Woke liberal TV ads are enough to drive the average racist mad - Vladimir McTavish
I reckon I’m not the only person who uses the commercial break on telly to put on the kettle or go to the toilet. Unless I’m watching Channel 5, of course, in which case, the ads are invariably better than the actual programmes.
Indeed, I’m normally gagging for a commercial after ten minutes of watching 24 Hours With Traffic Cops or some such drivel.
When I do sit through the ads, I tend not to pay too much attention, unless one of them is particularly funny or entertaining. Nine times out of ten, I would struggle to name the product being plugged. I suspect I am not unusual. However, some people seemed to be getting very hot under the collar this week about TV adverts.
Reform UK MP Sarah Pochin, taking part in a phone-in show on Talk TV, claimed she is being “driven mad seeing adverts full of black and Asian people”. Really? There must surely be more important issues over which to lose one’s sanity.
I’m willing to believe there are more black and Asian people in TV advertisements than twenty or thirty years ago, but it’s never struck me as unusual. I would certainly never dream of sitting there counting them.
The MP for Runcorn later admitted her remarks had been “phrased poorly” but denied they were racist. She then bemoaned how the “liberal woke” agenda has led to more black people in adverts.
There is too much equality and inclusiveness in the media these days, she moans.
So what? Is she really trying to claim that we don’t see enough white faces on our screens? Of course, it could be that she doesn’t think telly ads are inclusive enough? After all, when idid you last see a good old-fashioned British skinhead on an advert for Lynx Africa?
Pochin yearns to go back to the good old days when all TV advertisements featured white families and were fronted by white celebrities. Wholesome entertainers like Jimmy Savile.
That’s the trouble with the “liberal woke” agenda. Dodgy sex pests are being overlooked for all the best jobs in advertising.
When I was a kid in the sixties and seventies, there were plenty of black people in adverts. Except that they weren’t real black people. They were crude racially-stereotypical cartoons, selling us macaroon bars and fizzy drinks.
Remarkably, Robertson’s were even using their golli-wog on marmalade adverts as recently as the 1980s.
Of course, advertising was different back in the days when prime time Saturday night entertainment would include such hits as The Black-and-White Minstrel Show, in which white male singers would black up.
Remarkably, it was only take off the air as recently as 1978. Sarah Pochin is probably writing to Points of View to demand the BBC bring it back.
Nigel Farage later said of his MP’s comments that “if I thought the intention behind it was racist, I would have taken a lot more action”. He didn’t go on to explain what that “action” might have been. Promotion, probably.
Anyway, if Sarah Pochin gets so angry during the ad break, why doesn’t she turn over to the BBC? Because Reform UK hate the BBC even more than they hate inclusive advertising.
It’s enough to drive the average racist mad.