I say I’m baffled by this ad (rather than irritated or nauseated, which would also be valid responses) because it is squarely located within those kind of postfeminist representations that are inherently baffling to anyone who doesn’t think women’s liberation can be achieved through the aggressive consumption of low-calorie fizzy pop or the judicious application of Dove thigh firming cream. But Duffy’s contribution to this ignoble tradition is particularly baffling. Through her love of Diet Coke and ability to ‘be herself’, Duffy awakens the nascent desires of the other women to break the shackles of male domination and say ‘hello you’ to their new, fully agentic and ready-to-consume selves. The implication of this is that their former, non-Diet Coke drinking selves were not real, or somehow under the influence of a (very obscurely implied) patriarchal authority (doing traditional domestic work of food shopping, having to fulfil normative femininity with make-up). In comparison Duffy seems to be succeeding at ‘being herself’ - she’s the very model of the successful independent woman. Last year she sold more albums in this country than any other artist, and two weeks ago she won three Brit awards, including the coveted ‘Best Album’ which is very, very rarely won by a female artist. She is, you would think, free to ‘be her’ to quite a large extent.

But is she? The issue of artistic and personal authenticity is an especially vexed one for female musicians who invariably fall foul of a gendered and hierarchised divide where masculine rock is valued over feminine pop. Being a woman automatically aligns Duffy with the commercialism and inauthenticity of pop rather than the ‘art for art’s sake’ authenticity of rock. See how often interviews flag up her former participation in the Welsh version of the X Factor, or her total ignorance of the history of 'serious' music prior to her enlightenment at the hands of producer Bernard Butler, as evidence of this. Then there are the constant comparisons with Dusty Springfield based, seemingly, on the similarity of their hairdos. Comparing female artists only to other female artists is another music press/media trick to keep women musicians in a subsidiary ghetto which prevents them troubling the established rock canon too much, but comparing Duffy to Dusty has a particular irony here given the late, great Miss Springfield’s penchant for revelling in the inauthentic: the wigs, the heavy make-up, the mimicry of heterosexuality. The Dusty persona was never ‘real’ as such, and we might ask whether any woman wanting to be successful in the mainstream music industry can be ‘themselves’ or whether they’re obliged to fit into whatever model of femininity is currently the most profitable.

Duffy’s ‘I’ve gotta be me’ then comes across as more of a cry for help, an implicit critique of the marketing of female artists. Whatever vestige of artistic authenticity she might have earned via her career has been converted into ‘being yourself’ and commodified to sell soft drinks. Bafflingly the advert might really be saying that Duffy is not free to be her. Perhaps her mid-gig tour de supermarket is her “Diet Coke break”, where she is temporarily freed from the workaday worries of being an international popstar. Like the women in the old Diet Coke campaign who broke their mundane office routine to drink pop and ogle workmen, Duffy needs to break the monotony of performing to sold out audiences by taking in some extra-curricular cycling. Maybe being a popstar isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and certainly no way to ‘be yourself’. Obviously, even thin, pretty, successful women still need to drink Diet Coke to achieve that end…

From the earliest seasons of CSI Grissom and Sara had ‘chemistry’, but in the six (six!) series it took to reveal they were having some kind of intimate relationship the story arcs of the show had not revolved around the kind of tedious will-they-won’t-they narrative forced down our throats by the likes of Ross and Rachel (Friends) or Carrie and Big (Sex And The City). Grissom and Sara’s relationship was not presented as the pinnacle of human fulfilment for either of them, neither did we have to endure them whining about one another in homosocial friendship situations, which is the ploy TV usually uses to subordinate all other significant relationships, especially women’s, to the search for romantic love.

Grissom and Sara disobeyed the rules of heterosexual romantic plot development by never hating each other, then deciding they were madly in love and instantly getting married. Instead they actually had both personal and professional respect for one another, and genuine shared interests (in, you know, searching hotel rooms for semen stains and peering intently at corpses). Obvious though this sounds when it comes to finding a compatible partner, it’s amazing how infrequently we actually get to see it.

When the time finally came to reveal that Grissom and Sara were more than just ‘good friends’ the announcement was unusually ambiguous. There were no grand declarations, no farcical misunderstandings, and no last minute dashes to the airport/train station to retrieve a fleeing lover in the nick of time. We saw them together, outside of work, in dressing gowns, talking. The implication was of post-coital soul-bearing, but it the details were left entirely unclear. The viewer could not presume either that this was their ‘first time’, nor that their relationship would be/had been necessarily normatively sexual.

It’s this opaqueness which gives the Grissom/Sara relationship a distinctly queer character. The near invisibility of their intimacy continued throughout the following series of the show where we were given only glimpses, mere suggestions, as to what they might be up to after their shifts were over. Such a portrayal is not only characteristic of the kind of subtextual longing that is the subject of much slash and fan fiction, but also of the hidden-in-plain-sight mode of representing gay and lesbian relationships in much mainstream television - we only saw them kiss once (rather chastely), and personal remarks remained firmly coded. By the end of season seven, when Sara’s kidnapping forced their relationship into the open, Grissom even had to literally ‘come out’ to the rest of the team.

Perhaps I am attaching too much significance to what I see as the mildly progressive non-normativity of Grissom/Sara. Should I really be more concerned about the absence of out queer characters on CSI, or its persistent pathologisation of ethnic/sexual minorities? However, while it lasted Grissom and Sara seemed to offer the possibility of doing things differently. Maybe though we should be adhering to the CSI maxim of following the evidence: in the context of such an ambiguous relationship, can we assume the end is really the end?