..and now for a commercial break.
Chinese television advertising is quite the most bizarre thing I have ever seen. First of all it's just so literal. There's no degree of subtlety whatsoever. Car insurance would be sold by showing real life car wrecks for example.
It's also seems to be full of quite blatant lies. It would appear that the concept of presenting some semblance of reality has yet to arrive here.
The Chinese seem to have fallen prey to the western obsession with weight. The TV is therefore filled with adverts for various types of support stockings and girdles. Now in the west we would probably show some already anorexically thin girl prancing around showing the marvellous figure purported to be attained by the aforementioned product.
Not so in China. Here we are treated to big fat ladies parading their spare tyres for all to see before sandwiching themselves into a girdle made of some alleged magic fabric and then the miraculous results thus attained. The results are so impressive that you wonder if it's the same girls who started out at the beginning of the advert. You quite quickly come to realise that it's not. Half the time they don't even have the same colour hair. I would say that was slightly misleading.
There's another product aimed at the male portion of the population who judging from the diagrams are suffering a bit of a case of 'Mr Floppy.' We are shown with glorious 3D rendered graphics application of the spray, followed by what one can only describe as a Herculean development.
Now if only I could find a chemist where they sell the stuff..