The bus driver had picked the wrong charter. He hadn’t yet pulled out of the parking lot when he flicked on the video for a bit of soft core karaoke porn. For a busload of socially-committed, progressive, activist-type volunteers on a tour of development projects.

The smallest, mildest, softest-spoken among them was delegated to go up to the front and make him turn it off.

‘Why?’ asked the bus driver, in all innocence.

The smallest, mildest, softest-spoken glanced behind him. Some staunch feminists back there were listening intently. And not all of them women.

‘We don’t want it on.’

‘Well, I like watching it.’

With a speed that belied his slight stature and diffident disposition, Mr Soft-spoken punched the stop and eject buttons. Who wants a bus driver tweaking his John Thomas when his mind is supposed to be on the road?

A recent blitz campaign from change.org has also put a stop to tour buses automatically playing whatever R-rated video comes to hand to their captive audiences that almost always include children. This comes despite libertarian complaints from the anti-censorship crowd that this somehow constitutes an infringement of the right to freedom of expression.

Listen. People buy bus tickets to get from A to B, not to watch Rambo 4. They don’t ask for a film, they have no way of knowing ahead of time what film if any will be played at them without their consent, and nobody’s stopping the bus crew or any passengers who like that sort of trash from watching it in their own place and their own time.

But forcing under-5s who happen to be on a bus to watch Sylvester Stallone faking gratuitous violence is indefensible. (Forcing anyone of any age to watch Sylvester Stallone doing absolutely anything at all is indefensible, come to that.) And stopping it is no crime.

And I also walk down the soi to get from here to there. Not to have my head cracked open by a low-hanging board advertising the latest luxury high-rise with a ridiculous name. (After ‘The Residence’ and ‘The Address’, how long before some copyrighter dreams up ‘The Condo’?)

Here we have advertising at all its perversity. The placards are not aimed at me. I make a point of walking against the traffic because when there’s no footpath I don’t want the bastards coming at me from behind. So they’re facing away from me in the direction of those with the wherewithal to be driving.

But I either have to keep ducking as I walk along or repeatedly step into the roadway. And we all know how sympathetic Bangkok drivers are to pedestrians who dare encroach on THEIR space to do something as obstructive as, say, cross the road. Or avoid being brained by adverts. Adverts for companies who are selling a product that costs millions but who can’t afford to pay for proper advertising space. Instead they illegally attach their boards to electricity poles.

Note to these companies: Those tall concrete things are for holding up the electric wires. Not to give you free advertising space.

And what right do they have to be there at all?

Some advertising comes as part of the package. Newspapers would be double the price with no ads but nobody forces you to buy or read one.

TV commercials may also make the service free and while you can always take a leak, make a cuppa or read a couple of chapters of War and Peace in preference to sitting through the commercial breaks, you can’t so easily escape the advertising that is part and parcel of the show, which is why in some countries, product placement is illegal. And again, somebody voluntarily has to turn the blasted idiot box on.

But why should advertising invade public spaces? And this cannot be advertising carefully selected for its intended audience, like the discreet notices you can see accompanying this article. Outdoor adverts are truly weapons of mass distraction.

And before anyone says ‘media literacy’ let me point out that training the population to see through advertising tricks and tactics is, sadly, a non-starter. This means using the thinking part of your brain (which would be a lovely idea) to counter what happens to the feeling part of your brain when the best psychologists that the ad industry can buy have got at it. It has been likened to building fences to keep out moles.

And besides, who is going to train the population how to think? The schools? You’ve obviously not thought this through.

No, the answer seems to be astoundingly simple and places like Sao Paolo and Bergen have already done it. Ban outdoor advertising.

And then we won’t need to use those fancy Green Security Alert Boxes to tell officialdom that yet another billboard has collapsed and someone has died in the cause of capitalism. We can instead use them to say a billboard has gone up and the thessakij police should come round and pull it down again.

Oh what the hell. Cut out the middleman and the next time your path is blocked by some hoarding for accommodation you’ll never afford, just rip the damn thing down yourself.