Give me real gravy ... not this feeble feminist hogwash
THANKS to a 1950s childhood I like my gravy thick, salty and dark brown, best mixed to a background of Two-Way Family Favourites on the Light Programme. So I’m sorry to see the decline of Bisto and Oxo sales, which fell in September supposedly because of hot weather. They’ll be blaming global warming next.
Of course, the real problem is that nuclear families eating meaty meals around tables, such as the one portrayed by Lynda Bellingham in the famous old Oxo commercials, are disappearing faster than hedgehogs. I doubt anything can save them.
But there’s something a bit wet and defeatist about the new Oxo TV advertisements, in which a horribly correct modern family (the man looks terrified) are shown cringing to some ghastly female bully brought home for a meal by their daughter. The creepy interloper shows her approval of her meatballs not by eating them but by taking a photograph of them.
Advertising is such a slave of trends. Someone called Helen Warren-Piper, a marketing director for Oxo’s parent company, has actually said: ‘Those advertising scripts where the mum is literally tied to an oven just don’t work any more. It’s clear advertisers need to think beyond mum and do a better job at representing the whole of the modern family or consumers will reject them.’
Ah, yes, you’ll remember those days when mothers were literally tied to the oven, then briefly released to gulp down some gravy before being chained to the kitchen sink. It happened to Lynda Bellingham all the time. No it didn’t. What is she talking about?
And yet this rubbish dominates the world of business and commerce, which now peddle ideas once found only in seething, enraged ultra-feminist magazines.