KEY POINTS:
Mention the late comedian Benny Hill and betcha someone will recall the famous closing credits in which Hill chased saucy nurses and meter maids. In fact, the gag was that it was always the scantily clad women who beetled after Benny rather than the other way around, but no one ever seems to remember that. The point is, even the most dumb-arse humour is a subtle thing. Poor Benny was misunderstood. And I think business larrikin Marc Ellis is too.
His company, Charlie's, has had a television commercial for its new fizzy drink banned. The ad shows a cartoon version of Charlie's founders, Ellis and Stefan Lepionka, as nippers perving at a naked sunbather and then suggestively making lemonade. The lemons are rotated on a lemon squeezer: fnar fnar. The Advertising Standards Complaints Board banned the ad, saying it did not meet the required sense of social responsibility. The board also found that it used sexual appeal to sell an unrelated product.
This is confusing. For a start, it's okay to watch all sorts of graphic stuff in programmes - who didn't laugh at that bit in Californication where David Duchovny smokes pot with a scientologist he has just met, shags her in his ex-wife's spare room, gets interrupted and both vomit mid-shag. Lovely jubbly. The argument is that television programming is allowed to be more risqué than ads because you know what you're letting yourself in for. Also, ads are aimed at making filthy lucre so somewhat illogically they are simply not allowed to take liberties. (Not sure if anyone has informed Brent Impey that TV3 supposedly does not have a commercial imperative.)
Another oddity about this decision: a cheesy Burger King ad with gratuitious nubile lovelies in bikinis riding horses got the Advertising Standards Complaints Board's blessing.
So who makes these decisions? Let me introduce you to the public representatives on the complaints board.
Rob is an accountant and past treasurer of the Red Cross and past chairman of Capital and Coast Health. (Now there's an organisation everyone wants on their CV.) Jenny is a lawyer who specialises in child support issues and a lay member of the Medical Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal.
Jean is a former policy analyst specialising in women's issues and a consumer representative on the Osteopath's Council.
Greg is a public health specialist and spokesman for the New Zealand Food Safe Partnership.
Phil is an accountant but his vital qualification seems to be that he is of Ngai Tahu and Kahungunu descent.
Margaret is chairwoman of the Queen Elizabeth II National Trust and former manager of the Outward Bound Trust.
Does this sound like a group who know their way around the public sector? Certainly. Just who you would call if you had a bungled hysterectomy or got food poisoning? Quite possibly. Viz readers? Not so much.
This is not to say the complaints board does not generally do a good, un-prudish job of holding back increasing pressure to ban liquor ads, food ads or kiddie ads. Unlike, say, the Broadcasting Standards Authority, they don't seem to rush to censor everything.
Of the 15,000 ads which are pre-vetted each year the board heard 214 complaints and upheld 31, only five of which related to social responsibility issues. (The others got in trouble for being misleading.)
But in this case maybe they simply got it wrong.
Incidentally, two years ago, English television broadcast a documentary called Is Benny Hill Still Funny?, in which Benny's work was played to young people who had never seen it before. The participants laughed so much that a new series would have been commissioned if Benny hadn't been dead.
