Why do we have to pretend not to notice the diversity in TV ads?

The squall-in-a-ramekin over Sarah Pochin’s comments on diversity in advertising looks to be blowing itself out. It may even strike a nostalgic note by the time you dip into this column, as you seek some temporary escape from the latest horror to unfold on the streets of London.

The Reform UK MP’s ‘misspeaking’ may well come to be seen as a welcome, if piquant distraction. An amuse-bouche, a palate cleanser for those of us still struggling to digest the monstrous failures of the UK Labour government’s first year, sitting like a deadweight of unfermented cabbage on our collectively sinking diaphragms. Failures that have of course put Reform, and women like Pochin, into the spotlight in the first place.

Failures like the ongoing inability to grapple with the grooming-gangs scandal. There is an ever-growing suspicion bubbling in our queasy guts that this failure is not really accidental at all. We suspect the government wants this inquiry to fall apart like a soggy bag of chips, lest Labour be exposed as implicated in this business up to its shifty, swivelling eyeballs.

Then there’s the failure to tackle unprecedented illegal immigration. The most vivid illustration of this being the single man who was returned to France under the risible ‘one in, one out’ protocol, only to turn straight back around again and come back into the UK. It seems he had at least been integrated enough during his short stay to grasp the fundamentals of the ‘Hokey Cokey’.

He is, of course, currently vying with accidentally released Ethiopian sex pest Hadush Kebatu for the Brass Eye, ‘This is the one thing we did not want to happen’ prize of the month.

So, all in all, it is not surprising that Labour and its backers in the commentariat leapt greedily on a relatively obscure Reform MP agreeing with a caller on a talk-radio show, who noted that the racial demographics of TV commercials seem to have become a wild distortion of the country we actually live in.

Just for the avoidance of doubt, and lest anyone think I am being skilfully evasive, let me plant my flag, too. Yes, Pochin’s comments were clumsily phrased, and showed flank to her enemies. But I broadly share a more elegantly articulated version of Sarah’s frustrations and would like to know what the hell is going on.

I certainly wouldn’t say that ‘It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people’, as she did. Even with the caveats that Sarah followed her comment with, that wouldn’t be my choice of words. But it does strike me as within the range of acceptable idioms that a person might use for exasperation – as when a bus is cancelled at the last minute or you find yourself in the ‘Change password?’ doom loop. If, say, David Lammy had said that it ‘drives him mad’ that, despite numerous black players performing well for England, the FA has yet to appoint a black manager to the national side, I very much doubt The News Agents would be discussing a disturbing new drift of a mainstream party into ethnic hatred.

I have indeed noticed an absurd degree of diversity casting in advertising, which is utterly disproportionate to the shifting mosaic of this country. Along with that, I’ve noticed an abundance of mixed-race families, almost invariably with a black father and a white mother. I would also probably say, once the Panorama undercover agent had plied me with enough drink, that I find it tiresome, frustrating, wearying to have to pretend that I haven’t noticed this. That I am still clinging to the colourblind consensus that we had all signed up to happily in the Nineties, before certain people started taking the piss.

Which is why I am at least reassured that it’s not just me, and that highly regarded mixed-race commentator Damian Counsell also voiced similar sentiments some seven years ago: ‘I’ve said this before – when there were four or five mixed-race ad families simultaneously featured in major ad campaigns – but it’s happening again: I’m part of a mixed-race family from the days when it was very rare and, even to me, the media fetish for them these days is creepy.’

Creepy is a good word for it. Because I get the feeling, if I am honest, that something entirely else is being communicated to us by these adverts, beyond a brand of car insurance, flat-pack furniture or the only way to ensure a really heart-warming Christmas lunch.

The fact is that communications experts have been bragging about the subtlety and legerdemain of their dark arts for decades. Edward Bernays’s book, Propaganda, inspired by enormously influential American media guru Walter Lippmann, was published almost exactly a hundred years ago, coinciding (entirely coincidentally) with the rise of Madison Avenue as the Wall Street of advertising. He demonstrated conclusively just how many ingredients there can be in one easily swallowed message.

Besides, it’s not as if the people who have been campaigning for exactly what Sarah Pochin noticed are shy about their aims. Three years ago on BBC Radio Four’s Unsafe Space, I interviewed Marcus Ryder, then head of external consultancies for the Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity. It was an interesting conversation and you can still hear the final edit on BBC Sounds.

Essentially, Ryder was making no bones about seeking to influence the casting choices being made across all broadcast media. He felt this was a justified and noble cause. He rejected any suggestion that this was ‘social engineering’ and insisted that it was merely to see output ‘accurately representing Britain’. When I pointed out that black actors, at least, were clearly already way overrepresented in commercials, he suggested I be more ‘nuanced and sophisticated’. He then switched his focus to the lack of black foreign correspondents reporting from war zones.

None of which, to be clear, should be regarded as beyond the pale, or even unwelcome. Even if his campaigning might, in an ideal world, be tempered by other voices having an input – including those of, say, the white working class. But don’t, to use a phrase that even Sarah Pochin might have balked at, piss down my leg and tell me it’s raining.

So, let’s all just treat each other with a bit more respect? Stop pretending that nothing has happened? That the left hasn’t campaigned precisely for what we’re now seeing on screen? And let’s agree, as the world fractures into an ever-growing archipelago of identity, that representation does actually matter?

I get it. That’s why, until I see a grey-bearded, squinty-eyed Welsh Jew looking satisfied with his Christmas pud and brandy butter in the next Waitrose ad, my seasonal budget is all to play for. Capeesh?

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.