Hazards of billboard bombardment

Today's column carries an age restriction: If you're not at least 18, you are not allowed to read any further. Go do your homework.

And Mom, you're not allowed to read any further either; today I'm writing about naughty stuff, the sort of stuff that Gwen and the other ladies at the old age home tease you about when I sometimes get a bit saucy.

So there I was on the M1 North the other day with four children in the back, all under the age of 12, and suddenly this enormous billboard was in my face advertising an exhibition of sex toys and dirty movies, and inviting anyone driving past to pop in and, after loading up with lubricants and blow-up dolls, to "visit the bondage lounge".

And I could just imagine a little voice piping up and asking: "Daddy, what exactly is a bondage lounge?" So I put my foot down to get past the offending billboard as quickly as possible.

Can you imagine what impressionable young minds must make of that?

And what, on God's green earth, is a "bondage lounge" anyway? I imagine you go into a bondage lounge and someone ties you up. For a fee.

As you will know, I'm a terribly broad-minded chap but, at heart I'm a Presbyterian from Plumstead and, frankly, I've had enough.

Bondage lounges being advertised on the M1 is puerile, gratuitous and downright offensive, especially when there are minors around.

What consenting adults do in the privacy of the Gallagher Convention Centre is no concern of mine but, really, how can the City of Johannesburg allow such filth to be peddled so publicly?

What must the Muslim aunties in their burkas think? Whatever it is, I'm with them on this one.

The day before driving on the M1, I'd seen a very similar outdoor advertisement for this same sex exhibition (whose name I'm buggered if I'm going to mention - so to speak) on one of those mobile billboards some redneck with a bakkie tows to the side of William Nicol Drive for the day.

Seeing it, and wincing slightly, made me think of a film I saw the other day called The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.

This decidedly odd documentary was made by Morgan Spurlock, the Super Size Me bloke who, in his new film, sets out to show how product placement is rife in the movies.

(The film was sponsored, most of the money supposedly coming from a maker of pomegranate juice drinks - you can watch it tomorrow on DStv channel 108 at 12.35pm. It is very funny.)

In the documentary, Spurlock goes off to Sao Paulo, in Brazil (where the nuts come from), to highlight the fact that, in this vast metropolis, they've banned outdoor advertising. Completely.

And what a difference it makes to a city that was once drowning under meaningless, unsightly billboards.

And I thought: What a wonderful idea. Our highways and byways, even our lampposts, are crammed to the skies with banal, stupid billboards that exhort us to buy everything from car insurance to airtime, clothes we can't afford to roof repairs.

Monster billboards on the N1 advertise that you can pay just R50 for a metre of boerewors and half a kilo of deep-fried chips.

Seriously, how could they ban Peter Stuyvesant billboards on health grounds and allow this kind of hazardous advertising?

And don't even get me started on how the Airports Company of SA has ruined our perfectly good airports by plastering advertising on every single interior and exterior solid surface.

Outdoor advertising is just plain unedifying, unnecessary, intrusive and ugly.

Advertising belongs in newspapers, and on TV and the wireless, not alongside and on top of every single road and lamppost.

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