Turns out dangerous yet again

Advertising is in trouble again. This time the target is a TV commercial featuring US male model Lucky Vanous. He plays the part of a construction worker who pours diet gloop down his throat straight from the can, while secretaries line up to ogle from a nearby office window.

So what’s wrong with that? Is it perhaps the sexual suggestiveness? Of course not. Does it have anything to do with the risk of drinking from a can opened by a cement-caked digit? Wrong again. Is it the blatant exploitation of men? You must be joking.

I’ll tell you what it is: Lucky’s magnificent pectorals, which excite such thoughts in the typing pool as are best delivered under plain cover, come clothed in nothing but his native hair. Thus unattired, he sets a shocking example to young men of the outdoor working persuasion whose skin, when exposed to the ultra violet rays of the sun, may develop cancer.

This column has acquired a modest reputation for scepticism in the face of the scare-mongering tendency. So it is with some misgiving, and not a little shamefacedness, that I reveal a scare discovery of my own.

My research reveals that certain occupations, particularly epidemiology and psychology, carry an exceptionally high risk of exposure to Publicity Craving Syndrome (PCS). The victims of this condition experience a welling, uncontrollable desire to be seen and heard, which can only be assuaged by periodic exposure to camera, lights, microphone and notepad.

It is only through expressing their strongly held opinions and advancing their strongly worded warnings that PCS sufferers are able to experience the purgative that allows them to return, cleansed and untroubled, to their laboratories and lecture theatres. Until the next compulsive yearning engulfs them, and the next fix is administered.

Richard Eisner, professor of psychology at Exeter University, gathered the press together in London a few days ago to warn of the dangers of sunbathing. He chastised the makers of TV commercials featuring semi-naked hunks alfresco, and lamented much else besides.

The Baywatch babes, for example, send out completely the wrong message. Rather than expose expanses of golden, naked flesh of the kind that excites envy among young women and emotions of a still rawer kind among young men, Pamela Anderson and her colleagues should go about their task of resuscitating the drowning dressed in long-sleeved cotton dresses and sunhats, faces well coated with zinc sun-blocker. Never mind what that would do for the ratings, we’re talking life and death here.

What, you may wonder, does a psychologist, even one as eminent as Prof Eisner, know about malignant melanoma and the statistical likelihood of contracting such a condition? Surely a dermatologist is called for.

The answer seems to be that the Cancer Research Campaign (CRC), which sees among its annual duties the convening of scare-mongering press conferences on sunny days in June, changed its tack this year. Instead of the boring old message that more than three minutes’ exposure to the direct rays of the heavenly body that brings life to Earth will result in a death-inducing condition, the CRC decided to strike at the subliminal influences that draw us into the warm embrace of the sun.

Thus CRC has latched on to the golden principle that underpins the work of every scare-mongering campaigner, from the anti-smokers and anti-drinkers, to the more exotic specialists who scent the whiff of death in a grain of salt, a cellular phone, or a supermarket trolley. What is needed, and urgently so, is to change people’s attitudes.

It does not matter one jot that the rest of us, whose attitudes are to be thus remoulded, retort that it is not our frame of mind that needs adjusting but that of our self-appointed, wowserish oppressors.

It has been decided people’s attitudes need changing, so there’s an end to it.

Prof Eisner’s calling makes him an expert in attitudes, hence his appearance on that sun-soaked day, and hence his determination to admonish the orb’s worshippers, implicate the TV advertisers, and rain curses upon those who would have us believe there is something glamorous or sexy in a tan.

No matter that we pasty-bodied Britons, in our dull northern hemisphere, endure winters that last from September until May, and count ourselves fortunate to see the sun in summer. No matter that when its glorious rays break through, however fitfully, we deem it a treat to be savoured and relished. No matter that a sunny day induces a sense of wellbeing and lightens the step of even the most doom-wrecked, sperm-counting wowser. No matter, indeed, that the risk of catching malignant melanoma from the kiss of the sun is statistically infinitesimal. People’s attitudes must be changed.

And what if they are not? Why, we must meet here again, one year hence, when the sun comes dazzling through, and berate the natives for their folly. We shall generate such contumely and call forth such wrath that every half-naked, pot-bellied hod carrier shall count himself accursed and clothe his buttock cleavage for shame, and every empty-headed shopgirl shall run screaming from the flesh bestrewn cauldron of St James’s Park and pray forgiveness among the cooling shadows of the stockroom.

Failing that, how about the year after next? Turned out dangerous again, I see.