You don't have to go to the trouble of thumbing through your frayed copy of the ABC of Freud to know that there's something deeply off about the new Pretty Polly television advertisement.

It shows a group of women dressed in black slips and tights bouncing around a padded room on Space Hoppers and apparently loving every minute of it.

The advertisement was created by Mr Trevor Beattie from TBWA, who also devised the Wonderbra "Hello Boys" campaign. It cost £300,000 sterling (€467,508) to make and apparently the idea is "to illustrate tights that stay in place for women who don't".

Now, while no-one really expects advertising to make sense all the time and nylon tights are intrinsically a deeply unglamorous product, the advertisement does beg the question why a company that markets a product which is bought almost exclusively by women should have such a bizarre opinion of its target market.