The Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice (BCAP) has, at long last, ruled that television adverts can no longer be louder than the programmes in which they appear.

Better late than never, I suppose. I have mostly given up watching television because of the shrieking of the adverts. It's just so horrible how you're sitting there on the sofa after dinner, vaguely watching some costume drama with ladies in bonnets on a river bank sharing out the egg sandwiches, and trout taking the fly with a muted “glop”, and you're half asleep and drifting into a sort of reverie where you're asking Miss Bennet if there isn't, perchance, a slice of cucumber to be had hereabouts, and she raises her long eyelashes and says: “BUY STUFF! BUY STUFF NOW!! RA RA RA!! BLAAAAA!! KRANG!!!! BUY LOADS OF IT!!!! ONLY NINE NINE NINE FIVE!! COME DOWN TO THE CRAPHOLE WAREHOUSE!! SOFAS CAN GO UP AS WELL AS DOWN MAY CAUSE HEATBURN IN PREGNANT BABIES!!”

And you leap up thinking hoodies are at the door and grab your tennis racket and run out naked into the street. And then you realise it was just the ads.

I guess it is because television is so dismal that the ads are so loud. The advertisers know that whoever sits down to watch Britain's Got Property Ladders, Get Me Out of Here! is bound to be asleep within minutes and if you want to tell them about the terrible disposable garbage you think they should buy with the money they don't have because they spend their whole pathetic life in front of the television, then first you're going to have to WAKE THEM UP!! WAAAA!! BANG! BANG! BANG! DON'T SHOP FOR IT!!! ARGOS IT!!! WHATEVER THE HELL THAT MEANS!!! WA! WA!!! IT'S THE SAME OLD CRUD AS BEFORE, YOU JUST DON'T HAVE TO HAUL YOUR BIG GREEDY ARSE OFF THE SOFA TO GET IT!!

And if the viewers aren't asleep, then they've almost certainly gone into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and there is a chance that from there, if the volume doesn't suddenly soar, they won't be able to hear some D-list celebrity saying: “BUY FROZEN PEAS!!! THEY'RE GREAT!!! MUCH BETTER THAN FRESH!!!! SEALS IN THE FLAVOUR!!!! HURRAH FOR BIRDSEYE!! WAAA! WAAA!!!!”

But these new regulations state that “adverts must not be excessively noisy or strident”. It's my dream come true. At half-time in the football, from now on, there will be a faint tinkle of theme music and then a chap in suede shoes and a V-neck will say, quite quietly: “Why not have a Carlsberg, it's perfectly acceptable beer.” And then there will be a car, sitting nice and still by the road, and a voice saying softly: “Here's a car, it's much like all the others. If your own car is beyond repair, this is one of the many essentially identical vehicles you might consider as a replacement.” And so on.

And from this great start can we not go still farther to reduce the depressing and deleterious aspects of advertising? Can we not, perhaps, make the abdominal muscles of those men in the aftershave ads a bit less ludicrous? Nobody has abs like that. And can we make them a bit less handsome? And those enormous bulges you see in the pants ads, I think it's time they were scaled down.

And those big perky breasts on the girls in the beer adverts - they're just not good for marriages. Come on, let's saggy them down a bit so the missus doesn't feel quite so critically scrutinised coming out of the shower.

In fact, let's do away with hyperbole altogether. No more Ford Super Sunday - just Another Irrelevant Football Match Sponsored By A Mediocre Car Company Sunday. No more Fifty Greatest Comedy Moments but Fifty Joyless Clips To Which We Already Had The Rights So It Cost Us Nowt.

And once we're making some things a bit less noisy and strident, mightn't it be possible to make everything a bit less noisy and strident? Could they maybe turn the neon signs in Piccadilly Circus down a fraction? It would look so much classier. And might they be able to turn the volume down in the headphones of the guy sitting next to you on the Tube? And maybe also on the phones of the teenagers on the top deck of the bus because, really, this isn't a hip-hop gig, it's a frigging bus. And that courier roaring off to the next set of traffic lights, can't we turn the sound down on his motorbike? Or kill him?

And the fat blokes outside the pub with their shirts off, could we please turn off their tattoos? And must their trainers be quite so blindingly white? And whose idea was birdsong at dawn? And newspaper columnists these days, will they ever shut up?

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