How can they ban my ‘sexist’ Fairy Liquid ads — yet allow sex on Love Island?

The advertising watchdog’s banned gender stereotypes. What patronising nonsense, says Fairy Liquid star NANETTE NEWMAN

What a bizarre world we live in where the old Fairy Liquid adverts I starred in back in the Eighties might today be considered harmful. to have a woman showing off squeaky-clean plates in her kitchen — as I did to a jingle promising hands as soft as your face — would now, apparently, be deemed damaging enough to be worthy of a ban.

Yet at the same time, it’s considered perfectly acceptable for women to be shown on mainstream tV having sex on Big Brother or Love Island — something you’d never have dreamed of just a few years ago.

So, forgive me if I find it difficult to applaud the plan by the advertising Standards authority (aSa) to crack down on sexist commercials or share their apparent obsession with stamping out gender stereotyping.

these days we are bombarded with so much material which you could genuinely call harmful, that I find this ban ridiculously over the top.

the aSa’s report, unveiled this week, is very lengthy. Once I’d finished reading it, I found it rather worrying that these people can dictate what they think is suitable for me to watch. Don’t they think audiences are savvy enough to make up their own minds about a tV commercial?

today women can go into politics, they can go into the boardroom, they can drive trucks while munching on a Yorkie bar if they so desire. We are on such an equal footing, there is virtually nothing women cannot do.

We are a tough breed and not so easily offended that we need the aSa to protect us from a commercial which shows a woman extolling the virtues of a cleaning product. Women can work out for themselves when they are being patronised.

In my day, women with careers were deemed to be failing their families by working, but today it’s almost the reverse. Most women work and are seen to be failing unless they pursue careers.

But what about those women who do want to create a home and who love spending their time being a wife or bringing up their children? Why should they be made to feel guilty for that choice?

almost everyone these days takes commercials with a pinch of salt, anyway. We don’t follow them word for word, as a manual for living, and if we find an advert sexist or offensive, we simply refuse to buy a product. When I made the Fairy Liquid adverts all those years ago, I was a reasonably successful actress who was married to the director, Bryan Forbes, and also a mother of two.

I was capable of walking and talking at the same time and could sashay along a line of clean plates, even though not once during those ads did I ever wash up or even get my hands wet.

the ads were enormously successful and that was why they kept asking me to do them — around 14 in all. they still seem pretty harmless to me.

Only the other day, I saw a Fairy Liquid advert featuring a father and son, so most advertising these days accurately reflects the many different roles both genders play.

TO BE completely honest, at home I probably did more of the washing-up and cooking than my late husband, but there was no conscious division of tasks based on gender.

I think Bryan only cooked three times during more than 50 years of marriage and each time it was a complete disaster, so I was happy to keep him out of the kitchen.

But times have changed and the era of women being chained to the kitchen sink is thankfully long gone.

I don’t know of any mothers who say to their little boys: ‘You can’t wear pink because it’s too feminine.’ Or say to their daughters: ‘You can’t play with a train set or ride that car because that’s a boyish thing to do.’

I’ve got five grandchildren and one great-grandchild who is about to turn three. I’ve just bought him a pram for his birthday because he loves pushing things in one.

It’s wonderful that women have choices that did not exist for us years ago, but we cannot forget that some choose the role of having a family, creating a home and looking after their husbands while others choose to be engineers.

It’s just a shame that the aSa underestimates the intelligence of us all.