THEY’RE CORNY, NOT CORROSIVE
Has quangoland nothing worse to worry about than blokes being blokes — or women being women — in TV commercials?
Finger-wagging regulators at the asa have decided ‘gender stereotypes’ must be banned to stop us thinking impure thoughts about equality.
as a boy was I improperly influenced by those Brut 33 ads with Henry Cooper and Kevin Keegan? Our ’Enery and his friend Kevin brazenly flaunted their torsos as they held an important discussion in the shower about the merits of that most noxious of male unguents.
‘The deodorant with muscle!’ declared Cooper as he and Kev flexed their pecs.
‘Splash it all over!’ Would the ASA’s ridiculous chief executive, Guy Parker, rule such an ad improper because it reinforced an ‘outdated stereotype’?
Another Seventies TV favourite was the ad for Turkish Delight. It was set in a desert, with suggestively undulating dunes.
An exotic lass gave the camera a smouldering glance and then some chap in Lawrence of Arabia garb brought down his chopper (scimitar, I should perhaps say) on a bar of purple jelly.
Stereotyping again. Whenever we heard the haunting jingle, ‘ Fry’s Turkish Delight’, my brother, Alexander, used to chime: ‘Makes you sick in the night!’
Then there were the Milk Tray ads, in which a romantic chap scaled a mountain to leave a box of chocolates on the pillow of a dolly bird. A gravelly voice intoned: ‘All because, ze lady lurves . . . Milk Tray.’
Alexander and I used to salivate at that commercial, certainly, but it was the thought of the chocolates that got us going. We were perfectly aware the advert was absurd.
Corny adverts, you see, allow children to develop a satirical streak. Did any boy ever really think that eating three Shredded Wheat like Ian Botham would make him butch?
No more than any user of shower gel thinks he will gain rippling abs sported by the hunk in the Sanex For Men adverts.
Unelected regulators have no business deciding what is and what is not ‘outdated’. They should content themselves with making sure ads do not make false claims.
And how about doing something about bad language and sex? But no, they’re invariably fine about that. Gender stereotypes are a merry part of life and very much part of the British comical tradition, from Shakespeare to the Carry On films to Little Britain.
If the ASA’s snoots ever went to a women’s hairdressing salon or a building site, they would understand this.
Sharp-jawed boys in the shaving-foam adverts are no more lifelike than the ‘Perfect Mum’ in the Bisto ads. If she was really perfect, anyway, she would make her own ruddy gravy — as I do.
Because in our house, despite exposure to those allegedly heinous Seventies ads, I cook and my wife is the ‘handyman’.
When it comes to DIY, I am as useless as Frank Spencer was in the BBC sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, which also relied on stereotypes.
Presumably the ASA would want that banned, too.