons Virgin has scored an early victory in its "battle" with BSkyB because "just" 100 customers a day have been cancelling
subscriptions since Sky One, and other channels, were withdrawn from
the cable service on Wednesday night. The uncharitable, or those
actually familiar with the old NTL’s customer service*,
might speculate that those were only the 300 or so people who – so far
- have managed to navigate the hell that is a cable call centre in order to do the deed.

More must have made it through, though. Telebusillis
joins the press coverage dots and thinks Virgin must be handing around
2,000 package discounts a day, as bribes to dissuade others from
quitting cable. Finally, there are heavy discounts on Virgin services
now, aimed at those not yet trying to move. This must be costing Virgin
quite a lot.

And things might get worse. More Virgin subscribers, you’d imagine, might be reaching for the telephone around 9pm when they realise they can’t get Sky for tonight’s fix of 24.

I’m
tempted to think the whole thing a reminder of cable’s appalling
disregard for its users. Between mature businesses there is, surely, no
way that consumers should have to care – even know – about matters like
carriage arrangements. Virgin is clearly playing this game for PR
value. Sky is happy to play along and watch the debt-saddled rival’s
customers come across to satellite, while also ensuring its satellite
business becomes better differentiated against cable’s.

The only people who lose out are the users, again inconvenienced by pisspoor cable, and wondering how they’ll catch up on the episodes of Gallactica, 24 and the rest – even if they sign up with Murdoch. It’s maybe hard to be a network, but their weary customers may be feeling they deserve all they get.

* Me? I’m with Sky, and would never consider cable again after years of frustration with NTL. I hate call queues.