Television: SPITBALLING WITH FLAIR

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messages into the same time space. In the past two years alone, the number of products shown on TV has increased by about one-third, most of them in ten, 20-and 30-second shots. There will also be more "piggybacking": promoting two unrelated products in one ad. "Triggerbacking" and "quarterbacking" are just a station break away.

Glorious Hours. Humorist Stan Freberg, a freelance commercial producer who created the Sunsweet prune and Jeno's pizza ads for TV, is pushing another possible cure. It is frankly Utopian. He calls it "The Freberg Part-Time Television Plan: A Startling but Perfectly Reasonable Proposal for the De-escalation of Television in a Free Society, Mass Media-wise." The plan calls for a week like this: Monday. Television as usual. Tuesday. The set goes black, but one word shines in the center of the screen: Read!

Wednesday. Television as usual. Thursday. The set goes black again, but this time we see the word Talk! Friday. Television as usual. Saturday. The words Unsupervised Activity.

And Sunday? Says Freberg: "We have to have somewhere to lump all those leftover commercials, don't we? Think of it! Twenty-four glorious, uninterrupted hours of advertising!"

It might just work—and it could be worse.