A new breed of adverts is asking British viewers to mail off their gold in exchange for cash. And it fills Pixelsmith with terror.

GOLD! Do you have gold lying around your house? It doesn’t do anything, does it? Just sits there, burning a big spendy hole into your furniture. Horrible, smelly gold. You hate seeing it everywhere, don’t you? Why not post it to us so we can turn it into cash. Imagine all that lovely, delicious cash clasped in your hands. You’ll be able to buy that dining table you’ve always dreamed of. Or an Xbox 360. Or food and clothes, if that’s your thing.

There’s a new species of insane advert doing the rounds on TV. It involves a sketchy-looking individual trying to convince you to gather up all your jewellery in a jiffy bag and mail it to a company you’ve never heard of before, who will melt it down and mysteriously convert it into cash. It’s like alchemy in reverse.

When was the last time we sent stuff off to be melted down? Wasn’t that in the war?

The recession sowed the seeds for these ads and they found a rich growing environment in the depressing mulch of desperation and sorrow that surrounds programmes like Loose Women and Jeremy Kyle. Then they bred.

There’s one that scares me more than the others. The man on the advert is familiar, because I’ve seen him before in my nightmares. His eyes are weird, like little piercing marbles mistakenly lodged in a human head, and they don’t blink – they just glare. And his face is even worse. He espouses the benefits of turning your rings into money with the barely suppressed glee of a cannibal who has just found you, freshly washed and fast asleep on their sofa. I don’t know for definite but I think he might be Satan.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t follow his instructions. I’m sure Satan isn’t going to eat your gold – more likely he’ll give you some money for it and leave you in peace. But there’s something about this whole phenomenon that makes my spine tingle – and not in the good way.

This happened a couple of years ago with personal injury lawyers. Some bright spark devised the idea of no win, no fee and all of a sudden the ad breaks were filled with images of people bumping into planks and emptying kettles on themselves at work, while somebody you wouldn’t let near your children bellowed about the sheer injustice of falling over and not being paid for it.

There has to be a mechanism for compensating people hurt through negligence, but there’s such an opportunistic overtone to most no win, no fee ads that you almost feel compelled to find an uneven paving slab to fling yourself onto so you can sue the council.

Before that it was consolidated loans. These usually came with some kind of visual metaphor, like a man wobbling on a tightrope with a load of boxes. He’d fall off as a result of his many metaphorical debts, before consolidating them into one single monthly outgoing and successfully navigating the tightrope with a much smaller box. It’s not a very elaborate metaphor and, to be totally accurate, it should finish with a montage of the man lugging his new box around for the next 40 years – but I’m nitpicking.

They’re all about cash, these ads. Get yourself some cash by stepping on a stapler or flogging your necklace, or stop yourself losing so much cash by putting all your bills in a box. And while I’m sure they are all properly regulated and completely above board (my lawyer tells me) they all carry a faint whiff of untrustworthiness. Although by “faint” I mean “strong”. And by “untrustworthiness” I mean “evil”.

Hats off to the marble-eyed gold guy for being the first person to resemble an actual demon. The first ad person, that is. Jeremy Kyle’s been at it for years.

I wonder what’s coming next. Renting advertising space on your forehead? Selling your friends’ email addresses to spammers? Mailing your teeth off at a fiver a pop? Maybe the Loose Women will just cut out the middle man and open their own organ transplant shop.

“Broke? We’ll pay good money for a kidney. You’ve just got new kidneys haven’t you, Denise?”

“Well yes I have, Carol. And with the money he made, Colin from Gloucester left his family with a top of the range dishwasher!”

“Aww. RIP Colin. Isn’t that right everyone?”

[Audience]: “RIP Colin!”

“Now here’s Michael Buble singing the theme tune to Emmerdale."

I give it five years.

Get a chunk of RollZero delivered direct to your inbox with the weekly Electric Letter - sign-up using this page.