OPINION: Stuart Elliott in America.

Can you hear the shouting, the singing, the carousing, all the way across the Atlantic? Can you make out the lyrics to Happy Days Are Here Again as they're sung from one end of Madison Avenue to another? If not, you must be deaf, or dead, or perhaps both.

The reason for the clamourous celebration is the outcome of the 'upfront' market, the sale of commercial time on the major television networks ahead of the start of the 2003-04 season. The results so far for the broadcast and cable networks are stellar, spectacular, superb, special ... just about every 'S' word in the thesaurus.

The six largest broadcast networks hauled in a record amount of commitments to buy time ahead of the season, totalling dollars 9.2 billion to dollars 9.3 billion. That far surpasses the previous record, set only last spring, of dollars 8.1 billion. Their dozens of cable counterparts, worried that the incredible demand for spots during broadcast shows would suppress subsequent sales, had little to obsess about, it turned out, as the cablecasters scored a record take of their own, estimated at dollars 5.5 billion to dollars 5.6 billion.

Not too shabby for a struggling, unsettled, uncertain - get out that thesaurus again - advertising market.

So what's the story?

Part of the reason for the strength of the upfront market is, surprisingly enough, the same bumpy economic climate that makes the health of the overall ad market so hard to predict or determine.

Call it a flight to quality, a flight to the tried and true, a shocking lack of imagination or even guts among the planners and buyers at the media agencies that now dominate ...