Bad-Ads.co.uk

This advert shows children playing on an advertising exec’s idea of a farm, a free-range nirvana, all to jolly Bing Crosby singing, “Busy Doing Nothing”, with zero appearing as part of the scenery.

When I first saw this advert, I thought it was a public information film about children not playing on farms. This is probably because in the absence of health and safety litigation, when I was at school, we had a succession of people coming to scare us into not playing on the railways, building sites and with high-voltage electricity cables by showing us films of children being killed or seriously injured. A typical scenario being a child becoming fried after trying to fetch a kite when it became caught in a power line. I think that we even had a farmer visit the school to make us aware of the dangers of farms.

Hence, it is ingrained in my mind that farms are not idillic places where young children can roam free. They are dangerous places where a child may have limbs amputated by heavy machinery, be run over by a tractor, fall into grain silos, crushed by animals and large bails of grass.

I guess there is no danger to children these days because they are driven everywhere in 4×4 cars and never venture outside the world of the Play Station 3.