Advertising: Oh girls they just want to watch game shows

What do women want? The songwriter Cyndi Lauper said they just wanted to have fun. This was a new and exciting idea in 1983 and has buzzed around in the heads of advertisers ever since. They hadn't really thought it before. Just look at earlier ads, where women wanted to be good wives, or waited for a mystery man with a box of chocs, or couldn't resist a man's ... pipe tobacco, or the great smell of Brut.

But these ads never showed them lying around out of their heads with a pint of Babycham, or saying "Look at the package on that one!" to their mates. Nor did they show them wise-cracking; funny women in ads were dizzy types.

Women didn't use to, but now they do nothing but. It's all female friendship and urgent sexual appetites ("Oh Wyclef, honey, mama needs love," says a bony captor to the black star Wyclef Jean in a current commercial).

So the maker of Lambrini, which sponsors the game show Mr Right, is getting in on the female pleasure principle pretty late. It's got a trio of headless women – filmed from the neck down – behind a coffee table with a remote control on it, laughing and joking and drinking. "Lambrini girls just wanna have fun," it says.

As wisecracking goes – there's one joke to every ad – it's pretty weedy, viz:

"I went sailing once"

"Was there much wind?"

"I was a little nervous."

Ba-boom. Delivered with all the style of a Blind Date contestant. The corker above, incidentally, has a sub-text: the permission for ladies to tell fart jokes means they're gearing up to bigger gross-outs.

Like the recent bingo ads, these commercials are pretending there's something deeply modern and empowered about watching dross on the box.

Along the way they've omitted to tell us what Lambrini actually is. Maybe it's a girlie pop wine; maybe it's a kind of Aqua Libra "adult soft drink". Whatever, it sounds pretty thin and yellowy.

peter@sru.co.uk