THEY called him Slick Alick to his face, and smart aleck behind his back. Alex Henderson would have regarded them both as compliments, since he prided himself on being the sharpest employee of the Sophisticate Ad Agency. Alex admired the way the Benetton adverts had taken the shock technique and made it into an art form. At present he was working on a new idea which he called Context Shock, or CS for short. You took an advert which was innocuous in itself and placed it in a context which would cause offence.

He first got the idea from the Tennants ad featuring a man with his tongue hanging out trying to reach a glass of lager, but every time he got near it the chair to which was tied zoomed back across the room on an elastic rope. He couldn't remember whether it was sadisT or MasochisT which had been the joke, but when someone placed the advert right in the middle of the Prime Suspect programme after the episode dealing with the torture of murder victims, it had certainly heightened the ``impact''. Ha, ha.

He remembered making that little sick joke at the time.

Alex was watching the news when he came up with his own version of CS. Appropriately enough, the report was dealing with the tensions during the marching season and the threatened use of CS gas. The incensed reactions of the people on both sides of the sectarian divide had made him think. Suppose you put up a poster advertising the Orange mobile phone network in a Catholic area, and it was burned down. That would be an excellent news story - and excellent free advertising.

``Orange withdraw posters after Catholic protests'' the headline would read. The company would get the credit for being sensitive (plus the column inches) and the hoarding would be insured anyway.

The alternative tactic could be deployed in Protestant areas with products using the ecology-friendly slogan exhorting people to ``Go Green'' in some way or other. Guaranteed to be burned down, with the same ``sensitive'' response by the company and more kudos to his campaign.

Some of the account directors had seen it as manipulative, to which Alex replied: ``If we don't manipulate the public we aren't doing what our clients pay us for.'' To his delight the managing director of Sophisticate smiled and declared: ``Quite right, Alex. That wouldn't be morally right.''

Alex and his boss, Kevin Klien, got on well. The staff at Sophisticate were known in the trade as the KK Klan but Klien's nickname in the ad game was certainly not Mr Kleen. He was known as ``Mr Dirty'', as he had liking for raunchy ads and didn't ask the colour of the money which was crossing his palm. ``The seven deadly sins,'' he would often say, ``are our ten commandments. They tell us the weak points in our target audience - and we should play to them. But don't forget the eighth deadly sin - getting found out.''

Klien was hardly ever found out. He was a master at marginalising those who objected on grounds of taste or morality to his campaigns because he knew that he needed them. The Mary Whitehouses, outraged vicars, and colonels from the shires who wanted traditional values. They defined the margins against which he pushed and were his unwitting allies in providing an army of ``shocked'' people who could act as litmus to prove he was having an impact. The more they criticised his campaigns, the more he looked like a moderate, holding a middle course between pornographers and puritans.

The agency was extremely busy at present. The Olympics - showcase of amateur sport - was big business and all that TV coverage would mean a field day for the ad-men.

Alex was waiting to see Kevin with the drawings of a new poster campaign for a new brand of sweets in a tube. It showed a face close-up, with sweet on the outstretched tongue. The name of the sweet was in the bottom right-hand corner and in bold letters across the top the slogan read ``WOULD YOU LIKE A SMACK IN THE MOUTH?''

``Very good, Alex,'' Klien muttered. ``I like the way you've picked up on that Zero Tolerance campaign. Not that it did much good telling people what they already knew. But at least here we've got the satisfaction of selling sweets and measuring our success against sales. I also like the way it's likely to offend the battered women lobby.''

``And the anti-drug lobby too,'' volunteered Alex. ``You get the smack reference?''

``Of course I get the cocaine reference,'' snapped Klien. ``Don't teach your grandmother to suck ecstasy tablets. In fact I think it's excellent in the light of the drug-taking issues around the Olympics and will upset just the kind of people we want to - our allies in the `moral minority'. That's not what is worrying me. I'm afraid we can't run it for another reason.''

Alex Henderson looked puzzled.

Klien stood up behind his desk. ``Look at the colour of the face, Alex. It may not be intended but it looks like a black man. Now I'm fully aware about all the stereotypes about black men and violence. Black men and drugs. Even black men and Olympic gold medals. But in the week after Nelson Mandela took the country by storm, we can't do it. I'm not having this agency rechristened the Ku Klux Klan.''

The younger man looked pale. ``I thought it seemed ideal. It would offend all the icons of political correctness at once. I didn't think you would object on ..... well, on moral grounds.''

``It's nothing to do with morality at all,'' replied Klien. ``It's pure expediency. Is there any other value in today's world?''