Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Turning Ploughshares into Swords


The extraordinary TV ad for careers in the RAF is back on TV.  Can't remember when it was first out, but they clearly think it's successful as they're rerunning it.  

In the ad, the ghost of a fighter jet flies across an urban landscape.  As it passes factories and offices, it attracts various metallic objects from them as if by powerful magnetism, and these objects all fly up to join the plane and form its body.

It's meant to be a visual metaphor for the number of different skills and disciplines within the air force, and the voiceover talks about there being fifty different skills to choose from.  But watched without the voiceover, it's actually a straightforward dramatisation of how the armed forces takes resources that would otherwise be more useful elsewhere.  I'm not just being right-on about this - one scene actually shows surgical implements being stolen from a hospital in the middle of an operation, to form part of  machine that's built for blowing stuff up and killing people!

To my mind, this makes the ad a catastrophic case of 'friendly fire' as far as the image of the RAF is concerned.

2 comments:

  1. I suspect the surgical implements means that you can pursue a medical career in the RAF, which is usually common for all branches of the armed forces; given the incidence of Novo virus hitting hospitals at the moment at least it wasn’t cleaning materials being scooped up.

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  2. I see this is one of those blogs dilletantes set up write a couple of gushing posts and then never bother to update after that!

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