Drinker’s Party
‘WHY did you drink that over Christmas? Because it was cheap? Because it was there? Because the rules of Beer Bungee clearly state (code 7, subsection 153a) that you must?
On Tuesday, we learnt the real reason. We drink because the headshrinkers at the big ad agency tell us to?
As the Times reported (Adverts do make teens drink more, study shows), advertising works. A study at the University of Connecticut found that Americans between the age of 15 and 26 were heavily under the influence of adverts for booze.
Indeed, the boffins behind this study noted a correlation between the number of alcohol adverts viewed and the number of drinks scarfed each additional ad led to a 1 per cent rise in the average number of drinks consumed.
It was sobering stuff. But what if the ruse could be subverted? Would we all drink less we watched a bad advertisement for drinking?
We needed to put the theory to the test. We needed someone who could make drinking look staid and dull. We needed Charles Kennedy.
And on Friday, Kennedy massed the troops and gave it his best shot.
Like a Scottish Mars bar, The Scone had been battered. Charles Kennedy admitted that he was being treated for alcoholism.
Politicians love empathising with the great British public, and it was hard not to think that, given the nations love of booze, Kennedy was striking a chord of kinship with the electorate.
While other politicos kiss babies to look like family men, Kennedy dips his lips into a vat of the hard stuff. You can trust a man who likes a drink. Kennedy was one of us.
Not that being us is all that good. The Mail spotted a report in The Lancet stating that over the past 40 years alcohol consumption in the UK has doubled. Drinking to excess now kills 22,000 of us a year.
And it damages careers. Just ask Kennedy who resigned his post at the weekend…’
Posted: 9th, January 2006 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
