BOOZE ADS ARE A LOT TO SWALLOW

Drinking and driving don’t mix in real life. But they do on TV.

Although it’s a given that booze and cars are a lethal combination causing thousands of deaths annually, the two cheerfully coexist in the glossy, gooey, Madison Avenuey world of TV commercials.

Not in the same ads, but in uncomfortably close proximity.

During NBC’s recent telecast of the Larry Holmes-Carl Williams heavyweight fight, for example, Stroh’s beer and car products were juxtaposed in the same advertising blocks. That’s a dangerous association and image to promote, even inadvertently.

Viewers of Thursday night’s NBA playoff clash between the Lakers and Nuggets on CBS, meanwhile, saw back-to-back commercials for wine coolers and trucks. At another commercial break in the telecast, a Toyota truck spot was followed by a Lite beer spot, which was followed by a State Farm insurance spot.

Although the three were separately produced and are relatively harmless by themselves, they had an unintended insidious quality when clustered. All you needed was a little imagination to view them as one mini-drama: Get into your truck (Toyota), pop open a beer (Lite), and when you inevitably crack up, call your insurance agent (State Farm), who’ll make things right in a jiffy. And never stop smiling.

If only it were that simple.

CBS aired the Lakers-Nuggets playoff game the night after ABC’s “One Too Many,” a grim story about the tragic results of teen-age driving after drinking. There are endless real-life counterparts to such dramas, endless tragedies that increasingly draw attention to heavy alcohol consumption and feed opposition to beer and wine ads on TV.

To ban or not to ban is the question. It’s a debate in which reasonable persons can disagree.

Most booze commercials continue to give the impression that life is somehow drab without a bottle of you-know-what and that alcoholic accompaniment automatically produces symphonic richness.

“It doesn’t get any better than this.” That’s what the macho stud in the commercial tells his fellow guzzlers as they work through a case of beer while silhouetted against a blazing sunset that intensifies the romantic illusion.

Beer and wine companies contend that their commercials are designed to encourage product switching, not recruit new drinkers. That’s a big swig to swallow.

Yet the fact remains that unlike cigarette smoking (Congress banned cigarette advertising from TV and radio in 1971), the mere act of consuming alcohol has not been shown to be inherently dangerous to your health. The danger comes only from misuse and excess.

If beer and wine ads are banned, what comes next? At what point do we instead return some of the responsibility to the consumer and make him responsible for his own destiny?

Better to deglamorize the commercials, as some beer companies have begun doing in response to public pressure, than to throw them out. And better to deploy them more responsibly and erase even the slightest hint of compatibility between drinking and driving.

There’s no doubting the capacity of TV to help influence opinions and shape attitudes. That’s what commercials are all about. And the coupling of booze and auto-related commercials conveys a subtle message that seems almost to couple drinking and driving as acceptable companions.

That has to end.

Although the ban-the-beer-and-wine ads movement seems to be stalemated in Congress, meanwhile, new battle lines are being drawn. Rep. John Seiberling, (D-Ohio) has introduced a bill requiring TV, radio and cable-TV systems to provide equal time for commercials that show the down side of beer and wine consumption.

Some anti-booze ad activists support the Seiberling bill, yet FCC commissioner James Quello recently branded proposed bans and rebuttal ads as “unconstitutional, discriminatory and ineffective.”

How does he know something is ineffective before it’s been tried?

Under pressure from such reformers as Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD), TV programming has largely tidied its boozy house. One of the worst offending series was “Dallas,” whose characters made drinking as routine as dinner. But “Dallas” has curtailed the booze (although poor alcoholic Sue Ellen Ewing fell off the wagon as this season was ending), and now and then a character even turns down a drink. Applause, applause.

The funny drunk is still with us, though, if not in prime time, then in old rerun time on shows that were produced in a TV era when the alcoholic was a sure-bet cheap laugh.

Turn on your set today and you can still find a syndicated Jackie Gleason as friendly Joe the bartender, listening to the gibberish of Frank Fontaine as the thoroughly sloshed Crazy Guggenheim.

There is Guggenheim leaning against the bar, his hat pulled down over his ears, still crazy after all these years--and still drunk. But how was funny old Crazy supposed to get home after friendly old Joe closed the bar? And if he drove, who did he hit?

It doesn’t get any worse than this.