THERE was something about Linda Bellingham. Something very special. Obviously as the “Oxo Mum”, the actor's role and function in that unforgettable series of TV commercials was to be the mother who used Oxo. There was her husband, a luckless and seemingly incompetent cook and their two weans: one boy, one girl.
From 1983 until the turn of the millennium, that fictitious TV family charted the changing way many middle-class folk lived. The weans became adults, there were trials and there were tribulations. And there was always mum, Linda Bellingham, gravy in hand. But she did so much more than merely sell cubes of granular gravy; she inhabited the thoughts of a generation of teenage boys and, for this boy, she epitomised the “mum you pure fancied”.
While the “Oxo family” reflected some of the changing mores, they were fundamentally traditional. And traditional meant the dad was the breadwinner and the mum was queen of the kitchen. But that was decades ago; the way we live has changed and so the way advertisers need to sell us stuff has to change. As a wee brown kid I remember being gobsmacked when I saw an Indian or black family in a commercial. It was almost as if, in that three-minute world between the programmes, people like me didn't exist. Nowadays the people in adverts far more effectively reflect wider society; it’s as if those selling have finally realised that Glaswegian Sikhs, like Fife Jamaicans, actually buy stuff.
While those under-represented communities are now being welcomed into the fold it’s the “traditional” role of women that is now being challenged. (It’s far easier to introduce a new idea where there was an absence, much harder to develop already existing stereotypes.) The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) are proposing tough penalties on campaigns that depict lazy and outmoded images of women cleaning up after men or those men that seem utterly unable to complete the most basic domestic chore.
This seems to be the least controversial suggestion in the history of regulation by the ASA. The purpose is quite simply to break the already existing gender stereotype: that women do the housework and men don't. Any parent knows that the continual bombardment children have when it comes to such gender defining and limiting imagery has a profound impact. Put simply, for the next generation to truly believe that their gender isn’t the primary determinant of their lives, they need to see that in action.
Progressive as this sounds, the ASA has incurred the not insubstantial wrath of Nanette Newman, aka The Fairy Liquid mum. No doubt her hands (that did dishes) felt as soft as her face thanks to the incessant dishwashing she seemed to be doing in all those 1980s commercials. Newman appears to believe that a woman’s place is firmly in the home and we are genetically predisposed to engage with commercials that focus on domestic bliss with a female at the heart of it.
Describing the proposed ban as “dangerous”, she said that since women “are at the moment the only gender that can produce babies”, who’s to say there isn’t “something in them that is more caring and wants to create and nest and likes all the things that are connected with homes”. Why shouldn’t that be advertised, she said on Radio 4’s Today programme.
In the wake of the furore over a woman being cast as Dr Who, it’s all rather depressing that we still find ourselves fighting this fight. Yes, Nanette, some women may like to make a home. Some men do too. Some men love having soft hands from hours of washing up; and some want to fly fighter planes, build bridges and find a cure for cancer.
If all our girl children see is their future as docile, domesticated and downtrodden,maybe fewer will fly planes, build bridges or become oncologists. We need images of women that fairly reflect the potential women have; and that potential is pretty much the same as that of men.
I grew up in the halcyon days of British TV advertising. There were some brilliant campaigns by some brilliant creatives. Much as we all miss the past it’s crucial that we embrace our future. And I’m hopeful that that future will finally see our womenfolk released from the senseless stereotype that subjugates and stops them being all that they can be.
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