They often say that the adverts on TV are better than most of the programmes and anyone who’s been watching the new series of Survivors would probably find themselves agreeing with that sentiment.
The adverts are changing though, aren’t they? Not so much the style, but the selection of things it’s deemed suitable to advertise. We’re all grown-ups, and have come to terms with having condoms pushed down our throats (sorry) at peak viewing time, but when exactly did it become OK to advertise female incontinence aids before the watershed? (It was only after I typed it that I realised how appropriate that last word was).
I know we don’t expect the commercials to portray life as it is actually lived, but those Tena Lady adverts take the biscuit. Some of you will be gynaecologists, so tell me: how many of your female patients with stress incontinence look anything like the slim, active, pretty, forty-something models who skip about in the adverts wearing light coloured tight-fitting trousers, coughing and laughing and demonstrating their liberation from the fear of embarrassing damp patches? I thought so.
They could try harder to be realistic. I think a good advert for these products would show the front row of the audience at a Ken Dodd concert. Not so many skipping, lithe models there. As they were reduced to helpless laughter by his merciless barrage of jokes, one by one their expressions would change from glee to mild concern to acute anxiety. One by one, they would stand and shuffle awkwardly towards the exit, occasionally shaking a leg.
The camera would then zoom in on the only one left, the lady in the middle seat, who was still able to chuckle, secure in the knowledge that although she might be starting to smell a bit uriniferous, any external leakage had been forestalled by the stout bundle of wadding firmly strapped into place before she left home. The voice-over could say: ‘Laugh like a drain without filling one’, or something similar. I’m wasted in medicine, me.
And note that I specified ‘female incontinence aids’ - when was the last time you saw an ad for a male incontinence aid? I suppose it’s just another example of the reverse gender discrimination that us chaps have to put up with. Mind you, it begs the question of what name you would choose for the male version - it would need to make it clear what the function was while still being sufficiently macho for men to want to go into a shop and buy it. Stallion Stay-Dri perhaps?
Ps. Look what I’ve just found - male ones do exist? So ,why do they only advertise the women’s version?
Euuwww, you could certainly write sketches for Little Britain and its multiple displays of incontinence.