MICHAEL WALSH MUSIC CORRESPONDENT. I often wonder if the staff of advertising agencies are on illegal substances. ‘If it isn’t classical, it isn’t music’ is my approach to music. My favourite station is Venice Classical Radio (VCR) simply because the station provides 100 per cent classical music. There is no fake news, traffic reports, irritating chatter – and no adverts.

I do tune into Classic FM but apart from the above negatives, it is a ‘woke’ station. Although classical music is uniquely and distinctly a European genre if Classic FM – owned and managed by an Israeli – can find a non-European singer, performer or musician they will find one. It is called ‘diversity’: non-Europeans dominate the airwaves – they even discovered, believe it or not, a Black Beethoven.

When on September 7, 1992, the broadcaster first entered Britain’s network, I considered my birthday that year (20 September) had arrived early. However, there was a price to pay. The station’s advertisements, the fees of which pay for our listening pleasure, are sheer hell to listen to. To describe some of the commercials as juvenile is to insult children. By the way, it is as I write October 26: they’re advertising Christmas shopping. You couldn’t make corporate greed up.

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I did read that the purpose of raucous screeching radio adverts is to kick their way into our consciousness.  Infantile screaming and shouting to draw listeners’ attention to products and services might be accepted as fashionable by radio stations with a teenage audience.  But 80 per cent of the classical music station’s 5.6 million audience is over 35 years of age and surely mature.

I could only suppose that advertising agencies who provide media with advertising products haven’t the sense to realise that the listening audience of a radio station aimed at fans of Beethoven, Mozart and Puccini haven’t much in common with fans of Radio KISS and Radio MAGIC.

An additional source of exasperation is the repetitiveness of radio advertising. Having my roots in media and marketing I know that for an advert to be successful has to identify a purpose such as a special offer or a new product. It must be frequently modified. Yet, a mind-numbing screeching to draw attention to a telephone directory was played as much as 48 times each day for months at a time.

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It is the same wherever I venture. Commercial advertising features models of a kind and circumstance wholly inappropriate to the communities in which most of us dwell. I expect rap in a nightclub frequented by teens many of diverse ethnicities but what on earth possesses staid department stores to feature ‘music’ more suited to an African disco when clients are as far removed from such lifestyle as imaginable.

The unpalatable truth is that just four mega-corporations control the vast majority of advertising agencies. The Omnicom Group of New York, WPP of London, Publicis of Paris, and Interpublic of New York are the key corporations in the West. Those who control these and the much-derided Netflix, being Jewish and based in the United States, are completely out of touch with the peoples and cultures of Europe. Until advertising is returned to domestic agencies that actually empathise with their audiences most of us will be repelled by inappropriate and offensive advertising.