After spending an hour trying to digitise my girlfriend’s appearance on TV with Phillip Schofield this morning, I found myself looking rather more closely than usual at the adverts that formed the bread in the sandwich, Jenny’s performance being of course the sandwich filling, and the This Morning idents being the butter, or the margarine, if you’re one of those credulous people who believe that Flora is so healthy you should really be eating the stuff with a tablespoon. “Life can make your hair thin,” begins the advert for Pantene Pro-V’s new Full & Thick collection, which I’m assuming is a shampoo, although no reference is made at any point to the word “shampoo”.

Life can make your hair thin. Well, I’ve been living now for 34.5 years, and I can honestly say that at the beginning, for a good few years, life actually made my hair thicker, but now life is indeed making my hair thinner, so Pantene have a point, there. Of course, death makes your hair extremely thin indeed, to the point of invisibility. But Pantene aren’t recommending death as an alternative to life, no, they’re recommending their new Full & Thick collection.

Our unique pro-vitamin lightweight formula penetrates hair deep, leaving your hair looking noticably fuller and thicker in just seven days.

Hang on. 61% of 331 women agreed? So they’re saying that the pro-vitamin lightweight formula penetrates hair deep, leaving ones hair looking noticably fuller and thicker in just seven days, but only 201.91 women went along with this suggestion? So for every woman that said “my hair is looking noticably fuller and thicker”, there was 0.63 of a woman saying “sorry, mate, my hair is looking noticably similar to or worse than it did before I started using the new Pantene Pro-V Full & Thick collection”? The end-of-ad tagline is jawdropping:

More to play with!

More what to play with? Not more strands of hair, no, of course not, but the individual hairoids will have expanded in girth so much that they’ve started to resemble draught excluders. Get a handful of that, boys. Play with it. Go on, play with it. I don’t know what you play with it, just play with it. Try Monopoly, shove ha’penny, blind man’s buff, I don’t care, I’ve grown this hair, for god’s sake, there’s more to play with, now play with it. PLAY WITH IT.

And as for THIS (mp4 file, 848k), well, I’ve no idea where to start.

Couple lying on beach. Needy woman in process of constructing claustrophobic relationship begins to whisper, gently.
Woman: So, honey. Where’s your favourite part of my body? Is it here?
Woman points to shin.
Woman: Here?
Woman points to arse.
Woman: Here?
Woman waggles fingers. Woman lies back, looking expectantly at man. Man thinks of saying “spleen”, and then “Bowman’s Capsule” and finally “Islets Of Langerhans”, before stroking her armpit, implicitly suggesting that her armpit is his favourite part of her body, when it’s not, it’s her Islets Of Langerhans.
Voiceover: Accessorise your underarms with pearl extracts.

Come on, everyone, accessorise your fucking underarms with pearl extracts. Sorry for swearing, it just sounds better that way.