Assaulting a captive audience is hardly innovative

I HAVE A question for Dr Eden Woon Yi-teng, the chief executive of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce. How often have you ever taken a bus, sir?

I ask because the chamber of commerce has picked RoadShow Holdings, the company responsible for assaulting helpless bus passengers with a repulsive barrage of noise, as the winner of the Innovation prize in the Hong Kong Awards for Services.

Let us get it straight, first of all, that we are in a very bad way indeed if RoadShow is our idea of innovation. Could someone please list the patents, the copyrights or the international acclaim that this company has won for Hong Kong? If bludgeoning a captive public with advertising hype is the best we can do in the way of new ideas, then we had best give up talking about innovation before Hong Kong becomes an international joke.

Take note here that RoadShow is proud of the fact that you are a prisoner if you ride on a bus that it has infested. This is its big selling point. As chief operating officer Amanda Lui Yee-fai put it in a special supplement in yesterday's editions of the South China Morning Post, 'the unique concept of having a genuinely captive audience is the body and soul of RoadShow'.

Have you ever surrendered yourself to this captivity, Mr Woon? I assure you I am not alone in prizing my bus ride in the morning as a time of peaceful reflection before the hurly burly of the day sets in.

I prefer the bus to my car when I can have it and my profuse thanks go to Citybus for keeping RoadShow off some its routes to the south of Hong Kong Island.