NEWS just in. The sweet industry may be subliminally targeting sweets at children.

A recent report by Public Health England boasts to have exposed marketing tricks used by food firms, that they brand their packaging with fictional characters for children.

I for one was shocked. Not at the publication of the report, but that money was spent on a result that we all knew anyway.

Of course sweets are aimed at children. They have always been that way. Look at any sweet counter. It’s a technicolour sea of sweetness. Pick and mix counters are tactically positioned for kids. That’s why adults have to stoop to fill their bags with jelly babies.

When I was growing up, the television channels were full of sweet adverts. I spent my pocket money on sweets. The Beano and Dandy magazines that I used to read regularly had Irn Bru bars, Wham bars or a stick of Highland Toffee on the front.

By and large, my teeth are still intact.

The trick is that consumption of sweets needs to be controlled. I didn’t spend all my days pushing sweets into my face, it was a treat, perhaps once a week.

The suggestion that because kids see that sweets are marketed towards them means that they therefore demand them is understandable. But that does not mean parents have to bow to their requests.

My mam had a stock answer, and it worked pretty well. “No.”

THE world seemingly stopped for a few minutes this week, after the first proper trailer for the new Star Wars movie was released.

There have been teaser trailers for the much-anticipated film, released on December 17, but this was the first full-length snippet of action.

YouTube almost melted with the weight of millions of views of the trailer.

Kids discovering the franchise for the first time, and millions of adults that should know better, who have already booked their tickets for the maiden midnight showing of the JJ Abrams-directed seventh film of the series, all converged on the internet to watch the trailer.

I’ve never seen so much excitement for a film. It’s quite sad really. I’m off to watch the trailer again.

MY DRIVE home from work each night takes me past one of the call centres I used to work for.

If you squint through the blinds, you can see the video screens that lets workers know how many callers are in the queue, or how many calls have been fielded that day.

Call centre bosses are big on statistics. They could, at the touch of a button, find out how many toilet breaks a member of staff had taken, how many calls they fielded, how long they spent on a call and how long between calls they spent on administration tasks.

If you had taken a minute more on your lunch, or spent too long working between calls, there would be red circles and unhappy faces emblazoned on your statistics at the end of every shift.

When I was new to the industry, I had been out for a curry the night before and was feeling worse for wear as the shift progressed.

I clocked out for a toilet break. What felt like moments later, security staff burst into the toilet shouting my name. It had, in fact, been a whole ten minutes and my supervisor assumed that I had done a runner.

I knew at that point that perhaps that industry wasn’t the best one for me.