Being older is normal

Sometimes one feels that a real change has taken place in people’s attitudes. We now have a black American president, we have a had female prime minister in the UK, celebrities no longer have to pretend to be heterosexual in order to be successful. Age has perhaps remained more stubborn an obstacle than any of these issues. Certainly in the workplace older people suffer rejection purely on the basis of age, and in wider cultural issues ‘youth’ is taken to be a virtue, while old age is looked down upon. We all know that this doesn’t apply in many other cultures, but certainly our UK culture loses interest in the older person very easily.

We have tried to make the point that older people actually are a powerful group in both the society and the economy. A couple of developments in our culture recently suggest that perhaps things are changing.

Firstly, and perhaps perversely, I was enormously cheered up to see that older people are figuring much more in crime statistics. I think it was Monty Python that had a sketch on dangerous hordes of Grannies beating up young people on the streets – I certainly wouldn’t hope this happens to any significant extent, but apparently it is now less of a comic idea. Partly this has come about because the passion for new laws under our government has produced all kinds of excessive reactions by the state to quite minor infringements, so people simply find they have criminal records for petty acts – I recently forgot to put my new car license on display in our car, and received a note from a parking warden which threatened a criminal prosecution and the seizing and crushing of our car. Seemed a bit over the top to me. But somehow the burgeoning criminality of the older person seems a move into mainstream society – it just makes older people seem normal. Without in any way approving of criminality, I do rather like the drift away from the grey-haired, harmless image of the over 50s.

On a more positive note, older people have traditionally been kept out of certain areas of advertising. They obviously crop up on a lot of financial advertising, because even banks know that that is where a lot of money is owned. They appear on cruise advertising, although now younger people have crept into that sector. One area where there was an absolute and irrational embargo was the advertising of top brands of car. I did once discuss this with the advertising director on BMW, and he quite simply said that while the average age for buyers of their more expensive models was into the 50s, they would always show the drivers as in their 20s or 30s – that was what people wanted to feel when they bought a BMW.

Miracle of miracles, the new BMW campaign quite clearly shows older drivers. Somehow, the image of the brand will no longer be sullied by seeing grey hair on the driver. The passenger no longer has to be a 25 year old blonde. We are officially normal.

The last bastion in advertising will be lager commercials. It is OK to sneak an old man into Guinness ads if he is a ‘character’, but mass lagers simply will not be shown in the hands of the 50+ sector. I haven’t seen the figures, but I have a feeling that draught lagers are getting ‘older’ in terms of who drinks them – the young are buying bottles and other kinds of drink. The day I see a perfectly normal 50+ person shown drinking a major brand of lager in a commercial I will feel that we really are losing the cultural prejudices against age.