The Plebs Cannot Be Trusted

An average working class house yesterday

Alcohol brands pervade football broadcasts, apparently, according to a new study.  Booze companies, sponsor tournaments, put signs up by the pitch, even get the commentators to mention their brands.  This increases acceptability of alcohol and creates costly problems as people buy lager and get drunk on it.  Children will even be tempted to try it.  The horror.  So researchers have revealed at the British Science Festival, anyway.

Notwithstanding the picture on the website with children messing with tomato ketchup - surely that would make such a high-sugar, high-salt food acceptable to kiddy palates- you only have to look at the list of sponsors to doubt their motives.  General Electric - a major polluter and designer of the infamous reactors involves in the Fukashima Disaster; AzkoNobel, just your average toxic chemical manufacturer; and Saudi Aramco, a state-owned oil company. Nothing untoward, of course, being made normal and acceptable here.

The attack on Beer Sponsorship by these researchers is, as always, the result of middle class snobbery.  The working man will see Man United or Chelsea in an FA Cup game on TV, and will go out and buy cases of the promoted product (in this case Budweiser), proceed to get hammered and beat up his wife and kids.  This is because he is stupid, and does not know any better.   Nice middle class people do not drink lager.  They have a single glass of wine with their dinner and of course never have any problems with alcohol whatsoever.  There is always the assumption that the uneducated will see a single beer advert, and become alcoholics as a result.

(Advertisers see it much the same way.  Macrolager sponsors Football, the most watched sport in the country.  More middle class sports are given cash by financial companies offering esoteric services to the rich.  Had you heard of Investec before the 2013 Ashes series? I hadn't.)

The Portman Group were actually quoted in the BBC article as saying "National trends around alcohol consumption are encouraging. Government figures show that fewer and fewer children are even trying alcohol and the number of adults that drink to harmful levels is also falling."  The evidence suggests this is, in fact, true.  But the paper's authors insist "We believe a similar restriction to that imposed on tobacco products may be justified."

I will be blunt here.  Even taking away the whole personal responsibility angle, there is a difference between alcohol and tobacco.  Tobacco, when used typically, shortens life and impacts health.  Alcohol, when used typically, does not.   So, why treat them the same?  Simply because the upper and middle classes do not like the workers enjoying themselves when they could be being more productive - ie. serving the economic interests of their betters.  All that time and money spent in the pub or on Carling slabs could be spent working or saving.

I can't see Prohibition coming (history shows it doesn't really work), but I can see an awful lot of people's pleasures being curtailed

Glossy Magazine and Advert in the Tube

Apparently, there have been mutterings at the latest meeting of the Beer Writer's Guild.   Why is there no national, newsagent-distributed magazine about beer, they have been asking?  Well, I can see quite a few reasons.  But I think I can explain the main one here.

Any widely available magazine lives and dies on its advertising sales.  While the beer geek would be interested in long articles about say, the history of Meux's Brewery or an interview with the bloke behind Kernel, it would not help Shepherd Neame shift more bottles of Spitfire.  Mags tailor their content to attract advertisers, which is why a beer periodical would do tasting notes and puff pieces on breweries.  And would the blogging, tweeting, IPA sipping beer hipster crowd buy that for long?  Would anybody? 

Case in point : there's a motor sport mag called, well, MotorSport and they do a large section on road car reviews despite the majority of it's readers being somewhat uninterested in the handling characteristics of the latest Audi A8.  The advertisers love it, apparently, as they can tie it in with their product much better than they could an article about how many cars Vittorio Brambilla wrecked in the mid-70s.

There is actually a Whisky Magazine on sale, but the advertising model holds here too.  99% of whiskies are produced by big companies or their subsiduaries.  It's not really a crowded marketplace, and there is plenty of ad-spend to go round.  Anyway, whisky is positioned as a "luxury" rather than everyday product, so the stuff in Whisky Mag tends to be aspirational rather than informative. Advertisers love "aspirational".

The rumour at the moment is that Future Publishing will be doing a beer mag soon.  Well, I've not bought any of their esteemed publications since they cancelled Cult TV 15 years ago.  But I did buy their computer mags for nearly a decade.  Apparently, some poor souls even believed their numerical ratings were based on the actual quality of the product...