Advertising and its placement

Monday 16th August

Last night I watched Saving Private Ryan; for the first time since seeing it at the cinema actually.

The horrific, awful power of the prolonged opening sequence, and indeed the film as a whole, was diminished in its effect a liitle by being viewed on a TV - albeit 36" -  instead of a large cinema screen. But what, to my mind, diminished it further, were the adverts for McCain potato wedges the Film Four sponsors; I found them to be distracting from the mood of the film.

These adverts were actually quite amusing, the premise of them being that the potato wedges were observing through the glass oven door/screen the 'action' in the kitchen and living room beyond. I confesss to rather liking the one where a guy comes up to the oven door and turns his head sideways to look into the oven at which the potato wedges all recoil and scream and jump out of their skins. Surely a nod to that scene in Jaws? We all know the one. And we all still jump don't we, no matter how many times we see the film and know it's coming.

So is there a case, just sometimes, with a film such as this, for the advertising to be more sombre in recognition of the movie and its message?

Or is it just me?

And how bloody lucky any of us born post 1945 are not to have endured a war like that Second World War; as combatant or civilian. Saving Private Ryan must be as close as we can get to the sheer pant-wetting terror and gut-wrenching, mind-numbing horror of what those brave men went through in that war. We can't get close to imagining it. It's a cliche I know but cliches become so because they are true; we can't begin to measure how much we owe them.

I've visited some of those Normandy beaches still with some of the landing craft there. And many of the cemeteries - for the fallen of both world wars - in that part of France and in Belgium too.  They are eerily silent places. They are often by the side of a busy highway yet one doesn't hear the traffic at all. Nor even birds singing. Nothing but the wind in the trees whispering the magnitude of the loss.

They are profoundly peaceful, moving but tragic places. I defy the most cynical amongst us not to be moved by the sight of the massed rows of crosses  and so many of them bearing only the words "Known only to God".

There aren't the words...