Simon Cowell... Can of well-known fizzy drink just out of shot. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
For a British expat brought up on episodes of Blue Peter where the washing-up liquid bottles used to make model rocket ships were scrubbed with bleach to remove any hint of branding, the current fuss over product placement on American TV contains elements of the surreal.
Product placement is everywhere. Must-see frock-designer reality show Project Runway seems to be scripted around brand plugs. And the make of computers hammered at by the nerve-frazzled tech-warriors of the Counter Terrorism Unit is a dead giveaway as to which series of 24 you've stumbled into.
30 Rock, the self-mocking TV comedy about TV comedy, famously flaunted its product placement contract with a mobile phone company by making its plugs blatant, and by having Tina Fey's characters break the fourth wall to ask: "Can we have our money now?"
In itself this is nothing new. Product placement has long been a staple of US TV, radio and film. But it is running at seemingly unprecedented highs. According to one report, product placement on TV is up 37% in the last year. Vanity Fair counted over 60 product placements in the Sex in the City movie. And for a very fat fee right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh will seamlessly weave a plug for your product into a seemingly unrelated rant about Obama's secret plans to introduce socialism and outlaw Christianity.
Reality shows are often the worst offenders. According to one estimate, a viewer watching American Chopper might be exposed to as many as 1,000 product placements... per episode. Simon Cowell, meanwhile, never appears on American Idol without a Coke cup.
Government watchdog the Federal Communications Commission has held formal hearings into product placement - an increasingly attractive option for broadcasters as they try to find ways to "end run" advert-avoidance technology like Tivo. A coalition of advocacy groups is pushing for stricter regulation, and some, like the group Commercial Alert, are even demanding that each product placement be accompanied by a pop-up warning.
"What's happening today is it's being thrown in the credits at the end and sped through so fast you'd need a magnifying glass to see it," FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein told ABC News.
Defenders of the status quo - mostly TV company executives and those working for marketing and advertising companies - are quick to point out that placement-activated pop-ups or scrolling would have an even worse effect on the watchability and dramatic integrity of a show than the product placement itself.
Richard Samp of the Washington Legal Foundation, an industry-funded right-wing lobbying group, even went so far as to claim that attempts to moderate product placement "are in a sense totally suppressing free speech".
Nobody is holding out much hope for effective regulation. We are, it seems, on a slippery slope to a braindead TV hell where, on both sides of the Atlantic, such antiquated notions as journalistic, artistic and editorial integrity are drowned out by the ever more vigorous clattering of the stick on the side of the swill bucket.
(Steven Wells would like to thank Honest Tea Community green tea with Maltese orange for providing the refreshment necessary to write this blog, and for Gap for providing the trousers he wore while writing it on his Starbucks espresso-stained Mac Book Pro.)
