Every now and then something so staggeringly, jaw-droppingly idiotic happens on TV. These instances that beggar belief sometimes happen within TV programmes but more often than not happen during ad breaks or during live TV broadcasts, when the capacity for mistakes, strange quirks and genuine cock ups are much greater. Something like this happened during the other night’s Rachel Nickell – Case Closed: Real Crime on ITV1. It was a powerful, moving account of an horrific murder and the subsequent investigation. Pretty grim stuff all-round, but what on earth was going on with the ads during the show?

Related: TV Review: Rachel Nickell – Case Closed: Real Crime

During my review, I commented that it was a hard programme to watch and when the Banardos advert popped up (you know, that advert) it was almost like kicking someone while they were down – if I was finding the whole Rachel Nickell thing tough to watch, the sight of a young woman getting battered just about finished me off.

I did wonder who selects or schedules these adverts? Is there a human being who thought that seeing this harrowing advert in the middle of a harrowing programme would be a good idea? Or is it all done randomly by computer? I’ve seen adverts in the past that just do not fit with the programme’s subject matter, and that has looked pretty weird (kids food adverts during adult drama, for instance). But in this instance was a computer scheduled to pick up on ‘tags’ (much like an internet site does) and act upon those? Here’s a programme about crime, let’s have an advert about domestic abuse.

But that wasn’t the end of it. A reader of TV Scoop left a comment on my original post saying that there was an advert featuring Lenny Henry (I was doing a wee while this was on). To some, seeing Lenny Henry on telly is pretty offensive anyway (just not funny anymore), but in the advert for Premier Inn, he’s taking off Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, doing the whole slashing thing in the shower. The tag line is something like don’t have nightmares when you stay in hotels, get a Premier Inn hotel, or something like that.

That’s fair enough, it’s a nice advert done well. But when you plonk it in the middle of a programme about a brutal murder, it’s not so nice.

This scheduling was so staggering, so bad taste I actually laughed out loud when I read our reader’s comment. I mean, who puts a slasher ad in the middle of a show about a horrible murder case? The context was just awful.

I phoned the ASA, who told me that it’s there to act upon complaints and make recommendations to broadcasters. The nice man also said that Clearcast, a separate organisation, exists to grade adverts and make sure certain ads don’t go out at certain times.

But in terms of scheduling and these sorts of scenarios, it’s down to the broadcaster to sort out the scheduling themselves. So really, if anyone is that offended they should have a right go. It’s all pretty staggering.

Me? I’m fairly convinced no offense was intended and this was just one of those random things. The ASA man also said that there had been instances in the past when adverts featuring surfers were shown during news bulletins on the south Asian tsunami, and that adverts for aeroplane companies were shown around 9/11.

This isn’t just a one-off case, but it does beg the question: who schedules our adverts?