Although she will not be numbered among the film immortals, few of us will forget the recently late Bea Arthur, alias Maude Findlay and Dorothy Sbornak. The brassy, opinionated, somewhat vulgar but curiously engaging character whom, however, few would care to include among their closest friends became familiar to us when television, apart from the National, the Agenda and some reruns, was still worth watching.

What businesses and products sponsored her shows? Only Shoppers Drug Mart, back in the 1980s, comes to mind. Ms Arthur was reluctant to have those commercials seen in the U.S.A., at least not far beyond the border over which Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano now claims, without supporting evidence, that it was from a non-vigilant Canada that the 9/11 terrorists entered her altruistic and peaceloving country.

David Bloom, retired chairman of the pharmacy chain, remembers hiring 'Maude' after that sitcom was cancelled in 1978. Instantly recognisable and seldom predictable on camera by those who wrote her scripts, she became for a time Shoppers Drug Mart's toughtalking challenge to independent retail chemists. Other actors have turned to advertising contracts in order to supplement their incomes at the end of their careers. Bea Arthur did so at the height of hers.

Television commercials can be only slightly less annoying than telemarketers. Bloom said that Arthur was the perfect choice of a person to "cut through the advertising clutter" on the TV screen. Like the jumble of junk mail flyers in which some tabloid newspapers get lost, prompting one to consign the whole mess to the blue box forthwith, sales pitches that break unexpectedly into regular programming trigger a negative response.

The action on the screen no longer fades to" this message from our sponsor". The commercials simply intrude and there are usually six or more of them.. That insufferable woman who doesn't drive like you do lurches into view before one has had time to reach for the remote volume control to shut her up. The frequent repetition of the same commercial does not impress the message on the mind; it irritates at least this viewer. How many of us rush to switch our automobile insurance to save "up to $400 a year"? That's up to $1.09 a day, not even coffee money.

Why can the CBC not provide Canadian public television free from excessive advertising as it once did? PBS programming from below the border, like the proverbial curate's egg, is good in parts but the new"Buffalo-Toronto" ploy still features shows like "The American (i.e.U.S.) Experience", strictly 'Stateside' news coverage and pictures of Washington's Capitol building, the Grand Canyon and other foreign features with the assurance that "all this belongs to you". It does not. Nor are the frequent 'Britcoms' Canadian content.

To press the point, should the CBC's future not be as a Canadian public broadcaster supplemented by two or three million 'member" subscribers who appreciate programming that does not appeal to the lowest common denominator of taste and does not have to compete for advertising? Let that debate begin.

The acceptability of advertising in newspaper and other print media is another matter. Most of us give due attention to the display and want ads that appear in the newspapers we read while ensconced in our favourite chairs or while sipping our morning coffee. Those who have to work on a computer for several hours daily do not foresee the time when they will enjoy reading the news there as well. I, for one, keep both my computer and television set in a basement room, away from the ones in which I live and 'interface' with real people.

By contrast, books, magazines and newspapers belong upstairs with family and friends rather than downstairs with the electronic servants, including the washer and dryer. On my living room 'long able', the de-consecrated altar from a 1939-45 RCAF chapel, are current periodicals and papers. I note their advertised goods and regularly order them, but never on-line. I decline to launch my credit card information into cyberspace.

One has no quarrel with the advertising industry as such. One just wishes that its messages would reach us in less aggressive, nonintrusive, ways. Advertising and the print media have developed together. The Canadian Encyclopedia says that the first Canadian newspaper advertisement, in the Halifax Gazette in 1752, was for butter.

The first mass circulation advertiser was a probably a magazine ('magasin' = shop') like Eaton's catalogue. It carried neither news nor stories but it reached a crosscountry audience and had an extended life in outdoor 'conveniences' where it served another, now almost forgotten, purpose.

By 1889 newspapers were carrying enough advertising lineage that a Montreal firm began arranging the placing of ads in newspapers right across the continent. One such, the Globe, published in Toronto, began in the mid-19th Century to call itself Canada's national newspaper because it was read by Anglophones in every province. Even though under recent editorship it no longer aspires to the journalistic standards of The Times of either London or New York, The Globe may still be the most readable paper in Canada. Its quality, however, is slipping.

In 1988 newspapers carried 22.7% of national advertising. Television had 16.6% and radio 9.1%. The internet did not yet count. The Canadian Advertising Research Foundation (CARF) carefully guards today's figures. User names and passwords alone can unlock the information.

Garth Drabinsky, not now seen as the soundest of entrepreneurs or advisers, said in 1988 that "advertising is one of the greatest forms of education and enlightenment". John Robert Colombo included that in his anthology of Canadian quotations. One way in which Darth Grabinsky's (the late Peter Gzowski's slip of the tongue) Cineplex venues, with their earsplitting commercials and film trailers, educated me was by teaching me not to arrive for the feature film until at least 10 minutes after the published show time.

That way one avoids a line-up at the box office, the unwelcome 'messages' that are imposed upon a captive audience and the previewed mayhem of the pictures that are coming soon to a 'theatre' near you.