Nooo! Not the Smurfs!

Unicef, the United Nations' children's charity, is running an ad campaign to alert the Belgians to the plight of child soldiers in Burundi and hellholes like that. Only thing is, the Belgians realise that having Belgium's answer to Fintan O'Toole emoting for thirty seconds on the correct response to war on primetime TV won't amount to a hill of beans. So, in order to show just what war can do, they've gone and wiped out the Smurfs.

They've raised the Smurf village to the ground. The ads start off with the normal Smurf music, which is instantly recognisable, and then you hear the drone of the bombs dropping from the azure vault. Kaboom. The only survivor is Baby Smurf, wailing his head off, while the rest of the Smurfs are, in Shakespeare's words, quartered at the hand of war.

The ad can only be shown after the watershed in Belgium, and rightly so. It was shown as a news item on Belgian TV news, and any kiddies that saw it by accident are now in severe emotional trauma. Go and a have a look if you think you're hard enough, but I have to warn you - you'll need to listen to a lot of Katrina and the Waves to cheer yourself up after it.