The dad, shot lighting both would spring to mind.

I believe I have seen quite a few baby ads on Tv with different coloured mums to babys.

I will sscope youtube for examples, dont hold your breath.

Some people have suggested the family pictured did not have mass appeal and that the advert was not clear because they didn't share the same skin colour.

Why would a mixed colour family not be appealing? Are you really not going to buy a product because the mum is a different colour to the child?Are you going to look at the picture and say 'this product is not for me, I am the same colour as my baby'??

I thought the whole thing totally uncomfortable. My brother and I are both of mediteranean appearance. Mixed race. Very pale skinned mother. It is just part of the fabric of society now. It was so peculiar to have it questioned like that. Go back 30 years and I might have understood it but not today.

What is the problem here? What book of genetics are you getting your information from that the above would be impossible? My wife's got red hair though neither of her parents do. Genes are a bit more complicated than you seem to think they are.


Err, what 'can't be right'?

I thought they originally chose the baby because it was the best behaved. Surely when you're working with children it's better to get those right first then cast the adults to fit in with the kids?

That said, I don't see the problem with having a mother and baby of different colouring and I thought Lord Sugar was a bit of a twit to pick them up on it. Apart from genetics it could be a stepfamily or an adoptive family or fostering or anything.

I don't think the adults were cast to fit the kids. You just get the kids' parent/s.

One irony though - the surname of the girl who chose the baby is 'Brownless'

I found it to be an incredible Da Fuq?! Moment. The producers decided to give it a lot of focus like it's note-worthy but not really? I wouldn't have noticed the "Bizarre" decision to have a mixed race family until they pointed it out... not once, not twice but thrice!

Completely staggering, actually, yes.

It's commonplace of course to see mixed-race families in real life, or on television programmes, and thusly seems fatuous to even acknowledge the 'normality' of it. I can see though how it could seem a little 'odd', in terms of perception, to see an unequivocally 'white' and 'black' permutation of singular parent and baby, in isolation on such a small-scale medium as on a piece of packaging - not for one second that there's anything remotely 'irregular' in that scenario; just that it does 'stand out' visually and thus, potentially, detracts from the actual advertising focus.

I can only agree though that it was needlessly (and bizarrely) focused upon and harped on about in the programme.

Yeah but there's no way he wouldn't atleast have a tan, even the dad had fairly tanned skin.

There is no problem, Im simply asking a question because I don't happen to know about all of this, sorry

Well even the author of that review has now changed it to 'naïveté' after I questioned it.

Babies don't really tan. Their skin is sensitive and burns easily, so parents keep them out the sun. You can get genes off your parents that they never 'expressed' themselves.

I guess the point is that although it's POSSIBLE, it isn't exactly COMMON. Now I agree that promoting good, positive relationships is important, but the whole point is to sell as many as possible, not to give a patronising lesson in racial harmony?

Benetton seemed to do okay by having advertising of exactly that type. Shame that the kids are probably too young to know that and remind Surallen of it.


Red hair's not really comparable to skin tone, though, as the allele for red hair is recessive, whereas there are far more genes controlling skin colour.

What's all this nonsense about black women not having pale skinned, even blonde haired babies - even when the baby is mixed-race?

Also, lots of babies of any race start off all pale and then get darker as they get older.

My baby came out looking like a Tiny Tears doll, I guess I'm lucky none of you were around on the maternity ward as you might have taken babe off me for fear that I'd done a baby swap or something.

People who go on about 'PC gone mad' generally complain about someone being chosen for a job for some kind of 'box-ticking' exercise, to make some point, rather than because they're the best for the job. But when someone from some minority IS chosen cos they're best for the job - supposedly what the 'anti-PC' lot want - they still complain!

The baby wasn't chosen as some patronising racial harmony lesson, but because it was best-behaved, was the right age, looked good. As for 'it's not exactly common', for a start you're probably underestimating how many mixed race families there are out there, but you're also ignoring that models have never presented a 'normal' look. The average female adult model is close to six foot tall. And the same 'anti-PC' moaners throw up a stink if anyone suggests that models don't represent reality!

Agreed with the OP. Thought it was quite old fashioned and a bit ignorant.

The problem is that mixed-race suggest at least a shade of colour on the baby. Yes, my brother had curly blonde hair when he was little, but he was not pale (perhaps when born, but this was an 8-months old baby)

Personally, I can understand that people feel that too much of a problem has been made of this, but to actually say that the problem didn´t occur to them

Must confess I thought it was total bollocks !

I could not give a crap what colour they were, they were just real people !

What pissed me off was the airtime given to this scrutiny !

It was very "BigBrother", almost as if somebody was trying to make a point, on behalf of the NF, it was very "UN-PC "for the Beeb.

AND when Alan Sugar waded in with "why choose ......." I could not believe it !

Did somebody line up Sir Alan for a fall ?

my mums black and im whiter than most white people ha!

Frankly it irritated me when everyone laughed at the baby being light skinned and the mother being black, and I found Lord Sugar's comments ridiculous.

All my nieces and nephews are mixed race as are all my cousins, several of them are quite pale. Two are naturally pale, blond and blue eyed like their mother, as opposed to being darker like their dad, my uncle. With the vast majority of my numerous nieces, nephews and cousins you wouldn't know they were mixed race looking at them. So either my family have very odd recessive genes on my side (Asian) or it's not as uncommon as people like to make out for a darker parent to have a paler baby.

I thought that was the reason too.
On the other hand, the baby could have been adopted and would that have been a reason not to use the unusual racial mixture?
Perhaps it was making the whole thing too complicated. In the end, the ethnic origins would have been more of a talking point than the product. I think.
We will never know now will we .

Is that what I suggested?

So she had two good reasons.

I warmed to Zara quite a bit this task. I thought she kept her dignity pretty well in the face of being mocked and stuck to her guns when she knew she was right. Seemed to do very well in the parts of the task she was given and encouraged Haya to push for the third pitch (which ultimately won them the task).