Guardian today. I think they're really funny but...

WH Smith's Viz-style portrayal of Geordies as fat, bingo-playing couch potatoes has infuriated TV viewers in Tyneside.

TV watchdogs have received over 30 complaints about the ads, starring Nicholas Lyndhurst, in which the Smith family pays a Christmas visit to their northern cousins.

The Lyndhurst family makes the long trek from the south of England to Newcastle but arrive to find the house garishly decorated with brightly coloured fairy lights and a note on the door saying "Gone to Bingo".

Another ad shows the overweight Newcastle family slouched in front of the TV wearing black and white striped football strip and eating messily from their laps.

The humorous campaign features Only Fools and Horses star Lyndhurst playing every member of the Smith family, including a snobbish southern mother who looks on disapprovingly at her northern relatives.

The ITC said the majority of the complaints were about regional prejudices in the ads, while the remainder focused on the insensitive portrayal of obesity.

The watchdog is investigating the complaints.

No one at WH Smith was available for comment.

-- Anonymous, November 27, 2001

Answers

Anyone Put out? If you can't laugh at yourself etc...

-- Anonymous, November 27, 2001

Not seen them yet - but sometimes, as they say, the truth hurts.

-- Anonymous, November 27, 2001

I think they're great, if I was a southerner I'd be mortified at being potrayed like he does though

-- Anonymous, November 27, 2001

Maybe I'm a sensitive soul but there's a bit of me that really dislikes this stereotypical Northerner image. If I thought that everyone in the country recognised the image as a gross stereotype then maybe it would be OK but the point is many people think we are like that. I can just imagine the advertising execs sitting around and coming up with the advert.

There's another bit of me that doesn't really care though, there are worse predjudices around than a bit of regionalism and we Geordies can stick up for ourselves!

-- Anonymous, November 27, 2001

No such thing as bad publicity, apparently, but I for one will be kicking Smith's into touch. Anything that reinforces the impression ignorant bastards have of a region's inhabitants should be treated with the contempt it deserves, and I haven't even seen it yet. Sounds pretty gross to me though.

Laughing at yourself should be on your own terms, not the terms of a bunch of moneygrabbing ad exec scum. I'd have been a lot less anti if the thing had been countrywide regional, if you see what I mean. It should have been scousers in the Liverpool region, cockneys in the south, etc, etc. I might just have seen the funny side of that.

-- Anonymous, November 27, 2001

Only seen glimpses of it, but anything with the uni-talented Lyndhurst in it must be worth a miss. To be honest, I always thought Newcastle are bigger than any pissy advertising campaign by a local newsagents. If the makems or anyone else want to use it as ammunition, then they have even less of an imagination than you'd normally give them credit for. There's far more original insults and abuse floating about.

Mind, it would have shown some imagination if WHS had gone around the regions, as suggested above. But then again, they would never have got round to makem-land 'cos no-one outside the North East knows where it is!

-- Anonymous, November 27, 2001

Trouble is, if they'd made it regional, they'd have had the whole country down on their necks.

Obviously it was a calculated policy - 'Let's take the piss out the thick Geordies for Xmas, and sell tons of whsmith crap. Okay, we'll piss off a few thousand thickos, but what the hell, it'll make the rest of the peasants who're too ignorant to know any better, laugh all the way to the counters.'

-- Anonymous, November 27, 2001

What would happen if everyone in the NE stopped going to their shops in the 4 weeks up to Christmas?

-- Anonymous, November 27, 2001

Well, despite my views I might just carry a one-man-protest by not going into WHS in the interim.

-- Anonymous, November 27, 2001