Sometimes I see something like an advert and it annoys me and I think of a sketch which is essentially me pointing out the illogicalities of the advert at great length, and people generally say, "Well, yes, you're sort of right, Richard, but the sketch as a whole is a waste of time", and I say, "I know, but I feel better for writing it, a little part of me is kept alive", and they say, "Well, good for you, but throw it away", and I say, "OK", and then we all have cake.

This is one of those.

****

1: And then, we get all these people - the photographers who spend a long time calming a cat, the playgroup workers who get the plasticene in their hair - and we give them an exceptional rate of interest.

2: We give them extra.

1: We give them extra, exactly. Because they've given extra themselves.

2: But not to us.

1: No, obviously not to us. To the toddlers and the people at the tea rooms, and all that. I did go over it at some length.

2: You did, yes, Jeff. But, despite the 2 hours of examples, I remain unsure why working noticeably hard as an exhaust-fitter means you should get preferential interest rates.

1: Because...because of the extra. Remember the woman photographing the cat?

2: Of course I do! That bit took 20 minutes. But, if anything, that's her own fault for attracting a difficult customer base, one primarily consisting of people who want their pets filmed in period costume. She should branch out into new markets.

1: Well, if we gave her a cheap loan, she maybe could.

2: And what about those photographers who already had the foresight to focus their business on lucrative subjects? Like weddings and nudity and pizza cheese being pulled slowly apart, they've worked hard too.

1: Yeah, but not in the same way. It counts more if you get wet or tired or covered in-

2: [Joining in] Plasticene, yes; I recall that plasticene was a cornerstone of your argument. What you're saying, Jeff, is that, our bank should be a meritocracy. We should practice meritocractic banking.

1: Basically, yes.

2: And that's where you're dead wrong. Banking is the exact opposite of a meritocracy, isn't it? The more money you give us, the better deal we give you, it really is that simple - we don't care where the money came from, or how hard it was to get. You want a loan? We'll give you a good one if you can prove that you can pay it back, and a bad one if there's a risk.

1: But, that's not really fair.

2: At least it's logical. At least with the traditional method you know beforehand whether you'll get the loan, you don't need to use a complex plasticene and cat-hours algorithm.

1: Yeah, I suppose. [Pause] I did have this other idea.

2: Is it the one about the skin irritants pumped out of the cash points again?

1: Erm, might be.

2: No way! What sort of slogan is "we give you eczema"?

Actually....you could do something with this and it would be funny...maybe not exactly like that because they're talking about something we haven't actually seen, but you know those old Halifax adverts with the actual Halifax workers in them? You could have a 'real life bank worker' that messes with the advert. Use some kind of 'keeping it in the community' bullshit to introduce them, have your advertising person talk about giving extra, then have the 'real life worker' interrupt and insert logic?

You could always just have - 'because when you give extra, so do we'

'No we don't...'

'Bryan...'

'I had a full-time carer in the other day and we told her to piss off because she had bad credit'

'If you have bad credit, we'll help to find a solution to help you...'

'No we won't....'

Etc.

They do have these ads now, I saw one last night: it pretty explicitly said, "we give extra because you do, exhausted professional photographer stood in a river". Which is patently untrue.

But, although I like your angle very much, sglen, I think the whole thing is too on the button: the whole business won't really work, to my mind, unless one could get away from explicitly talking about Halifax campaigns, to saying somethign more incisive about the way that banks have tried to portray themselves as caring since aout 2005.