'One night in Miami,' Raymond Williams wrote in 1973, 'still dazed from a week on an Atlantic liner, I began watching a film and at first had some difficulty adjusting to a much greater frequency of commercial "breaks".' Things didn't get any easier for him. Trailers for two other movies began to appear as inserts; the one he'd started with, about a crime in San Francisco, was interrupted not only by advertisements for cereal and deodorant, but by a romance set in Paris and then the roar of a prehistoric monster laying waste to New York. 'I can still not be sure,' Williams reflected, 'what I took from that whole flow' - aside, presumably, from a sharp urge to lie down.

LRB 5 April 2007 | PDF Download