The women who axed the Oxo mum – and gave us naked Nick
Channel 4 has a knack for popular culture documentaries that don’t go especially deep but are wonderfully nostalgic and entertaining. I particularly enjoyed their Secret World Of... strand, which examined fierce brand rivalries. The one on crisps, for example, answered questions you’d never thought to ask but did need asking, such as: how did Walkers see off Golden Wonder?
These shows are all still available via Channel 4’s streaming service and, from memory, Wall’s vs Häagen-Dazs was also very possibly a classic.
I would put Mad Women in the same sort of category, in that it pulls the curtain back in a breezy yet gratifying way. This is about the real women who became copywriters and drove progress in British advertising from the 1970s, becoming less Peggy and more Don Draper, if you like.
Until that time it was an entirely male industry, and this opens with a montage of ads from the past reflecting a world where women crumbled Oxo cubes and fretted about keeping whites a brilliant white. Also: how might she wash up yet ensure her hands stayed soft? That was a big one. Women probably tossed and turned all night worrying about that.
A TV commercial for Kellogg’s corn flakes from the 1960s is played along with its jaunty jingle sung by a fella: ‘Train your wife, I’ve always said, to bring your breakfast to your bed.’ This wife, now, today, would probably wish to upturn it on his head. I don’t know what women in advert-land were thought to be up to when not crumbling stock cubes or fretting about brilliant whites and soft hands. Chances are, they were imagined sitting stock still on the edge of the sofa, poised to catch any dust-mote midair. She’d hate herself if she missed it, no?
Initially, the women who entered the boys’ club had to work within the constraints of the industry. ‘I hated making yet another advert with a housewife, but it would have been unthinkable to voice my real opinions,’ said Rosie Arnold, who in the early 1980s created the Shake N’ Vac campaign that had a woman dancing in an overjoyed manner while ‘putting the freshness back’ into her carpets.
‘We still kept women chained to domestic tasks,’ she added, somewhat sheepishly. The game-changer was the Levi’s ad (1985), with Nick Kamen stripping off at the laundrette. This was created by Barbara Noakes, who started out as a secretary at BBH (Bartle Bogle Hegarty), is now 80, and had never given an interview before. She still kicks ass and was wonderfully dismissive of her male colleagues.
‘The arrogance of men of little account astounded me,’ she said. ‘I had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly and I didn’t,’ she also said. ‘It was the first time women had been given the chance to ogle boys and ogle we did.’
Sales of Levi’s, which had become an unloved brand, rose by 800 per cent.
It was the start of selling goods by tapping into women’s sexual pleasure. Remember ‘the Lynx effect’? When bikini-clad women threw themselves at the young chaps who had doused themselves? We called it ‘the Gag effect’ in this house when my son was a teenager, but no matter. This took in the Thatcher years and ended by analysing more recent campaigns, such as the Dove one, which used actual women, with ‘actual thighs, actual hips, actual bums’, and was viewed as revolutionary, which has to be telling in itself.
However, I wouldn’t say we are quite there yet. For instance, why is it that, in advertland, men don’t eat yogurt, ecstatically or otherwise? Why is it only women? And why do they always end up with a little splash on the end of their nose when you’d think they’d have mastered how to guide a spoon by now? It’s the excitement, I suppose.
I didn’t hold out much hope for Black Ops, just as I don’t hold out much hope for any comedy. It’s the hardest genre to pull off, I think. But this is terrific, a joy, fresh, wonderfully funny and inventive.
It stars Gbemisola Ikumelo and Hammed Animashaun as Dom and Kay, community support officers – ‘the s*** police’, as local residents call them – who, at the outset, are giving out ‘Stay Street Smart’ promotional frisbees on the street in a bored way, which doesn’t sound funny, but trust me, it is.
They are quickly drawn into a crime caper when they are inveigled to go undercover in a drugs ring where she does the sales because ‘I once worked in Foot Locker’, which is fair.
He finishes every deal by telling the customer to ‘take care’ because ‘that’s good customer service and they’ll come back’. ‘They’ll come back because they’re heroin addicts?’ she queries.
It all happens at breakneck speed, there are umpteen twists and while you wouldn’t think there are many laughs to be mined from, say, the institutional racism of the police, or the institutional misogyny of the police, you’d be wrong. Plus there are star cameos from Joanna Scanlan, Rufus Jones and Felicity Montagu.
It’s being shown weekly at 9.30pm on Fridays, but if that doesn’t suit because, say, it interferes with Gogglebox, all episodes are now on iPlayer. So go on, fill your boots.