THE recent celebrations surrounding Yorkshire Day recently reminded me of the most annoying advert I have ever seen on television.

It starts off in an old farmhouse kitchen with a grey-haired stereotyped wrinkly explaining to a doe-eyed eight-year-old girl how life used to be 'in the old days.'

"When we came in for tea, there was always a fresh egg apiece and a nice hot cup of tea...." She goes on: "I drink Yorkshire Tea now."

Among the rest of the script the decisive word the creative advertising executives were forced to include is 'now' because the makers of 'Yorkshire Tea' cannot under any circumstances claim that their brand of hot drink was around in those days because it wasn't.

Such a suggestion would leave them prey to censure from the Advertising Standards Authority."

In fact, Yorkshire tea was launched by Taylor's of Harrogate in 1977 but the company has been blending teas using Yorkshire Water since the 19th century.

They are desperate, however, to cash in not only on county chauvinism, but also nostalgia for the old days, hoping that no-one ever realises the significance of the word 'now' which the stereotyped wrinkly adds to the end of her

nostalgic statement.

If they manage to imply that Yorkshire Tea has something to do with the way things used to be in some invented golden age of pseudo-

traditional wholesome English cuisine, then the advert will have done the trick.

Similarly, other products try to exploit our

golden age concept with words like 'Farmhouse' stamped on the packet, as if it made any

difference to the food.

I remember my being asked if I wanted 'Farmhouse' cheese at a supermarket delicatessen counter and receiving a puzzled look when replying that I could not possibly eat

anything made from bricks, mortar, stone and infested with damp and vermin as traditional farmhouses used to be.

Like most words when commercially exploited, advertising vocabulary is only effective when it is almost completely stripped bare of meaning.

Advertising is a psychological process which presents, not a product per se, but a product as an icon of a dream.

In this sense mere words are transformed from simple tools of communication into a rhythmic litany rather like the Latin Mass used to be in church.

The repeated phrases which hardly anyone attending could translate in a meaningful way were extremely important for inculcating a very profound message holistically which made sense only until its constituent parts were examined and found to be largely confusing and nonsensical.

We do not buy ice cream, cars or beer, we buy sex, sun and success. We don't necessarily buy Yorkshire Tea for its flavour, we buy it because we want to revert to an idyll of rustic and scenic simplicity.

The ironic thing is that the population's diet has been so sanitised and standardised by a combination of supermarkets and intensive agriculture that if we did return to producing the type of food which would look at home on a 1930s 'farmhouse' kitchen table, no-one would eat it.

How many among us could catch a rabbit, skin it and prepare it for the pot, or turn a flapping trout into tasty fried fillets? Faced with a

chicken or pheasant still replete with feathers and innards, how many modern cooks would throw it straight in the dustbin and reach for the frozen breast portions in a supermarket packet?

Leaving aside vegetarians, who suffer from an eating disorder, I know of many meat eaters who would gag at heart stew, ox tongue, a plate of kidneys or a pan full of liver and onions all of which are traditional English meals no longer eaten by the majority of our squeamish and overfed population.

Do shoppers know that eggs do not come out of the chicken spotlessly clean and carrying a

sell-by date, or that the waxed coating on orange peel is not natural?

I think the modern shopper - Yorkshire Tea lover or not - would be nauseated by a traditional farming diet of the 1930s despite the yearning for nostalgia their favourite brand suggests.

There is just one thing that puzzles me. Where the devil do they grow tea in Yorkshire?

l Do you agree with the Lancashire Loudmouth? Write and tell us your views at Wharfedale Newspapers, 9 Orchard Gate, Otley, LS21 3NX.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.