BBC News Online reports that

BBC defends ‘digital face’ trails, following four hundred complaints about them. They write:

The BBC has defended its adverts for digital TV following criticism from viewers who found them frightening.

Is that an official admission that these ‘trails’ are actually adverts? In common with many telly-taxpayers, I’m sick of the amount of advertising the BBC has loaded onto BBC1 and BBC2 over the last few years. It used to be that the lack of adverts on the BBC was used as a justification for the telly-tax, but those days are long gone.

“They have generated an encouraging level of enquiries, which has vastly outnumbered the amount of complaints received,” a spokeswoman said.

That’s the same lame excuse peddled by dodgy-advertisers everywhere!

“It is designed to be upbeat with cheerful music,” it continued, adding that the trails were not screened near children’s programmes.

BBC heads: ‘Upbeat and cheerful’, or scary and sinister?

If they’re so ‘upbeat’ and ‘cheerful’ why avoid children’s programmes?

However, one viewer complained to the BBC’s Points of View website that the image was “disturbingly psychotic”.

“It makes me feel queasy thinking about it,” wrote another contributor, while a third described it as “absolutely horrible”.

Quite. I don’t know about you, but the BBC’s digital ‘faces’ remind me of the stacks of skulls in photographs from the killing fields of Cambodia or Rwanda – stacks and stacks of individuals, born, nurtured and loved by someone, only to end up senselessly murdered in the name of political ideology or ethnic cleansing. Brrrr.