Sex, rivalry, secrets ... the world of confectionery is choc eat choc!
Take a group of wives and mothers. Lay on wine, and a plentiful supply of chocolate. Inevitably, the conversation will turn to sex.
Bill Norman, former managing director of Mars, used to sit at the back and listen during the marketing department’s focus group sessions, he told The Secret World
Of Chocolate (C4). ‘These ladies spoke about chocolate as if they were having an affair,’ he said. ‘Quite a few kept it in their underwear drawer.’
One hot topic was whether the lorry driver in Yorkie’s ad from the 1980s was attractive. Most of the women insisted he wasn’t their type, but sweat broke out on their upper lip when they said it.
The passions stirred among the men in suits were of a very different sort. They despised rival brands the way other blokes loathe a neighbour who is trying to seduce their wife. We saw the former head of Thorntons pick up a box of Cadbury Milk Tray, open it warily and close it as if the contents were lumps of alpaca poo. ‘I wouldn’t touch mainstream product with a bargepole,’ he shuddered.
His former chief chocolatier, Barry Colenso, was accused of sauntering around the Hotel Chocolat store in Nottingham one lunchtime in 2007, picking up display boxes from the shelves and squashing truffles with his thumb — an act of ‘vandalism’, fumed the outraged boss of Hotel Choc. It’s a choc-eat-choc world out there.
Mars relaunched their milk chocolate Galaxy bar in 1987 with the slogan, ‘Why have cotton when you can have silk?’ — a deliberate dig at the market leader, Cadbury Dairy Milk.
The implication was that Dairy Milk was coarser on the palate. It was regarded as the Queen Mum of choccy bars, Bill admitted — loved by all and beyond any criticism.
Far be it from him, he added, to suggest that Galaxy had the texture Princess Di liked best. This rivalry was so close to open warfare that when Cadbury launched the Wispa in 1983, they did it under a codename, like a top-secret World War II invasion plan.
Instead of ‘Operation Overlord’ or ‘Ultra’, this was ‘Project Basil’.
Rowntree’s got wind of Basil, though, and launched the aero Chunky in a pre-emptive strike. The clips of Nigel Havers chatting up Stacy Dorning on a train with a suitcase full of aeros were, just like the advert’s tagline, ‘Irresistibubble!’. Salman Rushdie claims he coined that word, as a young copywriter for the aero ad agency.
Sadly, he didn’t feature, and there weren’t nearly enough classic choc commercials. There’s a whole show to be done on the Flake advertisements alone.
But there was barely enough material to fill an hour on The Queen And Her Prime Ministers (C4), as talking heads tried to guess which politicians Her Majesty did and didn’t like.
Piers Brendon was on safe ground when he said that Winston Churchill could make the young monarch laugh.
‘He almost sort of fell in love with her,’ claimed the historian. ‘It was a kind of love affair.’
Those words ‘almost sort of’ are a giveaway — they mean, ‘No he didn’t,’ and ‘No it wasn’t’.
Will Self, the novelist turned bug-eyed euro Remainer, garbled a story about Margaret Thatcher suffering a dizzy spell at Buckingham Palace. He said she was PM at the time and that she fainted dead away — both facts wrong, but never mind.
He then remarked, with a spectacular absence of selfawareness: ‘as many commentators have remarked, while no intellectual, the Queen is not a slouch, she is a quick study.’
She’ll be flattered that you think so, Will.
SECOND CHOICE OF THE WEEKEND:
Though it praised the actor, John Travolta: Dancefloor Star, Comeback King (C5) admitted he turned down American Gigolo and refused to make An Officer And A Gentleman, both smashes for Richard Gere. Oops!