Government's £6 million 'Bedtime Story' climate change ad: most pernicious waste of taxpayers' money ever? (UK)
James Delingpole
(Oct. 12, 2009)
The government has spent £6 million on a hard-hitting commercial warning children of the perils of failing to check under their beds and in their cupboards before they go to sleep.
The advert – “Watch Out – Or The Bogeyman Will Get You!” – has been rushed out by Ed Miliband’s Department of Ignorance And Fear Promotion (formerly Dept of Energy and Climate Change) in response to “worrying” statistics showing that 52 per cent of children think the Bogeyman “will never ever crawl from underneath my bed and get me, no not even if I don’t check”, with another 32 per cent saying “Well I suppose I ought to have a quick look, just in case” while another 15 per cent do not know. Just one per cent agree with the government’s statement: “Yes I believe that the Bogeyman exists and that he represents a greater threat to my future than even Al Qaeda, Gordon Brown’s mismanagement of the economy or racist language on Strictly Come Dancing.”
It shows a father reading a bedtime story to a cute little blonde girl, carefully selected because it is thought white middle class households will be most susceptible to this kind of guff. The bedtime story shows pets drowning and nice, middle class neighbourhoods like the little girl lives in being swamped by rising sea levels caused by Anthropogenor – a terrifying, black, fanged beast wearing a giant badge saying “Man Made CO2″, in order to illustrate that white middle class people very much like the girl’s father are largely responsible for this devastation because of their overuse of patio heaters and internet porn sites.
“Daddy, is it twue what some of my fwends at school say that the Bogeyman doesn’t exist so it’s OK not to check under my bed at night?” asks little girl.
At which point, the father snaps the book shut and slaps the little girl hard across the face.
“They LIE bitch!” he says. “The Bogeyman is REAL.”
Since its first broadcast on primetime television on Friday the Government has received numerous complaints from viewers protesting that the advert is brutal, wantonly misleading and, especially in the midst of a recession, the most spectacular waste of taxpayers money.
A spokesman for the Department of Ignorance and Fear Promotion admitted: “Yes we appreciate the evidence for the existence of the Bogeyman is thin and getting thinner by the day. But what you have to understand is that a lot of us here have invested a great deal of life and credibility in promoting the belief that the Bogeyman DOES exist and IS a problem. We simply can’t pull a U-turn like the BBC did last week on “Global Warming”. It would be too damned embarrassing.”