Jingles all the way Golden age of the commercial break
LOOKING through old copies of a local magazine I used to work for I hit one of those forceful reminders of the past as a foreign country.
The mag used to have an annual poll of its readers. This being preinternet times, they filled in their answers on the page, tore it out and sent it to us via a Freepost address. Just try telling that to da kidz nowadays, what?
In among all the questions about what readers considered the high and low points of the year in sport, movies, music etc. we used to ask them what their favourite and least favourite TV adverts were.
But then TV ads used to be a big part of the national culture. If you’re old enough, dear reader, then sooner or later, like me, you will have caught yourself humming or singing advertising jingles when doing the dishes or peeling the spuds.
Indeed, one of my childhood memories is of my own mother’s fondness for a 1950s radio advert from her native Ireland:
So the next time you visit your grocer
Tell him no other sausage will do to his other suggestions say no sir It’s Donnellys sausages for you
I remember these words better than most nursery rhymes. No, no, you’re fine. I don’t need therapy or anything.
Another of mother’s favourites: “You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with …”
With what? Answer below.* Oh well, at least she never danced the Shake ‘n Vac.
Nowadays, one imagines many BT readers will, like us, set the tellybox to record things not just so’s we can watch them at our own convenience, but also so’s we can fastforward through the ads.
TV ads make very little impression on most of us these days. There only exceptions are the big store and supermarket Christmas ads, which seem to attract as much breathless media fuss as a new Star Wars or James Bond flick.
But from January to November, would you be able to tell anyone what your current favourite/most hated TV ads were? ‘Cos I certainly couldn’t. But just as in former times you had to sit down and watch your favourite programmes when they were actually being transmitted, so it was that ads made their way into our brains because you had to sit through them. Sure you might nip out for a toilet break or to put the kettle on, but you’d catch them all sooner or later. So, yes, every year until the late 1990s we asked readers which were their most and least liked. In a similar spirit, BT’s letters pages are open to your commercial break memories!
*Something called Pepsodent, apparently.
Coo-ee! Mr Shifter!
All this jaundiced nostalgia for TV commercials was brought on by a note to myself for this edition of BT: It says here that the first PG Tips adverts with the chimps in was broadcast exactly 50 years ago, in November 1971.
Diligent research (cheers Wikipedia!) tells me that this cannot possibly be true, and that the ads for the well-known tea brand based on the old zoo entertainment of the chimps’ tea party first went out in the 1950s.
The ad that went out in 1971 was only the best-remembered of them. The one about Mr Shifter and his son trying to move a piano, and the lady of the house calling out “Cooee! Mister Shifter, light refreshment!”
(The latter voiced by the peerless Irene Handl. An aside, because I find her so interesting ... You think of Irene Handl as the archetype of the Cockney mother or grandmother. Yes, she grew up in London, but her father was Austrian, her mother German and theirs was a very comfortable middle-class existence, domestic servants and all. She doesn’t seem to have worked until she started acting her thirties. As a young woman she wrote an utterly astonishing novel called The Sioux about a fabulously wealthy family of psychopaths in the American Deep South which I urge you to read. OK, I’ll shut up now.)
If you need to see the PG Tips chimps again, the ad’s at https:// tinyurl.com/4zwad974 and you can indulge in thirty seconds’ worth of nostalgia.
And that is quite enough. Though I daresay if you craze the Cadbury’s Smash aliens, the Hamlet cigars photo-booth bloke and all the rest
of the commercials we used to talk about, YouTube will have ‘em.
The price of progress
On the subject of how much things have changed in just a few decades, let’s talk about male homosexuality.
Gay history is more complicated than we sometimes think. Persecution and prosecutions came in waves, most notoriously in living memory in the 1950s when gay men were seen as a threat to national security. Quite why a few toffs at Cambridge catching Communism meant that factory hands and office clerks also had to be persecuted has never become clear. Indeed, well over half the gay men I know are Conservatives.
There were other times when gay men, provided they were careful, could get away with it, especially if they were rich, or opted for careers where, within strictly defined boundaries, it was “tolerated” – showbiz or corners of the merchant navy, for instance.
By the 1960s and 70s, though,
plenty of very courageous people started campaigning for equality, and struggled against the backlash if HIV/AIDS paranoia and the preposterous “Section 28” of the 1988 Local Government Act which banned the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools.
Now, though, in most parts of English society, it’s no big deal. Every last one of us has gay friends and relatives. The acceptance that homosexuality is normal and won’t bring down civilization or even lead to lower house-prices is one of the more positive changes of recent decades.
Or it is in Western society at least; there are still plenty of countries in the world where gay men can be imprisoned or even executed.
This change, though, has had some interesting and unintended consequences.
A couple of weeks ago I had a long chat with an old friend and former workmate who I’ve not seen in ages. He’s a couple of years younger than me and in his day was one of Bristol’s foremost gay rights activists. He was getting nostalgic for his younger days, when Bristol in the 1990s and Noughties was the South West’s leading hub (if that’s the right word) of gay culture. There were gay clubs and club nights, gay pubs and Old Market was talked up as Bristol’s “gay quarter”.
“We had some great nights, some brilliant times, and you’d meet the most incredible characters,” he said.
Now, though, it’s mostly gone. And the reason is progress. Even in the 1990s there were plenty of places in Bristol, and every other UK city where gay men were not wanted. Nowadays, though, you can be openly gay pretty much anywhere in Bristol.
“I hate the word ‘acceptance,’ but that’s what it is,” he said, going on to explain that a young professional couple, say, might well prefer to hang around in fancy bars in Clifton rather than go into the middle of town to spent an evening in a club with a sticky carpet.
This is all great progress, but he says it’s come with a price-tag. A flourishing culture in which Bristol was one of the national pace-setters, some incredible parties and creativity and individuals is going the way of 1920s Harlem. Gay life got all grown up and has a mortgage and, increasingly, children.
All to the good, but I hope that in future years someone will write a properly comprehensive history of Bristol’s gay life from before 1967 and into the Noughties. It was, after all, one of the most important elements in making the old place what it is today.