I have already confessed to my liking for TalkSport, a talk-radio station whose own advert best sums them up, "TalkSport: the radio station for discerning taxi-drivers - both of them!" Well, I was once a bus-driver so I nearly qualify. Anyway, as they chunter on, day in, day out, mostly on the tragi-comedy of our national game, proceedings are interrupted by commercial breaks. When I can't reach the remote control, I tend to tune them out of my subconscious but over the last year I have become increasingly aware of a huge increase in 'adverts' from the sink-offices of the governmental bureaucracy, mafia clans like HM Customs & Excise, the Vehicle and Driving Licence Agency and whatever the old Ministry of Works is called these days. The 'ads' all have the same style; a low, creepy voice with a sinister, electronic echo-tone playing in the background. The one from the Vehicle Department in Swansea boasts that it knows if you are using an unlicensed car or motor-cycle and threatens to confiscate it and have it crushed. However, so incompetent are the thick Taffs in Swansea who mismanage this so-called 'Agency' that my paper reported a month ago that there were tens of thousands of unlicensed cars hurtling round the country every day of the week. The works department has a whole radio serial representing some poor sod trying to earn a crust and employing other poor sods who just want the money and paying them cash. There's a nice 'scene' in which the boss is put in the slammer along with the immigrant he was employing - and who wanted to be employed. The 'advert' invited snitches to 'grass up' anonymously anyone they thought might be employing people for cash.
Where do they train these people - East Germany? I don't know which is worse, the fact that they dare to threaten and corrupt us with their creepy 'adverts', or the fact that they are so utterly useless they couldn't actually catch a cold! In fact, I do know what the very worst thing about this whole wretched business is, the fact that their pay and perks and pensions and cars and smart office blocks and unbelievably expensive advertising budgets, comes out of my wallet - oh, and yours, too, by the way. Have a nice day!
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