Despair of man, and watch The Simpsons. You will despair no more. If human beings can make a TV show like this, their souls deserve to be saved.

Anthony Burgess

Have you seen any advertising for the upcoming Simpsons movie? I haven’t, except for a single trailer before Ocean’s 13. Maybe your town is different from mine, but over here all the usual advertising that goes with a blockbuster movie - ads on buses and billboards and in the newspapers - is completely missing.

Maybe the producers have decided that Bangor just isn’t worth bothering with. They wouldn’t be the first movie executives/governments/invading armies to do so. Or, maybe, they’ve decided that this is one movie that doesn’t need too much advertising.

I think they’d be right. In its way, The Simpsons is the complete viral marketing proposition. It has a huge, established fanbase and a whole culture of its own. Although there isn’t much prominent advertising that I can see, everyone knows that it’s out this month.

So what do you reckon? Under-advertised, or are Rupert Murdoch’s marketing guys exploiting the viral value? Or am I just missing out on a ton of publicity because I live in the middle of nowhere, North Wales?

Let’s just hope it lives up to expectations. For years I’ve been telling people that the Simpsons is TV’s Shakespeare, the apotheosis of the medium. They either fall asleep or tell me that a copywriter has no business using a word like ‘apotheosis’, and that I should shut up.

[Edit: actually, Anthony Burgess was talking about the city of Venice in the original version of the quotation at the top of this post. I’ve just amended it to reflect what he would have said if he hadn’t died the year before the first full length episode of The Simpsons was broadcast. Obviously.]