Let's nut this out: 10,315 seconds = 171.91 minutes of TV gambling ads per week, but let's make it 172 minutes for convenience's sake.
If Tom Waterhouse and friends were to claim three minutes of every broadcast hour between 3pm and midnight -- an overestimate, to be sure, given that commercial stations are limited to 13 ad-minutes per hour -- that would mean Little Miss Misery is watching 57 hours of television every week.
If that is genuinely the case, if she is planted in front of the screen for longer each day than her parents spend at work, exposure to the latest betting trends and opportunities would be the least of her problems. Far more serious, if we put any credence in that figure of 10315 seconds, is the unavoidable conclusion that her parents are deliberately keeping her awake, perhaps in order to run a book on the moment when seizures begin.
Then again, it might just be an example of what the loudest scolds and stickybeaks have always done better than anything else: Lie.
Another moral panic. On this reasoning yoof should by now be hooked on Lotto tickets, where the returns are considerably worse.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure that such surveys will count the entire duration of sporting telecasts as "gambling advertising".
ReplyDeleteBut surely that 57 hrs of live television every week would have to be dedicated sport where the bookies actually get to advertise? Or do broadcasts of Parliament now give live odds on the passage of bills passing through the houses either individually or as a running double for both houses?
ReplyDeleteParliamentary television is blocks of really bad "infotainment" scattered across a three-year season. It fills the "void" between the times the punters get their hands on the remote control for one day only.
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