6 hours ago
6
Does it matter what colour the people in a sofa advert are? I can’t help feeling it doesn’t. Certainly, after next month’s budget, our political class might find it has more pressing concerns than skin pigment in fictional families convened to flog you something comfy in chenille. In fact, if some of the even bigger global financial storm clouds on the horizon end up bursting, we might well end up thinking it doesn’t even meaningfully matter which big house/two slightly smaller houses Prince Andrew lives in. Impossible to conceive of in the current news vortex. And yet: a possibility.
Either way, this week we are talking about Reform MP Sarah Pochin’s turn in a TalkTV phone-in, where she responded to a caller’s gambit on advertising “demographics”. Declaring the caller was “absolutely right”, Pochin explained that “it drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people”. Mad? Listen, she said it. Contrary to initial positive assessments of Sarah’s talents when she was elected, she is starting to come across as an armchair short of a three-piece suite. But on reflection, I think the mad she is talking about is the angry kind. The kind where if you see another non-white face in a 15-second spot for a product you don’t need and are under precisely zero obligation to buy, you will literally lose your mind.
Even so, of all the things to wet your pants about, you’d think what happens in the gaps in linear TV when people go to the kitchen or the loo just probably aren’t worthy of a seriously committed public servant’s time in a crapsack world. It’s hard to give one iota of a toss about this supposed crisis in cultural identity/TV advertising, where the fallout is so intense it could result in you … simply not buying the sofa? Or the takeaway burger? Or the tub of Quality Street? I’ve tried to be driven mad by this, but it’s incredibly hard to get that invested in the commercial future of big sofa. Maybe that makes me an enemy of growth – and yet, I note the profits of DFS were up last quarter. And with them doing an advert starring several non-white people and everything.
Perhaps the point is that profits would have been up even more if they’d done an ad in which some suitably Aryan young professionals and the corpse of Eugène Terre’Blanche were snuggling up watching Christmas telly or something. Certainly, I would like to have seen this thought experiment explored in Richard Littlejohn’s latest admiring column on Pochin’s comments. For younger readers – anyone under the age of 70 – Richard currently appears twice a week in the Mail, though I’m not sure where he currently physically resides. For decades, he worked from home in Florida, railing against things like people working from home, or the problems of the country. The country of the UK, obviously. The country of the USA, where he lived – lives? – famously doesn’t have any problems.
Anyway: adverts. As Richard’s latest thunk-piece reveals, he was recently to be found not in Florida, but in – actually, I’ll let him tell you. “We spent the weekend before last in North Norfolk,” he divulged promisingly to readers, “and practically the only non-white face we saw belonged to a young woman serving in the seaside village convenience store where we stopped to pick up our Daily Mail.” Uncanny. Having not meaningfully participated in the popular cultural life of the UK over the past decades, Richard perhaps doesn’t realise which TV figure of fun this riff immediately and powerfully calls to mind. Likewise a revelation elsewhere in the same column: “Admittedly, a while ago I did spot a traditional white, middle-class, heterosexual, married couple during one ad break, but I was so taken aback I can’t remember what they were supposed to be selling.”
Aha! That of course undermines the argument in one fell swoop. As the legendary ad genius David Ogilvy put it in one of his thunderous treatises (so much more fun than Richard’s): “The function of advertising is to sell the product”. Advertising is, despite what a lot of wanky underperforming creatives will tell you, the art of selling, and failure by a viewer to even register the product is certainly not going to register at the cash register.
And so to the tills. As well as being Britain’s biggest retailer, Tesco is presumably the mortal foe of Pochin and Littlejohn, having recently been running an ad campaign showing a family gathering where some people are black and some are white and some are mixed. Yet the supermarket’s sales rose 7%this year. The chain is currently seeking people to fill 28,500 temporary Christmas jobs. Is all this bad? It feels sort of … fine? Maybe we need another searing appearance by Sarah Pochin on TalkTV to explain the economics of it.
Although, it must be said that there is a certain irony that Sarah’s ad rant occurred on Talk, which so few advertisers deemed worthy of bothering with that it had to ditch its linear TV model last year and move to streaming. Even that way, however, it can only operate as an ad-supported channel, so another thing to drive Sarah mad is the reality that her appearance was financially supported by precisely the kind of melting-pot commercial break she regards as culturicidal. This is what it must feel like to know a spectacle is completely wrong but still have to haul your arse out there and participate in it. I imagine she sees herself like Katniss in the Hunger Games.
As for the rest of us, anyone who has got this far through 2025 will have detected that we are in the middle of a great unmooring, where the undoubted cultural excesses of one era are giving way to the likely even less healthy cultural excesses of the next. Some people feel they have reacquired the ability to say things about legitimate subjects which they feel they were warned off for a long while. But this new licence – or newly reissued licence – has opened the gate to other people saying any old rubbish at all, even when it tips into dangerously irrational bigotry and worse.
after newsletter promotion
Maybe instead of sitting slumped in front of the ads, Sarah Pochin should flick over to a history documentary. Anything on populism will do, because throughout modern history the story always ends the same. Populism offers simple answers to complex problems, but time and again it has been shown ultimately to offer no answer at all. Instead, it trades in deflections. This is why you will find it fixating on utter irrelevances like telly advertising when a number of interlinked crises threaten to explode entire political orders or financial markets. Call me a repulsive old realist, but these people are not meeting the moment. They are not saying the unsayable. They just don’t really have the first clue what to say at all.
-
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
