So Easy, Even A Man Can Complain About It

March 13, 2009

oven-pride-ad.jpg

An advert for Oven Pride – “the one with the bag” – kicked off with a £1million national TV campaign last week. It features a reluctant and, at times, evidently very confused, man being forced to clean an oven by a woman whom we presume is his wife, though we don’t know if her suffering is of the long, medium-sized or Peaches Geldof variety.

We do know that the man is not in the habit of cleaning ovens. However, his disinclination to do so is miraculously cured by Oven Pride’s new invention. It’s a bag into which you put miscreant parts of your oven. You then pour in some cleaning fluid, shake it all about and, hey presto, your oven is clean. As the strapline has it, Oven Pride’s new methodology is “so easy, even a man can use it.”

Sounds good to Blade, but apparently Oven Pride has had some 1,000 complaints about the ad from men, including more than 50 to the Advertising Standards Authority. Presumably they object to the ad on the ground that it is discriminatory, showing men to be inept, blundering fools in the kitchen when, in fact, they like nothing better than dedicating themselves to its maintenance. Blade says “Speak for yourselves, fellas.”

 

3 Responses to “So Easy, Even A Man Can Complain About It”

Posted by:
eon on May 13, 2009 at 7:58 am

the advert is totally crap, patronising and illegal. its not acceptable to degrade women like this in commercials, so why is it ok to pick on men?

Posted by:
eon on May 13, 2009 at 7:59 am

sorry – not illegal – dont know where that came from

Posted by:
Andy on March 25, 2010 at 3:47 pm

Will overpride be running any of the following slogans next: 1) ‘So easy a pakistani could do it’ (No, because that would be racist) 2) ‘SO easy an old person can do it’ (No, as that would be agist) 3) ‘So easy, a disabled person can do it’ (No, as that would be ablist) 4) ‘So easy, a woman can do it’ (No, as we all know that would be sexist). Why is it ok then, to demean men this way?

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Good work by Rusbridger

February 10, 2012
scissors

The headline says it all: ‘Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger takes pay cut‘.

Dan Sabbagh’s piece says a bit more: said editor ‘emailed staff at the newspaper to say that his salary in the upcoming 2012-13 financial year will be £395,010, compared with £438,900 in the current financial year’.

Some voices say: ‘How worthy.’

Others opine: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

But we say: good work by Mr Rusbridger. For the sake of the media’s survival, we hope that others in senior positions in the industry will follow suit.

Image of toolkit allegedly deployed by Alan Rusbridger courtesy of Flickr user LollyKnit.

From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.