Welcome to the 21st Century. If you’d have asked people 50 years ago what society would be like now I’m sure they’d talk of hover cars, robot housemaids and teleporting to Mars for a holiday. Of course, none of that has come to pass (unless you count novelty robot dogs as housemaids, in which case your house probably isn’t very clean and tidy). Others in the 50s would have predicted improvements of a more societal nature – equal rights for all, more tolerance. Some would say that in the UK we’re pretty much there when it comes to those things. Sure, sexism, homophobia and racism hangs on in some forms but generally people here are a tolerant bunch.

Or so I thought. It appears that the most complained-about TV ad so far this year is one that happens to feature two men kissing. Heinz have now announced that they’re withdrawing the ad.

The first gay kiss in a soap opera took place nearly 15 years ago on Brookside. (See below).  It was certainly controversial back then, but the gay kiss has since become a soap staple; even Hollyoaks, which aims itself squarely at a young audience quite regularly features a same-sex snog. If gay people can get married and have a smooch on a soap in modern Britain, why shouldn’t an advert featuring two men kissing be perfectly acceptable?

Aside from the usual “Down with this sort of thing” complaints from Daily Mail-reading types, the Guardian reports that some complaints argued that the ad “raised the difficult problem of parents having to discuss the issue of same-sex relationships with younger viewers”. Fair enough you might say, but Heinz Deli Mayo is banned from being advertised during children’s programmes thanks to its high sugar, fat and salt content. So, where might kids be watching the ad? Maybe during the breaks of soap operas like Hollyoaks, Coronation Street and Emmerdale, all of which have featured prominent same-sex relationships?

All of this, of course, is irrelevant anyway. The ad doesn’t actually feature two men kissing if you take the fraction of a second it takes to fully understand it. The whole point of the ad is that the product is so authentic in its ‘deli taste’ that the Mum of the featured family has transformed into a swarthy Noo Yoik Deli proprietor. So it’s actually a man kissing his wife, a wife who happens to be portrayed by a man.

So really, if these complaining parents are so unable to grasp the concept of a metaphor that they’re explaining same-sex relationships to kids after watching the ad (rather than explaining the real meaning of it), then we really should be worrying about the future of society. We should be teaching our children the art of reading media messages, not the art of banning things that upset a few people.

UPDATE: See here for more background.