I’m having an horrendous day with the kids. Our baby is screaming, our six-year-old is being uncharacteristically curmudgeonly and irritable, and our three-year-old appears to have been possessed by the demonic spirit of AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’. He is a tiny ginger-haired evil guitar riff of a boy, marching to a drumbeat of savage fury.

There’s only one thing for it. I’m giving them all a revitalizing draught of delicious, refreshing Coca Cola.

Ahhh! Gosh, that’s better. Less of a beverage and more of a social worker in a comforting red emergency can, Coca Cola instantly reforms our young offenders. The baby sleeps like one, and the boys tiptoe upstairs to play nicely. And wow, you know what? I might just have a nice glass of ice-cool Coca Cola myself. Delicious. Coca Cola: it’s not just for kids, you know!

And now, according to my watch – a Patek Philippe, incidentally, which is the official chronometer of the Down With The Kids column since of course one never actually owns a Patek Philippe but merely looks after it for the next generation – it is time to walk upstairs to the nursery, furnished in stylish-yet-sustainable hardwoods from Habitat, where my above-average offspring are waiting, dressed head-to-toe in classic-yet-modish Osh Kosh dungarees. Yes, you heard right: even their socks and hats and underpants are tiny dungarees.

The above was product placement, of course. I’m piloting it in this blog. Do you like it? Or do you really love it? Those are basically your two choices. I’m having a consultation period and I’m keen to hear your views. If your views happen to coincide with mine, you may see them quoted in my forthcoming report.

See? Everything I know about democracy I learned from this government, which recently announced its plans to allow product placement in British-made TV shows for the first time. The government really is having a consultation period, of eight weeks, during which you really can write to tell them what you think. May I suggest using a Bic rollerball? I’m writing with one now. They certainly are silky smooth.

British kids between five and 16 watch a huge amount of TV – 2.7 hours per day according to the latest big survey. Most of what they watch isn’t officially classified as children’s programming, so it won’t be exempt from product placement. 2.7 hours per day, which equals 82 full 12-hour days per year, means a lot of products to place. They’ll have to place them everywhere. My kids like nature documentaries, which will now presumably need to focus on urban species such as foxes and pigeons, scavenging our bins for branded detritus. The late, great Johnny Morris will rise from the grave to do the voiceover of two vixens discussing – à propos of nothing – just how much tastier these discarded Burger King nuggets are than their rivals: “Blimey, Samantha, I can see why humans might chuck McNuggets away, but these?!?”

TV is a public space, and in public spaces we accept that billboards are part of the view. The understanding, of course, is that billboards won’t be nailed over our windows, or Scotch taped to the insides of our children’s corneas. As adults we can spot product placements for what they are – I hope you all spotted that I was paid to say Scotch tape rather than Sellotape just now – but children, by definition, are more naïve.

The very best thing about kids is that they only partially get the difference between fantasy and reality, let alone the difference between editorial and advertorial. Their little brains should be full of big dreams. How grown-up it would be of us to surrender 2.7 hours of their daydreams to the marketeers.

•    The government’s consultation document is here.

•    One campaigning website suggesting ways of engaging in the consultation is here.

•     You should also go here if you’re curious what it’s like inside my 3-yr-old’s brain.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 2:23 am and is filed under My column in 'The Guardian'. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.