Product Placement

I hate adverts. I’ve got a real aversion, almost like an allergy. I switch over the channel whenever they come on. I can’t handle them.

Ever since I was born, I’ve been exposed to endless advertising. I feel deadened by it. I think, if I watch an advert, then maybe another bloody jingle or slogan will get stuck in my head, some multinational conglomerate will have successfully brainwashed me with garbage, so that next time I need to clean up, their stupid advert will worm its way out of my subconscious and scream at me, ‘BUY ME! I’M THE STRONGER SOAKER UPPER!’ It makes me feel physically sick. Real pangs of nausea strike me whenever I consider the goop that my brain is becoming, the zombie drone to the faceless world of consumerism, being fed thoughts directly from Big Business constantly.

I always thought I was just particularly susceptible to this irritation. Nobody else seems to care that much. My friends and family watch adverts all the time – they even talk about good ones they’ve seen - and they always seemed sane. They weren’t wearing Nikes, drinking coca-cola and Carling and eating whatever McDonald’s have got new on the menu – they were just regular folk.

That was, until it happened.

I awoke in the middle of Worlds Wildest Police Videos. I must have dozed off. The adverts were on, so I flicked the channel over to ITV News. There was no-one in the studio. I watched expectantly for a few minutes, at the still camera image of an empty desk, before flicking back to Channel 5 to watch more stock footage of police drama. ‘How strange’, I wondered, but it wasn’t long until my mind was full of US cops.

When the next ad break came on, I turned off the telly, deciding to drive up to the chip shop to get some food. I opened the front door and stepped into a different world.

Car alarms were wailing endlessly through silence. Litter blew around my ankles like the road hadn’t been swept in months. Every streetlight was off, the only lights being the thin streak of silver that had left the moon and got lost in the clouds, and the glare from my headlamps.

The chippie was closed. I wasn’t surprised; I was already fretting the end of the world. A police car was outside it, its doors wide open, its siren screaming and plastering lights over the black landscape like a disco heralding the apocalypse, but with no cops inside, with no cops in sight. I drove on.

I sped up and down the main road, looking for a sign of life, preferably one that would sell me chips. I tried to keep a cool head. What had happened? These streets that were normally bustling with traffic, pedestrians, drunks smoking outside pubs, were vacuous voids - bleak visions of nuclear holocaust. There was not even an insect for company. I was stressing out, driving frantically to nowhere as quickly as possible, desperate for a sign of life.

Everyone has to be dead, I told myself. Everyone has died. Or everyone has evacuated. Some catastrophe has happened since I was napping and the world is over.

I span the car around again and floored it, racing down the main road at 90mph, into the next town, past blackened streets and deserted houses. A speed camera flashed me. I laughed for the first time, carefree in an empty world, before the macabre horror of my picture never being seen, the industry behind the camera being an office full of empty chairs and missing lives, hit my mind and made me feel repulsed by my joy. The horrors of a deadened land paled next to the joy of liberation.

I passed the Tesco supermarket that had just opened. The lights were on. I saw movement. Indeed, I saw masses of people. A wave of relief rolled down my body like a massage. I’d found Humanity. The UK still existed. We were here. Thank God.

Hunger hit me once more. I pulled in to the crowded car park and entered the massive emporium. Everyone was there. And everything was there. And the staff were exceptional. I got a tray and ate a meal at the cafe. Every service I could ever desire screamed out at me – mobile phones, mortgages, top-of-the-range electronics, books, spattered in endless aisles of groceries - and all very reasonably priced. There was no doubt why the streets were empty – there was no need for anywhere else. Tescos had it all, and more. “Tescos,” I muttered, “you’re brilliant. What is it that you do that makes you so phenomenal?”

A moment of realisation hit me. They do everything. And every little helps.

And I opened up my heart. And sacrificed my soul to Tesco.