AND NOW FOR A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR...

When I was married to my first wife and not my current one (sorry, scratch that, Yannie sometimes reads these editorials), we used to spend time round at her parents’ house and watch telly with them. Her mum was very sweet but a little scatterbrained and one evening she asked us, “Is that programme on tonight, the one I like?” We looked at each other in bemusement. “What programme would that be?”

“The one with the Martians in it, those little creatures from space.”

“Do you mean War of the Worlds?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “The funny ones.”

It turns out she was talking about the Cadbury’s advert for Smash instant mashed potato in the UK. In these classic ads we saw a family of Martian robots who would watch humans laboriously preparing mashed potato the traditional way on TV.