Tell Wes Streeting to leave our genius alcohol adverts alone

Telegraph

4 hours ago

Steel yourself for Wes Streeting's bumper summer issue of diktats. His 10-year plan for the NHS is due for publication in a few weeks, and the energetic and engaging Health Secretary will be bouncing around the airways like he's in charge.
And one thing said to be in his sights is alcohol advertising. A full ban is not, apparently, being considered, but a spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care says: 'We are exploring options for partial restrictions to bring it closer in line with [the] advertising of unhealthy food.'
The current mantra from those who deign to rule over us being that alcohol should be avoided and that it is as heinous as junk food. There was, for example, the recent advice from former Government drugs advisor Prof David Nutt that we should limit ourselves to one glass of wine a year, while the Mayor of London, Sir Sadiq Khan, seems to think that on the other 364 days of the year we should be rolling spliffs.
So with his stated aim of prevention rather than cure, Streeting is gunning for the advertising industry. If a full ban is not on the agenda, then it will doubtless mean no ads for booze before the watershed, the idea being that kids won't then see any dastardly ads on the telly after 9pm because they'll be in bed. Which is, of course, a completely outdated concept because kids don't watch telly anymore. They'll be upstairs on their phones, and if they're being targeted with adverts for junk food and alcohol, that will be the least of our concerns.
Yet a ban, partial or otherwise, would be a pointless piece of nanny-statism – not least because it would inflict needless economic damage on the British advertising industry. Which is a marvellous trade, a fabulous part of our creative industries and particularly wonderful because its purveyance of alcohol is ultimately harmless. I mean, do you know anyone who ever bought a drink on the strength of seeing it advertised on television?
Or perhaps it's just me, totally immune to the powers of television advertising. Because I have, joyfully, been entertained by adverts for the likes of Heineken, Hofmeister, Skol, Guinness, Martini, Cinzano and a great deal more, yet drink virtually none of those things, while being fairly certain that I've never seen an advert for my favourite tipple of a nice white burgundy.
Thus the nanny state seeks to obliterate another chink of our cultural heritage, the TV ad for alcohol, under the guise of preventing alcohol-related deaths. While, ironically, it is Streeting's colleague, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, who is doing more actively sterling work of preventing access to alcohol by hiking employers' National Insurance and the minimum wage for 18-year-olds, which is closing pubs up and down the country.
But let us not be downhearted, and instead celebrate the finest attempts by drinks brands to get us to imbibe. Many of which proliferated during my childhood, which might account for my excellent current relationship with alcohol (if you're interested: champagne at noon, pinot noir with lunch, chardonnay at 7pm).
And a gander at many of those ads suggests that, as a nation, we are more class than alcohol-obsessed. There's the famous ad from 1976 for Campari in which a well-spoken Jeremy Clyde pours Lorraine Chase a glass on the terrace at his palatial pad in the Med. 'You wafted here from paradise,' he says. 'No,' she replies in a south London accent, 'Luton airport.'
Another notable of the class-clash genre is Paul Hogan of Crocodile Dundee fame, whose adverts for Fosters lager invariably cast him as a rough Aussie brashly invading a posh English scene, such as the ballet, from 1985. 'Strewth, there's a bloke down there with no strides on,' he says. A single sentence which confirms the genius of the ad folk, in this case from London-based Cherry Hedger Seymour, who wrote lines that few of us who watched could ever forget.
Similarly, many have forgotten that it was an advert for Castlemaine XXXX where Saatchi & Saatchi created one of the most famous lines in advertising history with: 'Looks like we've overdone it with the sherry.'
It's a line that signalled another rich territory for alcohol adverts: the depiction of women as feeble drinkers of things such as sherry while real men slurp beer. This was personified in a commercial featuring a man called Arkwright who says: 'That night when I first saw you at the Three Ferrets, I thought you were the loveliest thing I had ever seen.' His wife, in an apron, ironing behind him, assumes he's talking of her, while, naturally, his declared love is for his glass of John Smith's bitter.
And it's a housewife that features in the 1986 advert for Harveys Bristol Cream, this time the wife of Attila the Hun. 'Hello, hon, had a hard day?' she asks, tending the fire as he kicks the door in on his return. 'Positively murder,' he replies.
The 1990s, however, saw the advertising industry dragging itself out of an era of post-war stereotypes, creating instead stylish and witty spots for the likes of Guinness: a man dancing as he waits for the head to settle (in 1994) and the acclaimed surfer advert of 1999 by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO. It was directed by future filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, whose other work includes the Stella Artois adverts of the early 2000s, which are also cinematic mini-masterpieces.
To Wes and friends these ads are heinous pied pipers to mayhem, illness and early death. But to me our British adverts for booze, which are more brand positioning concepts than anything else, are stylish and witty discourses on society that we can enjoy while sipping a glass of something entirely of our own volition.