Irn-Bru bows to police pressure on 'cuckoo' ad

IRN-BRU has had to tone down its latest advert to avoid having it banned after claims by senior police officers that it encourages violence.

AG Barr, which makes the energy drink Irn-Bru 32, unveiled a redubbed version of the offending commercial yesterday. The original featured a man dressed in a blue cuckoo costume impersonating a Glasgow hardman.

Bursting into a library, "Derek the Cuckoo" intimidated a student before threatening an elderly attendant.

The new version retains the same footage, but the Glasgow accent has been replaced with a plummy English one and uses lines such as "It does wonders for one's cranium" and "awfully sorry, didn't mean to cause offence" in place of the threats.

Officers at Strathclyde Police's Violence Reduction Unit had complained that the original advert glamorised violence and portrayed Glasgow as full of gangsters.

Some 19 complaints were made to the Advertising Standards Authority concerning the advert.

Jonathan Kemp, the commercial director for Irn-Bru, said:

"The ad will be banned in the next few days and so we decided to make a slightly different one."