TV companies have long been under pressure from campaigners for allowing companies like Domino’s, Pizza Hut and Cadburys to sponsor their most popular programs, buying the time before and after every adbreak to promote their products to an often young and impressionable audience.
Now however one of the most popular programs for under-15s is to have an critic-proof sponsor – the government’s Change 4 Life campaign. The government have decided to sponsor episodes of the satirical cartoon in an attempt to make children more aware of their message promoting healthy eating.
The cartoon features Homer Simpson, famous for his doughnut addiction and habit of chugging down can after can of beer. Officials apparently hope that families zoning out in front of the TV will see the Simpson family as a reflection of themselves and be pushed to take better care of their health.
They also approve of the way the animated family, despite their fairly dysfunctional ways, eat together round the kitchen table and support each other through their various tribulations (the episode when they get lost in the woods and nearly eaten by slavering wolves springs to mind there).
After the show was analysed, the health experts said that they thought skateboarding Simpson son Bart achieved the recommended 60 minutes of exercise a day, while his vegetarian sister Lisa probably consumed at least 5 fruits or vegetables a day.
The officials plan to use the slots to show a set of cartoon characters, created by the same company that made Wallace and Gromit, pretending to be the Simpson family. They will be sitting on the sofa eating pizza and junk food, which will ultimately disappear, to be replaced by fruit and vegetablesThe positive and negative aspects of the Simpson family have been acknowledged in the slogan for the £640,000 campaign, “Supporting the Simpsons: Sometimes.”