Euro ads nothing to shout about

People having been getting aerated about the Euro again. For once, the anger is not emanating from reactionary old duffers convinced that a common currency will signal the downfall of the great British empire. This time, the complaints are from hypersensitive television viewers.

The Government has commissioned a series of TV advertisements designed to get us ready for the funny money. You may have seen them. They show the boss of a company haranguing his workers for showing little interest in the Euro.

To my mind, their apathy does them credit. Thanks to weak-willed politicians of all colours, we are missing out on this eminently sensible development; there seems little point in celebrating when we haven't been invited to the party.

However, this is not the point. The disinterested office staff are meant to be symbolic. They represent British business as a whole. Most firms are woefully under-prepared to trade with the Euro and these adverts are supposed to act as a wake-up call.

But they have been too raucous for some TV addicts, who have grumbled about the adverts being inappropriate. They feel the loud-mouthed boss is unnecessarily impolite. And if they had wanted to watch a rude man shouting at helpless cretins, they would have tuned into Jeremy Paxman's political interviews on Newsnight.

It is not the advert that annoys me, but the people who complained about it.

They must be highly nervous individuals or have too much time on their hands. Either way, they should be ignored.

Unfortunately we don't ignore them. There is a whole industry built around dealing with gripes about adverts.

In 1996, the Advertising Standards Authority, which regulates ads in the press and on billboards, received a massive 10,723 complaints. Many came from traders accusing a rival of "dirty tricks".

The remaining complainants either claimed that an advert misled them (that's the intention, sucker!), or they were whinging that an advert shocked them (poor flower).

Case examples show what the ASA has to put up with. Complaint number one: a poster for beer with the slogan "Hard to put away" next to a picture of train robber Ronnie Briggs was said to "trivialise serious crime and encourage irresponsible drinking". It does neither. Complaint, I'm pleased to say, dismissed.

Complaint number two: a promotion for a radio talk show was headlined: "Lorraine Kelly. Prostitution. Weekdays at 11am." It pictured a bar code on a woman's naked bottom. The authority upheld this complaint on the grounds that the nudity was unnecessarily shocking. I would have upheld it on the grounds that Lorraine Kelly is unnecessarily shocking.

Gripes about TV commercials are just as petty and pointless. Sixty nine viewers contacted the Independent Television Commission upset by the image of a pig dancing to the Bee Gees' tune Staying Alive to promote Colman's Mustard. Admittedly this is not a particularly pleasant or funny ad, but its hardly going to encourage widespread pig baiting.

Meanwhile, a handful of viewers were angered by the advert in which a skydiver wearing Gillette male body spray crashes into a hospital bed. He is immediately surrounded by attractive nurses eager to tend to his needs. Most of the complaints came from nurses who thought it sexual stereotyping of the worst kind. Which just proves that some nurses don't have a sense of humour.

And an astonishing 519 viewers were horrified by the Levis advert showing a 'dead' hamster being pushed with a pencil. As they live in a century that has seen two world wars, they should count themselves very lucky that this is the most disturbing thing to enter their lives.

23/11/98

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