A short commercial break

The advertisement begins with a shot of a small boy of oriental extraction sitting on a lavatory. The camera angle is carefully chosen to leave us in no doubt that what he is sitting on is a lavatory (and not, for example, a sofa) whilst at the same time studiously excluding anything which might detract from the wholesome image he presents, such as the fact that his trousers and underpants must be round his ankles.

Having completed his daily business, the little boy is immediately revolted by the stench of his own bodily waste. (Thereby demonstrating that he is a very great deal more fastidious than are the majority of little boys, and leading one viewer at least to suspect that he may well prefer Barbie to Action Man.)

Obvious remedies to his olfactory predicament - such as opening the bathroom window or simply flushing the offending solids away - seeming not to have occurred to him, he reaches instead for a device which will endeavour to mask the unpleasant aroma by squirting an equally-unpleasant and probably considerably more noxious mixture of synthetic fragrances into the air.

But, oh, calamity!! The device is empty!! He emits a wail of misery which brings his mother (who, curiously, is of an entirely different ethnicity from that of her son) to the bathroom door. "What's the matter, darling?", she cries. (From the desperate nature of his wail, she has no doubt assumed that something really dreadful must have happened, such as her precious son having accidentally blinded himself with an inaccurately-wielded toothbrush, or inadvertently maimed himself with the nail scissors.) At this point, the boy's voice is over-dubbed with that of a singularly repellent stage school brat petulantly intoning the words, "It's all gone, it's all gone".

Now, we have already established that the bathroom door is not sound-proofed. The boy can hear his mother, and his mother can hear him. Would it not therefore be reasonable to assume that, when she asks him exactly what it is which has all gone, he would simply tell her? He would not need to know the name of the product in question: mothers are accustomed to the fact that small children often describe things in an endearingly naive way, and are generally able to decode their charming responses without excessive difficulty. Surely, "the squirty thing that makes the nasty poo smell go away", would be sufficient to identify whatever it was which had all gone?

But no. Eschewing the simple expedient of telling his mother what the problem is, he instead draws a picture of the product on a piece of paper, and slides the drawing under the door.

An action which raises three further questions in Lady Bracknell's mind:

1. Is her ladyship unique in not keeping paper and pencil to hand in the bathroom against just such an emergency?
2. Is it not stretching viewers' credulity to the breaking point to expect them to believe that a child who has not yet learned to write has sufficient manual dexterity and artistic skill to dash off a deceptively simple sketch which, in less than half a dozen pencil strokes, portrays the advertised product with such devastating accuracy that it could not possibly be mistaken for anything else?
3. Why doesn't the child just open the door? Surely he has pulled his trousers up by this time?

All of which world-weary cynicism and capacity for independent thought goes to show why persons such as Lady Bracknell are so roundly loathed by advertisers, and why Lady Bracknell avoids commercial television stations whenever possible.