“ I wonder, I wonder” That Cunard ad on tv.

I love it….sets me thinking…always reminds me of Richard Burton, super voice!….the full literary passage is much better though!……..but never realised it was selling cruises! Never watch ads just listen! So wasted on me, can’t see me captive in a hotel on the sea with 100’s of others…yuck!

It was the suggestion about love affairs that blew it for me. Rather seedy, chauvinistic, and old fashioned.

Always mute ads or change channels immediately. Some of them are on repeatedly and become increasingly annoying. Im thinking particularly of weight loss ad, selling your gold ad and numerous cremation ads. Not a fan of ads and wonder if anyone actually watches them let alone be influenced to buy.

Whenever this advert comes on my blood pressure goes up - I absolutely hate it! I quite agree that it’s very patronising, aimed at women who dream about this sort of thing, when the reality is totally different. In the real world I booked a Saga cruise for DH, who has limited mobility and me. A great cruise!

I have never and will never go on a cruise. That ad sounds silly and stupid.

The ads that drive me crazy are for pharmaceuticals, with unpronounceable names (can I have a vowel or two, please?), such happy people portrayed, and if you don’t have this affliction… well you’re just not with the “in” crowd. Take this and it will change your life!

Seems like half of America is comprised over-medicated stone-cold zombies. Maybe that’s why our politics are all screwed up.
USA Gundy

I turn the sound off during adverts on the rare occasion I watch anything with adverts. Good time to go to the loo make coffee etc!

I dislike this add intensity. It’s totally unrealistic and creepy. Certainly does not make me want to go on a cruise!

Me too Foxygloves! His voice is so annoying I cringe every time it comes on.

Ad grates on me, and no cruise for me, too many others sharing my space !

Nauseatingly trite, but so are so many ads and so puerile, do the ad companies think we are all mindless idiots. And if I hear one more ad with Brian Blessed shouting I will scream.

This ad caused a bit of a rift with my husband months ago!
He asked me if I would dream of having love affairs and in the voiceover, and I replied that I may well do so, I suppose.

Which irritated him, and he told me to go off and have one if I felt like that. Needless to say I haven't nor would I!

No matter how many times I hear it I can never remember at the beginning what it’s for. Maybe the message is subliminal but, if it is I don’t seem to have had a sudden urge to go on a cruise.

If you could make anything you dream come true then you could find a cure for cancer, end world hunger, bring world peace, give everyone clean water, give everyone unlimited free power....in fact you could do everything that needs to be done to make the world a better place, or you could just go on a luxury cruise. What type of person is Cunard aiming this advert at?

I've enjoyed some cruises and I'll be on Cunard next year but I've never seen the advert. People one meets on cruises vary a lot - it can widen ones horizons. I've never met anyone I really disliked, just a few with little in common.

The ad is four years old now and was made originally to run in cinemas before the 2019 Downtown Abbey film. At the time, Cunard marketing director David Milo Jones said: We know that many of our target audience of discerning travellers are passionate Downton Abbey fans, so a return to the big screen was too good an opportunity for us to miss.

travelweekly.co.uk/articles/342731/cunard-makes-cinema-ad-debut-with-downtown-abbey-film

In January 2023, The Spectator’s Gus Carter was moved to write a rather (pun intended) acid piece about the sixties Zen Buddhist pop philosopher:

www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-paradox-of-alan-watts/

Setting Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg among the passengers would be interesting.

The real Dream of Life text:

If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.

I am not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it, I want you to play with it. I want you to think of its possibilities, I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about.

So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive.

And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be.And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream.

And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren't God, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality, not God in a politically kingly sense, but god in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending you are not.

It seems to be me that a cruise would be the exact opposite of what Watts is suggesting here:

let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be … Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream.

Cruises strike me as the most predictable, least adventurous and most controlled kind of holiday one could take where one knows exactly what is going to happen . I know that some people enjoy them but they aren't the kind of free-spirited adventure that Watts was alluding to.

So she has the pool all to herself? The restaurant is practically empty? Nobody else on deck? In your dreams!

I keep thinking he's then going to go on to narrate The War of the Worlds.

Germanshepherdsmum

I haven’t seen it but it sounds ridiculous. I have never wanted to go on a cruise anyway - the ad which talks of a cruise with ‘just 900-odd like-minded people’ says it all for me.

I think it can only mean that they're like minded by all choosing that cruise GSM so definitely not for me...

'I loathe this bloody advert' can be heard from me every time its on.

I wonder I wonder what it’s all about oh it’s just a patronising advert!

I find it immensely irritating, and the voiceover trite and rather pointless, to say the least.

Let’s face it, most of the holiday adverts promise much but often fail to meet expectations.

Happy children frolicking together in the pool, (not whining and arguing), Mum looking slim, tanned and glamorous in a bikini ( not plump, white and sweating), and then the loved-up couple enjoying a glass of champagne on the terrace overlooking the ocean, not debating whether to have fish and chips or a burger in the local cafe to economise.

The adverts are there to sell the dream, the same as the show house home, the perfect hair, skin, clothes…..

I've been on a Cunard seven night transatlantic crossing, but it was in December. No lying dreaming on sun loungers. If you did venture on to the promenade deck it was cold and windy.
That ad certainly hasn't prompted me to book a Cunard cruise though, I think it's rather silly.

Are they allowed to use his voice, his thoughts, like that for something advertising consumerism?

I haven’t noticed this ad so far, but tbh it would really be a dream for me to go on a Cunard cruise.Can’t see it happening so will have to stay as a dream.