Cormac MacConnell: The TV pig in the parlour gets my goat
It has always been unfair and inaccurate, and in recent years, the situation has worsened sharply.
However, over the last couple of months, those who create these adverts for their clients have plumbed the depths altogether by bringing back the pig in the parlour. I don’t know about you, but I am quite livid about that. Scandalous is the word.
The Civil War cordite was still hanging over this state, when we began a national campaign to rid ourselves of the slur affixed to us by the English gutter press, with stories about barefoot Paddies and Bridgets living in hovels with pigs in the parlour.
The cartoonists in organs like Punch had an image along those lines in about every issue.
Now, dammit, in the current campaign, there is this loon of a farmer appearing every 20 minutes, showing off the pig in his parlour to a young woman who clearly is desperate to find herself a husband, even if he does have a porker in his parlour.
Incidentally, that is not a farmer in the advert. For sure, it is a Dublin actor who was never close to a pig before this campaign began. And that is the unsmoked truth, yet again.
We cannot escape the swathes of TV adverts which punctuate every programme on the box. They are an economic necessity, and I understand that clearly. I am often impressed by the imagination and skill displayed in many of the commercials.
To mention just one, for example, I often chuckle at the Specsavers campaigns, which are usually witty and whimsical. Even in that campaign, though, I think you will agree, there is one segment which diminishes the farming profession.
It is the one in which the farmer directs his sheepdog to bring in the flock for shearing. He is shearing away merrily and dammit if he does not shear poor Shep in the end, because his sight is not as good as it used to be. You know the one.
Returning to the pig in the parlour campaign, I have to say that it is extremely reductive for all farmers and their lifestyles, in my view.
It might be slightly funny in a way but, especially when repeated umpteen times over on national TV, it is little less than offensive.
The message is that this idiot of a farmer is keeping his pig in the parlour, instead of outside in the piggery, and is so fond of it that it is even supplied with its own bed in the living room, and is spoiled rotten.
We meet the farmer’s intended on her first visit to the house, and she is so desperate for a husband that she pretends to love the porker, and even allows it to intervene forcibly in what would otherwise have been a courting session on the parlour couch.
Ye have all seen that incident ten times nightly over the past few months.
One wonders where the campaign will go next.
My bet is that the loony alleged farmer will eventually reject the lady, because she refuses to take the pig out for a walk through the fields every morning and afternoon. Something like that.
But the negative TV advert image of the farming profession is far more widespread than that, right across the media. Any farmer featuring in a campaign is likely to be aged, more than a little infirm, wearing two days stubble and dirty wellingtons, as he trudges over drenched landscapes to the sound of sad music.
This broken specimen will often appear fleetingly alongside actors who never milked a cow in their lives, singing the praises of, say, Irish ham and bacon and suchlike.
A few of these acting types look so pallid and pale that I would be prepared to swear they never enjoyed a good feed of bacon and cabbage in their lives. I don’t quite believe them when they claim that my food is their passion either. Again the pure truth.
I don’t have the foggiest notion about how to address this problem.
Something though should certainly be done, to inject a more positive image of modern Irish farmers and their lifestyles on to the national screens. I hope it happens sooner rather than later, because I am likely to throw something heavy through the TV screen the next time I am presented with images of that bloody pig in the parlour.
Incidentally, I have been exposed to the advert so often that it has been drummed into my head that the pig actually has a name. Her name is Sue, as a matter of fact.
It begs the thought that some farmer or farming organisation might consider suing the advertising agency that has turned back history and inflicted her on our screens.
