Mixed Messages

I was watching something or other on TV last night (maybe the pilot of Smallville, just to see how young Eric Zoner Tom Weller looked in the first episode, and then being shocked ... shocked I tell you ... to find our hero clad only in a pair of boxers, stuck in a cornfield with a red S painted on his man-boyish torso), when an ad came on that I found to be more ridiculous than Lex Luthor giving Clark a shiny red new pickup truck.

A gaggle of tarty girls are out on a hen night. One of them loses her grip on their apparently precious helium-filled balloons, and a superhero climbs the nearby building's scaffolding to rescue the lost treasures before they float off into space and then explode ... no doubt casting much unwarranted bad luck on said hens and the upcoming nuptials they're celebrating.

Superhero reaches the top, and then loses his grip and falls to the ground. You'd think he'd pull a Peter Petrelli and fly up to safety. But no. *SPLAT* he goes, and ends up in a pool of blood with his arms and legs splayed out like hands on a broken clock. He wasn't a superhero at all. He was just a drunk who thought he was clever.

"Don't lose your powers to the powers of alchohol," said the stern voiceover (or something to that effect).

IMMEDIATELY following that spot (almost as if it were the same spot), up pops a Tesco ad, showing a half dozen bottles of wine and champagne with a Graham Norton-esque VO saying "Your favorite wines now 20% off at your local Tesco."

Brilliant.