Does it matter what colour the people in a sofa advert are? I can’t help feeling it doesn’t. Certainly, after next month’s budget, our political class might find it has more pressing concerns than skin pigment in fictional families convened to flog you something comfy in chenille. In fact, if some of the even bigger global financial storm clouds on the horizon end up bursting, we might well end up thinking it doesn’t even meaningfully matter which big house/two slightly smaller houses Prince Andrew lives in. Impossible to conceive of in the current news vortex. And yet: a possibility.
Either way, this week we are talking about Reform MP Sarah Pochin’s turn in a TalkTV phone-in, where she responded to a caller’s gambit on advertising “demographics”. Declaring the caller was “absolutely right”, Pochin explained that “it drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people”. Mad? Listen, she said it. Contrary to initial positive assessments of Sarah’s talents when she was elected, she is starting to come across as an armchair short of a three-piece suite. But on reflection, I think the mad she is talking about is the angry kind. The kind where if you see another non-white face in a 15-second spot for a product you don’t need and are under precisely zero obligation to buy, you will literally lose your mind.
