UK: Former copywriter FAY WELDON, who created some of our best-loved ad slogans, despairs at the nannying new PC rules

Once upon a time, back in my Mad Men days, when I was head of copywriting for an advertising agency, my most successful advert was: 'Housewives! Now you can afford to pay for the central heating out of your monthly housekeeping.'

And I seem to remember the slogan 'A woman's life is in the home' for a sewing machine. Ads were certainly sexist back then.

But this is 2019, not 1969. And the news that the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has forbidden anyone from screening two light-hearted and, yes, funny adverts under new rules to prevent 'harmful' gender stereotyping is an absurd overreaction.

By forbidding us from laughing at them, the ASA is making itself a laughing stock.

The two advertisements in question are for Philadelphia cheese and car-maker Volkswagen. The Philadelphia ad is a cream-cheesy triumph depicting two new dads by a conveyor belt in a restaurant serving buffet food. One man is shown holding a child in his arms and the other is carrying his in a car seat.

As they talk, the first man absent-mindedly places his child on the moving conveyor belt. 'Let's not tell Mum,' he says, having moved across the room to pick up the baby.

Well, it made me laugh! All too true to life, I thought.

Meanwhile, the Volkswagen eGolf ad features the strapline: 'When we learn to adapt, we can achieve anything.'

It shows a couple asleep in a tent, having climbed a steep rockface; two men in space; and a male athlete with a prosthetic running leg — before panning to a woman sitting quietly on a bench reading, next to a baby's pram.

The advert was adapted from one shown successfully in France. And it actually rather moved me — it seemed so true and timeless, and I don't see why what was deemed good enough for the French public should be deemed otherwise for us.

A tiny, tiny minority complained — out of all those who saw the ads, just three people wrote letters objecting to male-female stereotyping in the Volkswagen ad, and 128 in the Philadelphia one.

And yet the ASA shrank back, cowering like a snail into its shell.

What shock and horror! Men are being shown as traditionally male and women as traditionally female — duh! that's the blooming joke.

But OMG, thinks the ASA, you never know, this might just swell into a social media storm and end up in dreaded controversy. So it backed down.

SOURCE