Tombola Bingo advert gets banned

18th March 2010 8:53 AM

It seems to be more of an issue of political correctness than the suggested presenting of a negative racial stereotype as the latest Tombola Bingo advert gets banned by ASA. This bingo sites latest advert prompted just two complaints but this is all it took for ASA to consider whether the complaints about the Tombola Bingo advert were justified or not.

Obviously it would not be appropriate to get into a debate as to whether the decision to ban the Tombola Bingo advert was the right thing to do. However, this bingo sites advert, which featured a coloured man playing a ukulele, repeating everything that the white man next to him was saying, was deemed to imply that black people are less intelligent than white people.

This is not the first time that Tombola Bingo has had to pull a TV advert off air. One of this bingo sites previous adverts was also banned after it was deemed to appealed to the younger generation. This is also not the first time that political correctness has interfered with the bingo at a whole either. In December last year a local council authority in Suffolk banned the use of the traditional bingo calls, two fat ladies and legs eleven as these were deemed as offensive. Thankfully we have had no news of any other local councils taking the same action and bingo sites who use these traditional terms have not reported any complaints so far, but many bingo sites have adopted their own terms to their bingo calls anyway.

Tombola Bingo has made a big effort to portray a view of equality amongst people and you only have to look at what they feature for their Emmerdale sponsorship. It features ordinary people from every day walks of life and one must wonder if this bingo sites recent ban would have happened if the roles of the white man and black man had been reversed.

Written by Hannah Jones

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