When did the advertising industry get so obsessed with swearing and innuendo?

When did the advertising industry decide that swearing sells? Look around you, and you’ll start to see rude, unfunny double entendres everywhere. The latest company to jump on the bandwagon is Toyota — currently flogging cars with the catchphrase, ‘Go Fun Yourself’. Try not to split your sides laughing.

I blame French Connection. In 1991, the once respectable clothes shop started referring to itself as fcuk. The company began knocking out T-shirts, saying nasty things like ‘Too busy to fcuk’ and ‘fcuk fashion’. The campaign was such a hit that, God help us, Conservative Future — formerly the Young Conservatives — called itself ‘cfuk’ for a while, until French Connection threatened legal action.

I’m all for double entendre. When handled brilliantly — fnaar! fnaar! — by Frankie Howerd or Viz’s ‘Finbarr Saunders and his Double Entendres’, it can be startlingly funny and original. Oh, for a swearing adman to match up to the double entendres of Kenneth Williams in Carry On Doctor:

Dr [Kenneth Williams]: ‘You may not realise it, but I was once a weak man.’

Matron [Hattie Jacques]: ‘Oh, don’t worry. Once a week’s enough for any man.’

The fcuk campaign was merely prurient and unfunny, because the structure of the joke was so banal. Turn two letters around and it sounds like a rude word; hardly comic genius. ‘Fcuk fashion’ isn’t much of a leap from ‘fuck fashion’ — and that isn’t an original, funny thing to say, either.

Still, the idea was so successful that desperate admen have copied it ever since. The principle remains unchanged — use a lame double entendre to barely conceal something rude, and the punters will rush to buy your stuff.

The upmarket Malmaison hotel chain has gone for the idea in spades. Staying in its Dundee outpost recently, I took advantage of the ‘Malmaison fig and olive body cleanser’.