Advertising: It's a bit of an anticlimax, possums
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Your support makes all the difference.You know about charity ball committees. There'll be the Countess von Eurotrash, Mrs Wayne Plutocrat, Antonia Inverness-Wiltshire and Boy George or Esther Rantzen. Something for everyone, an ambassador to every constituency of the rich and the socially mobile.
There's something of the charity balls about the current AMP Finance commercial. It's a bit of a classy do. It's got some genuinely famous people in it and at first you think it's going to be an appeal for what Ingrid Bergman called "little brown babies" with some XYZ Multiplex corporation being terribly proud to lend a hand and get their name on things.
It's Michael Parkinson, Clive James, Jerry Hall, Barry Humphries, Dame Edna Everage and Sir Bobby Charlton saying what they look forward to. Michael Parkinson keeps it brief. He wants to listen to jazz. Jerry Hall says she's looking forward to her summer holiday with her four children. You believe them. Clive James, who seems oddly depressed, has an artistic ambition, of course. He looks forward to saying something interesting. Chancing his arm there.
Dame Edna, another self-obsessed Australian, says she hopes world leaders can come to look at things through the eyes of a Melbourne housewife. Sir Bobby Charlton – I think it's him and not his brother – wants to spend time in his garden. Barry Humphries looks forward to lighting a large fire and burning a purple wig. I don't believe it; he'd be as depressed as Clive James if he had to be himself all the time.
It's all smartly done, well shot, with self-consciously arts channel kind of music. Rather a let-down, then, that it's all for AMP, another financial services company. (They never use the simple generics like bank, insurance company or stockbroker now because they want to keep their options open to sell you practically anything. They all have these Identikit strategies based on the idea of quadrupling the revenue from existing clients by cross-selling.)
And what's the link between Humphries, James and AMP? Australia, of course. AMP is big in Australia and wants to expand out of it. So it's acquired a number of UK brands and some nice people to introduce it into polite European commercial society. But when you see that dreary list – pensions, investments, insurance, banking (plus the cutesy "optimism" in yellow print) – your heart sinks and you limbs get so heavy you can't leave the house that night.
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