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From Socialist Worker, No. 107, 1 February 1969, pp. 2 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
IF PANTOMIME GAGS are any gauge, the easiest tickle on the national funny-bone is not the government, the mother-in-law, or even my wife.
The way that television ads have eaten into our consciousness, to the extent of creating new words (the ‘pinta’) and certainly new concepts and criteria (the washing powder that is whiter than whiter than white) is partly amusing and partly horrific.
It doesn’t need saying admen are in the twilight business of creating previously non-existent needs, like the washing powders that, owned by the same company, vie monthly to transcend their ‘competitors’ and their own perfection.
But the machinery the admen use for their work is usually well codified: colour high income-bracket gloss for Punch and factory chimneys for the Mirror.
It’s on the telly that the adman has to be all things to all men.
He doesn’t, of course. So, side by side, we see heavily regional accents in Toffo ads, and sugary Belgravia advertising the noxious After Eight Mints.
After Eight is fantasy, not created for people who drink coffee out of silver, smoke Havanas and have crates of Napoleon Brandy in the cellar. After Eight is, like so many ads, an attempt to impose values of ‘unashamed luxury’ on people who neither can afford it nor really want it.
It’s an extreme example. Not so Katy and Philip, Oxo’s soggy soap saga, carefully trendifying itself as the years go by.
Philip and Katy are not top executive class. Philip seems to be in oil on some sort of low managerial level.
But their accents are impeccable, and, although money can be tight, they eat ‘dinner’ (the name of the evening meal being the most effective class thermometer).
Katy is what every petty-bourgeois would like to be; not rich, but with class. She, like Mrs. Dale, is a notch or two higher up the social scale than her audience, and presumably the use of Oxo will help her fans along the class clearway that little bit that makes all the difference.
Philip and Katy are a couple, not a family. They are extraordinary in that respect.
Kids don’t get repeat fees for ads, that’s why they even advertise cars and insurance late at night.
Kids vary from the nauseating (that repulsive child in the Fairy ads – the prime creator of the myth that a washing-up liquid’s most important characteristic is its effect on the hands of the user) to the cheerfully irrepressible, as in the Smarties ad where the sky rains the stuff, falsetto American kids repeat their diabolic refrain, and be-jeaned and be-sweat-shirted youth indulge their exercise in consumer orgasm in a sea of multi-coloured chocolate buttons.
Persil is another typical family ad: ‘When they go out you don’t go with them. Or do you?’
Yes, apparently, in the fact that their white shirts look whiter than the shirts of the kid next door, or presumably, the kid next door’s dirty mother, who uses another leading brand and so doesn’t care.
Thus the appeal to the bourgeois conscience (Stork is tested on Selfridges staff: ‘success’ pitted against ‘success’) is intertwined with the appeal to make YOUR family just a little bit more bourgeois than the next one.
Sex is not a great influence on telly; telly is ‘family viewing’ and as such must be wholesome. And when passions so virile and competitive can be achieved by a golden-haired child in a white dolly-dress mouthing tinsel platitudes into the ear of a just-hip-enough Mum (who if she feels the strain is usually given a working-class accent along with her patent pill), then who bothers?
The sink’s the thing, wherein to keep the money rolling in.
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Last updated on 30 October 2020