They aim to destroy us. I think it's safe to say "us" since "they" would never look at any blog section of Guardian Unlimited. I finally lost my mind on the tube last week. I had been in a good mood returning home on the Northern Line when I caught site of something that made me gasp aloud and declare to my fellow passengers, slamming my satchel on the floor, that we would pay for what we have done to this world. People looked away briefly from their free newspapers and thought: "It's OK, he's not Muslim. Just nuts."
What I had seen was an advert above my head that managed to shred straight through every wire channelling hope into my brain. It showed two black and white photos of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, birth and death dates portentously beneath both. To the right it declared that we could become "the next great Underground writer".
"Subversive stories full of radical new ideas. Sounds like a throwback to the experimental days of the 60s," offered the advert. It was offering advertising teams a free space for one of their companies on the back of a tube ticket. The advert will be on travel passes for people using the Underground, we are told repeatedly, the capitalisation jarring the tone of the sentence like the come-on lines of a malfunctioning sex droid: "Yes, we will Sex now sir as you are Great of the Writers."
They will also "challenge the established thinking of glib headlines or huge phone numbers," apparently. I don't understand the latter ambition. They want to return to the radical days of the 1960s where people were contacted via the operator rather than by inputting digits?
Firstly, allow me to be annoyed that the Beats were the most radical writers the advertisers could think of. To be fair, they could have chosen them because Allen Ginsberg used to work in advertising. But I know they didn't, because I know they are idiots.
"Next time people travel on the tube, words and ideas about any of your clients' products could take them places they've never been before." What is it with this pretence? This idea that everyone's jobs have to be so bloody important and profound? Back in the mists of time I was a graphic designer and worked on a series of ads on taxis and the backs of buses. Marketing were ecstatic about the opportunity, the pitch, the reach potential, the innovative industry approach they were taking. It involved a Labrador looking eager and advertised a free email account.
Advertisers write like nervous teenagers at a university interview. Desperate to seem smarter, more comfortable with themselves, than they really are. A grotty head-girl literacy where Kerouac is as wild as it gets and, say, BS Johnson isn't famous and therefore just plain weird.
Most striking is the lack of respect they have for their audience. It projects an alternate world tied in with nauseatingly low-brow compromises applauded as the pinnacle of human achievement. Except it isn't an alternative world. It's theirs and they're trying to bring it into mine, with the artificial excitement of the literary awards we're meant to be ecstatic about.
"People spend around 13 minutes reading tube cards," the "Underground" writers of CBS Outdoors say, as if they see us having nothing else to do but drool over a printed piece of paper, as that is all our Grazia-reading, rattish little minds can handle. They want us to gawp with orgasmic interest at the utterly mediocre, because they can't be arsed to get into anything actually challenging themselves. They want us to sit in stunned silence at the climax of Atonement, shake an enamoured head at Lost's plot twists, quote huge swaths of BBC sketch shows. They want us to die a little inside. And they made me lose my mind one cold December evening.
