Shockingly bad taste!

At my advanced age – 39 and holding – I’m not often shocked by things I see on television. Certain news items will do it . . .

. . . And charity appeals requesting urgent donations for natural disasters that include heart-breaking footage of floods, earthquakes and famine.

On a much less serious level, my jaw’s been known to drop when confronted by exploitation TV shows with titles like “The Man Who Was Unaware His Head Had Exploded And Continued To Work At The Welsh Assembly”.

But I never thought a television commercial for a well-known chain of fast-food restaurants would have me reaching for my remote so I could rewind to check that I hadn’t imagined what I’d just seen.

The advert features a young lad sat in a branch of the afore-mentioned chain with his mother.

During the brief conversation between them it becomes apparent that the boy’s father is dead.

The mother tells the sad-faced lad that the meal he’d ordered was also his late father’s favourite.

At which point the sad lad’s face breaks into a smile. This isn’t a TV soap series.

It’s a commercial specifically designed to make money for the fast-food chain. Naturally, it attracted loads of complaints.

For example, the children’s bereavement charity Grief Encounter said it had received many phone calls from concerned parents.

The main complaint was that the fast-food chain exploited childhood bereavement to connect with young people and surviving parents.

Originally, when complaints started rolling in, the restaurant chain denied the intention of the advertisement was to manipulate viewer’s emotions – which seems an odd thing to say.

Because the whole point of advertising is to manipulate us into buying the product being advertised.

Mercifully, the advert has now been pulled from our screens.

But a TV ad using childhood grief to sell a product should never have appeared in the first place.