As we set our watches to streaming, is time up for TV commercials?

Each has reached an age and stubbornness dictating such situations are not to be ameliorated through lazy surrender to technology, so we exist, in silence, searching the walls for something to read or just looking at the ceiling, the way we used to before mobile phones were invented to fill every waking void.

We are not of those generations, the ones frightened by boredom, the pauses in life. We are resourceful and comfortable in our own special thoughts.

We are stoic.

I offer my seat to the most senior member of our cadre.

No, thank you.

More stoicism.

Despite all this stoutness of character, an anxiety hangs in the air. It piques each time the studious chap in the white coat materialises from a workspace we know is filled with sharp surgical instruments.

To offer us some privacy in this fragile moment, he doesn't call us by name and there is no point categorising us by ailment because we're all here for the same reason. Rather, he scans the room, catching us in the eye before nodding curtly to the man who next gives himself up for diagnosis.

There is no queue-jumping. We are also from a long line of waiters, having honed this Zen-like skill in a time not so very long ago when patience was a virtue, not a career-threatening defect.

Not that we are without our flaws, and I wallow briefly in solipsism when it becomes obvious the gentleman ahead of me has problems far worse than my own.

When it's my turn to see the watchmaker, he picks my timepiece up from the counter, and says knowingly, "Ahh, Bulova".

He pops the wristwatch in a paper envelope and says he'll text me with a full quote for the service.

Those phones do come in handy sometimes.

American company Bulova has been making watches since 1875 and, on July 1, 1941, was the subject of the world's first television commercial.

The 10-second spot aired on NBC-owned station WNBT during a baseball match between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies.

"America runs on Bulova time" a cocksure male east coast accent proclaims as we're presented with an animated dial on the United States floating in inky nothingness.

The primitive ad, which cost Bulova Watch Co. nine dollars, has an ominous quality, as if signalling the entire world is about to change.

And for a while there, it certainly did, but now, some 80 years later, I'm lucky to see a single ad on TV.

READ MORE: B.R DOHERTY

The family's viewing habits are such that almost every series or movie is now streamed and commercials have, we assume, gone the way of the dinosaurs.

Every now and then we might stray into free-to-air territory and are shocked when someone intrudes to sell us cars or groceries.

In many ways, these interludes act as touchstones to the community, a 30-second insight into the zeitgeist. But they are only interludes, fleeting excursions into a greater psyche.

TV advertising was once so penetrating, many of us still walk the Earth reciting the slogans and humming the jingles of our youth...

Good on ya, mum, Tip Top's the one...

You've got to work it hard to be a Solo man...

You can get it striving, you can get it diving, you can get it mixing cement...

You're soaking in it...

The macho men (they were always men, even if they were women) who made these ads were rewarded for their ability to tap into the national consciousness and were revered as seers more than spruikers.

These days, jingles seem to have been replaced by established pop earworms with inapposite lyrics simply layered over the top, laundering them of their creative intent. One song, originally about pornography, is now being used to sell family homes.

As the big streaming platforms such a Netflix and Disney+ roll out cheaper options with advertising, perhaps those ad men (and women) will rise again, but you get the feeling the glory days of television commercials, like wristwatches, are over.

But there is always hope.

Our youngest doesn't even watch TV in the traditional sense. He streams entire online channels devoted to flogging bits of plastic to children with an overdeveloped need for gratification and an underdeveloped fear of debt.

The perfect little consumer.