THE government is running out of patience with the drinks industry's advertising campaigns, heavily reliant on sexual innuendos. So, just when you thought Saint Anthony and his disciples were ignoring things at home in the pursuit of global greatness, along comes a topic to prove you wrong!

OK. I will concede that a health service on the point of meltdown, schools facing a cash crisis and street crime running at record levels might be seen as more important than alcohol and outrageous advertising. But, hey, the lad is doing his best to protect our sensitivities and uphold a code of morals which is under full frontal assault.

A number of drinks promotions have exceeded the accepted boundaries of taste and decency, according to one leading figure in the advertising industry. Here are a few examples:

A young woman at the height of ecstasy in a coffee shop as she thinks about her Bacardi Breezer-swigging boyfriend. Another ad from the same campaign, set in a church, has a similarly saucy theme.

A woman depicted in a state of bliss with the slogan: 'Some things get better given longer' was used to promote Abbot Ale. A second advert showed a woman, blindfolded, and groaning with pleasure on a bed.

Now what the hell those two examples have to do with selling or drinking beer is beyond me. I've always been warned that too much ale of any brand is, shall we say, detrimental to desire . Yet I've never seen that warning on a pub wall or beer bottle in the way that Smoking Causes Cancer is plastered all over everywhere these days. Perhaps the government will sort that one out when they've regulated the suggestive adverts.

The Carling TV ad featured a man trailing after his partner and licking beer off the furniture and walls, leading to a scene in a bedroom with the woman, in her undies, dousing herself in Carling. That was described as 'extremely tasteless.' A criminal waste of beer was how I would describe it.

In my younger days, 50 or so years ago, I can't even remember drinks being advertised. They must have been but we didn't have television and the radio was all BBC so we relied on word of mouth for drinks to render us blissfully comatose.

We had some unholy concoctions: Atom Bombs (Mackeson stout and cider mixed), Black Velvet (Guinness and Babycham) to name but two. The man who became my father-in-law was landlord of a pub which sold Groves and Whithnall 'C' Ale but he rationed even the most experienced drinkers, so potent was the brew.

I once drank four and a half pints of 'C' Ale and my dad found me at 5.30am the following morning -- a freezing one in mid-winter -- fast asleep in the privet hedge of our house with my powerful motorbike on top of me. Had it had been a woman on top of me instead of a Triumph Thunderbird, maybe I would have made the drinks adverts on TV, 46 years later!