PRIVATE VIEW: Mark Wnek is the chairman and executive creative director at Euro RSCG Wnek Gosper.(Vehicle Crime Prevention ad campaign)

I've got flu and I'm abroad and rattling with American drugs so excuse my rambling.

Apparently, some of my colleagues find doing Private View problematic: doing ads is hard enough without some smart-arse having a go at you in public.

The problem is maybe that we want to have our cake and eat it. If you admit the truth, that doing ads is a team game, then you know that righteous blame for dodgy stuff goes to everyone from the client down.

As should the credit. For instance, planners not having their names on creative awards is a stain on those awards.

I have my own problems writing these columns. The idea of a captive audience able to go over and over the work, which is what the Private View writer is, seems the opposite of what advertising is about. Its primary (and increasingly downplayed) role is to stop a far-from-captive audience turning the page or getting up to make the tea.

I try to address this by only looking at the work once. Even then, one's professional appreciation remains pretty acute regardless of whether, in reality, the work would have been well-executed enough to make you pay attention in the real world.

This time, nature has conspired to render me a more realistic reviewer because when I received the stuff to review I got flu and then had to fly abroad to a meeting. So I'm sitting in New York feeling sorry for myself, the Private View stuff a distant memory. Or is it?