The most irritating series of commercials on television at the moment belongs to ibm. They project an image of what must surely be the single most arrogant, self-satisfied, onanistic corporate identity on the face of this deeply troubled Earth.

So writes The Globe and Mail’s television reviewer, John Haslett Cuff, on June 28, under a headline proclaiming Elitist IBM ads put teeth on edge.

And if you don’t think he’s really bummed out by these spots, you should look up the word onanistic in your dictionary. Yuck-oh!

Now Cuff moans a lot about the world in general, and endlessly laments the cancellation of My So-Called Life, and sounds like a pretty humorless piece of work anyway, which, as you can imagine, is a highly precarious mental state in which to approach 20 hours a day of channel-surfing, so it’s entirely possible that He Has Slipped Over The Edge Into The Abyss of Madness, and ibm just happened to be strolling past at the time.

Because the present ibm campaign has to be among one of the funniest, most effecting, charming, intelligently conceived, wonderfully cast, warmly acted and beautifully shot stuff in ages and ages.

Beyond its ability to deliver information and its uncanny emotional impact, it is a textbook case of brilliant editing, sound design, and the use of both to create a startling sense of place, both familiar and utterly foreign.

This campaign ambushes the foreign with the familiar.

A gaggle of nuns bustles through a maze of Gothic architecture as the soundtrack echoes with ancient and ethereal Gregorian chanting.

The camera frames their radiant faces in succession as they speak intensely to each other in a foreign language.

Supers appear to translate. First super: I’m trying to get that new operating system, Chicago, but they keep pushing back the release date!

Second super: That new OS/2 Warp from ibm sounds pretty hot.

Hey, these ladies are delivering a not-so-subtle dig at Microsoft’s tanglefooted failure to intro a system on schedule, and recommending ibm’s alternative. Later, one nun’s passionate outburst is translated as I can’t wait to surf the Internet!

This is funny stuff! Two elderly Parisian gents walk by the Seine at dusk, and one mutters something melancholy and lilting in French, which is supered on the screen as My harddrive’s maxed out. His friend sighs and says Incroyable, which translates in the super as Bummer.

Another begins in the dressing room of what looks to be the Peking Opera. Two actresses are making up their faces, singing snatches of songs, and yakking back and forth.

But with the combined effect of the harsh Chinese language sounds and the half-painted faces, they look like beings from another planet.

Then, lo and behold, the subtitles begin: Last night my pc froze…called their help line…they were anything but!

One actress points out she’s heard ibm can fix your computer over the phone line, and suddenly we’re watching the whole cast of the opera materialize onto the stage in fast forward with a flourish of oriental music.

There’s one with two Celtic shepherds in driving rain with magnificent Irish landscape as a backdrop, fooling around with a laptop that contains photos of one shepherd’s recent holiday in Acapulco.

There’s a Bangkok ferryboat driver who pitches ibm consultants to a young exec passenger while buying and selling soybean futures on his cell phone. And a Moroccan guy in a bazaar who proclaims Hey, I’m no wirehead! His pal promises to e-mail ibm’s phone number to him.

There are Zorba-style Greek fishermen who plan to do lunch and talk ibm over sushi. A tango-ing Spanish typist whose supers appear in misspelled typewriter type (the product is ibm voice recognition programs.)

The killer spot for me is the California corporate surfers, dissecting a botched business transaction in Californian! Boss says Squids, we got snaked bigtime in Barneyland! Execs: They dream greenroom…we sent shore slop! English translations appear below. The performers are beautiful and dreamy in their black wetsuits, the sky and sea are blue, the music is ’60s beachboy. It’s perfect!

Each spot ends with the ibm logo and the line Solutions for a small planet. And by going, quite literally, to the ends of the physical and psychological earth to find exquisite, strange, funny, lovably human archtypes who are all into exactly the same computer stuff we are, ibm has made our planet seem to be its own friendly fiefdom.

This campaign is as oddly uplifting as My So-Called Life was depressing. May it enjoy many seasons and endless reruns, and phooey on Mr. Cuff’s dump!

Barry Base is president and creative director of Barry Base & Partners, Toronto.

Off-air dubs of spots reviewed in this column were supplied courtesy of Nielsen Creative Services, a division of Nielsen Marketing Research.