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Applauding the ASA

Wednesday, 12th December 2007

The Advertising Standards Authority that is. No, not for it's specific decisions, but for its very existence.

A TV ad accused of portraying Welsh people as having "low intelligence" has escaped a ban from the advertising watchdog.

The TV ad campaign, for Welsh Whisky Company's Brecon Five vodka, opened with a University Challenge-style quizshow featuring "Boffins from the Institute of Advanced Philosophy" against four women from the "Valley College of Further Education".

The quizmaster proceeded to ask which philosophical concept Søren Kierkegaard had advocated, to which the Welsh girls beat the boffins to answering with the reply "existentialism, innit!".

A voiceover then said: "Now that's not would expect from Wales".

Quite why anyone should be banned from insulting the Welsh (or should that be telling the truth about them?) I don't know, so I would usually put myself in the camp of those who would decry the very existence of something like the ASA.

However, there was an excellent column a couple of decades ago by Bernard Levin on this very subject. He waxed rhapsodic (almost to the level of his panegyrics about Wagner) about the way in which there was a committee which calmly and seriously considered the claims put forward in an advertisement as to the crispiness of the manufacturer's crisps. His point was that only in a nation which had already solved all of the difficult questions would such a thing happen. Further, that only in Britain would it actually be taken seriously, a complaint about the texture of crisps.

The existence of the ASA I care nothing about: but as with Levin, the fact that we've already dealt with all of the serious matters (which, in any historical sense, we have indeed done) means that we can waste time on such trivialities. And vice versa, that we do support such waste means that we have indeed mastered the hard stuff.