To excel in so many fields and to do so with such style enthusiasm

To excel in so many fields and to do so with such style, enthusiasm and good humour marked him as a man of unusually high quality. Sir John Figgess was a soldier, diplomatist, expert on Japan and world authority on oriental porcelain. It also claims extra ads would dilute the impact of ads so even if cheaper they would be less effective.But ITV's unspoken fear is that extra minutes of commercials - more supply - would simply mean advertisers will then spend less money.The argument about more minutes on terrestrial channels is largely in the hands of the regulator, the Independent Television Commission, but advertisers wanted ITV support in lobbying for more minutes of ads.However with Channel 5 about to come on line and supply 61,000 more minutes of advertising airtime - admittedly not hitting ITV's kind of audiences - it is doubtful that the ITC will look sympathetically on any push to put even more ads on our screens.. ITV has been resisting these calls because it fears that more advertising would scare viewers away. This has been combined with a period when viewers - especially young and affluent ones the advertisers want to reach - have been turning off or tuning into subscription services on satellite and cable.This squeeze on the supply of audiences - especially for ITV - has led to advertisers demanding that ITV raise the number of minutes of ads it runs between programmes. If you are unlucky enough to be targeting young people in high demand regions like London the inflation rate is 77 per cent.The reason for the rising costs is due to an increase in demand for advertising as the economy comes out of recession and advertisers increase their budgets.

For these groups inflation has risen even higher - 60 per cent in the case of the latter. They usually want smaller demographic groups such as ABC1 men or young adults aged 16-34. Since the depths of the recession five years ago, the cost of advertising on TV has risen by 47 per cent, this compares with a retail price inflation rate of just 14 per cent.However advertisers do not usually buy campaigns targeting the whole TV audience. In short: on supply and demand.For the past three years advertisers have been making increasingly loud noises about the cost of their advertising.

The price of a thousand viewers depends totally on the number of viewers actually watching a channel and the amount of money being offered to buy them. But an average-sized advertising campaign that runs for two months will usually cost in the region of pounds 2m-pounds 3m with only around pounds 250,000 going towards making the ad.The market in these thousands of viewers, as traded between advertising agencies and TV companies, is one of the purest markets in the UK. In fact the production of TV adverts costs but a tiny proportion of the money needed for the whole campaign because the airtime it uses is very expensive and getting more so. It is difficult to say exactly how much a 30-second ad costs because advertising agencies do not buy individual spots, they buy viewers by the thousand. In the popular imagination, advertising campaigns run into big budgets because of the whopping salaries of the stars who appear in them or the exotic locations that always seem to be needed. Like him, we should meanwhile monitor the election via Roy Hudd and the Huddlines team.The writer is a freelance radio critic.. But Radio 2 is surfing into the future on their grey permanent waves, and the Huddlines will be right alongside."I look forward to greeting the new century in the company of the wonderful News Huddlines," says sunny Jim Moir, boss of Radio 2. And, yes, it is end-of- the-pier stuff - but with modern material."A visit to a Huddlines recording at Broadcasting House reveals exactly the audience profile you'd expect - the same cackling crones familiar from Mrs Merton's soirees, who display the grisly perkiness last seen in the insurance adverts on daytime TV.

People have tried to write for us and Week Ending, but they've never managed it.""I've always insisted there must be belly laughs," agrees Hudd "There can be a point, but there must always be a joke. But it rejects mere political opinionising and demands jokes."Both programmes are rare because you can turn up and start your career on them," says "gag doctor" Stoneman "But Huddlines insists that you're funny. They don't explain why licence-payers should listen to novices with more opinions than wit.Huddlines pays the same as Week Ending (around pounds 30 to pounds 45 per minute, or pounds 8 each for one-liners, not forgetting the 65p repeat fee) and is equally welcoming to newcomers. Complain to Week Ending people and they'll sooner or later say that it's the UK's greatest training ground for comedy, giving newcomers a unique access to the airwaves. They soon discover they're wrong and give up one or the other."Jokes are what make the difference. People assume we're the same as Week Ending but with knob jokes. "Week Ending is discouraging for writers because they keep changing the producer We don't, so Huddlines has a stronger identity.