You know the one - "This is the Night Mail crossing the border/bringing the cheque and the postal order..." Images of steam swirling round the great express, mail bags being snatched and dropped automatically, postmen sorting through the night ... Not only is it the company that looks after - but does not own - the Royal Train, it also runs what are now called TPOs (travelling post offices) but what used to be called, more romantically, the Night Mail.A bloke called Auden wrote about it in 1935 to accompany one of the most powerful publicity films ever made. But if this seems a little too clean, be comforted that it was motivated by gently smutty thoughts. Confide In Me is apparently the title of a song by Miss Kylie Minogue and, says Paul Prickett of Ravensbourne College in Kent, "I'm in love with Kylie so this is a bit of dedication to her really."Steamy letters ONE OF the first bits of British Rail to make its way into the private sector is, I'm told, Rail Express Systems Sounds dull? It's not. "Our tutor told us the ad was too seedy," they said.The other runner-up, by Caroline Jaggard of Brunel, is so rude that even she thought it would be binned, which shows how broad-minded dear old BT has become. It is a picture of a steamed-up phone box with "aural sex" written in the condensation on the window, and the line "Giving you the privacy your parents won't" underneath.The winner is simply a big slogan saying "CONFIDE IN ME", with the "I" replaced by a phone box. Quite good smut, though: Alfredo Marcantonio, a director of the agency Abbott Mead Vickers, said he would have been happy if he had created some of them himself, and BT Payphones is thinking of running them for real.The entry pictured on the right is a runner-up produced by Richard Robinson and Emer Stamp of Brunel University.

The students were told to highlight "privacy, romance, freedom, spontaneity and emotional sanctuary", so it is not surprising they came up with a load of smut. But if BT Payphones told you to do the same sort of thing in their phone boxes, you would be shocked, wouldn't you?Well, it is thinking of doing just that. It sponsored one of the categories in the More O'Ferrall Adshel Student Design Awards, and asked aspiring creative directors to come up with bus shelter posters that would persuade young people to make more and longer phone calls. Amazing technology, very clever, but would it make me buy a Galaxy? Afraid not.NO-ONE was very alarmed when Club 18-30 ran advertisements telling you to come on their holidays and be licentious. The commentary tells you to look around and how to use your glove: as you move your hand a disembodied "electronic hand" tracks your movement.

With a bit of skill (more than I possessed) you can operate the radio, the electric windows and the sunroof.You can look round and see the seats behind you. You can also see your driver and other passengers changing alarmingly; then there's that dog (I think they forgot to finish making him). You put on an oversized pair of sunglasses, headphones and a "data glove", and you find yourself sitting in the passenger seat. It will be lugging them around exhibitions, and hopes dealers will eventually decide to splash out on their own systems. The Galaxy, which Ford claims is a "completely new type of large passenger car" (but which seems remarkably like a Renault Espace to me), is being launched with what is undoubtedly a completely new type of sales gimmick. Then everything went blank A nightmare? Quite the opposite: I was experiencing the latest way of selling a motor car, by virtual reality. IBM and Virtuality, the Leicester- based leader in VR games machines, have built eight computer systems for Ford. I WAS sitting comfortably in the passenger seat of my Ford Galaxy when I looked round and saw something quite alarming: a dog with only half a head.