The hard sell: Ocean Finance

Having asked a mortgage broker, I am now sure that Ocean Finance are perfectly reputable moneylenders. Their advertisements, however, do them no favours. Six months ago they ran a commercial in which a tangerine-coloured gangster in a nasty suit marched up and down a busy office promising the earth to those who were prepared to put their homes on the line. You had the impression that he lived in Barking and had only left his sovereign rings at home because his knuckles hurt. It gave me nightmares.

Perhaps realising their mistake, they now employ a pretty and well-spoken woman, but the format and timing have not changed one iota. The ads are still screened on cable TV during the day and very late at night for those people unfortunate and impecunious enough to have developed reverse sleeping patterns. And, like the gangster before her, the well-spoken woman promises to overlook all previous financial impropriety and throw vast amounts of cash in your direction.

A series of ordinary people are then wheeled out to sing the praises of impromptu vacations, new furniture, 25-year debt-consolidation plans and, natch, Ocean Finance. All this might be a tad more convincing were these ordinary people not so gruesomely, self-parodically ordinary.

A couple, the sort you can imagine flicking through "P" in the Yellow Pages seeking paedophiles to beat up, sit on their threadbare, three-piece suite beneath hideous centre lighting, intimating that were it not for Ocean Finance they would long ago have died, probably in a suicide pact. A bloke with glasses, worn, I suspect, in the vain hope of implying intelligence, explains his problems. You know the sort of thing: "I am a self-employed, unemployable, unemployed twit, with a child custody battle and 600 CCJs. Nevertheless ... "

I have no idea who was able to assemble such a hapless, gormless and gullible bunch of hopeful no-hopers. I just hope that they are actors, because the alternative is that they actually exist. It is adverts like this that bring the ancient, noble and much-loved vocation of moneylending into disrepute. Ocean deserve better.