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Old adverts

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Over a sociable beer a mate fixed me in a gaze and said “The sweet you can eat between meals…” and I automatically responded “without ruining your appetite…”. I haven’t seen or thought about this for 20 years, but there it was. We had a good laugh coming up with old ad catchphrases and finishing them for each other (possibly you had to be there…). But now I couldn’t tell you a single one – partly because I avoid them at all costs, but have advertisers lost the ability to embed their wares in your brain in short order?

Some classics here…including Elvis Costello’s Dad….

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Comments

  1. A quick test to tell if you’re old fashioned enough to still watch commercial television in real time, and so can’t fast forward through the ads. Are you ready? Here it is –

    Does the following expression make your knuckles itch?

    ‘You make me laugh, Cortana!!!’

  3. “They peel them with their metal knives, boil them for twenty of their minutes, then they smash them all to bits”
    All because the lady loves Milk Tray
    Beans meanz Heinz
    There’s always a bear on a Fox’s Glacier Mint.
    Murray Mints, too good to hurry mints
    Tell them about the honey Mummy

    I was a child of the 70s

    Adverts are crap now

  5. My earliest memories of television are ads. Triangular honey from triangular bees was a cool cartoonn image I could relate to, but I couldn’t make sense of The Inch War” which Ryvita was helping us to win and the seatbelt on the bar of Imperial Leather applied by the guy bathing on the plane was Chinese to my teeny mind..

  6. For some reason I thought of this advert today in the supermarket. I thought it was from the early 00’s but it’s from 1990! Bloody hell. This kid is probably forty years old now.

  9. The obvious response is “Shake n Vac”.
    But that is too damn obvious, so I’m not going to say it (Oops – I just did)

    So I’m going for this one instead:
    “We hope its chips, its chips”

  12. Way down deep in the middle of the Congo,
    A hippo took an apricot, a guava and a mango.
    He stuck it with the others, and he danced a dainty tango.
    The rhino said, “I know, we’ll call it Um Bongo”
    Um Bongo, Um Bongo, They drink it in the Congo.
    The python picked the passion fruit, the marmoset the mandarin.
    The parrot painted packets, that the whole caboodle landed in.
    So when it comes to sun and fun and goodness in the jungle,
    They all prefer the sunny funny one they call Um Bongo!

    and who says TV Adverts stifle learning and an active mind – I still know that word for word some 30 (!!!) years later

  15. Both my elderly grandmothers were staying with us at one time in the late 70s. They spent all day in front of the telly – at deafening volume. On one occasion, this ad came on and they both did old lady singing to accompany it.

  16. My goodness, the advertisers seem to have lost their mojo; there’s nothing I’ve seen recently that seems like it’s made to make your mouth water, or to help you work, rest and play, nothing with any snap, crackle and pop.

  18. I met the Cresta Bear at Caters ( later Tesco) in Bromley in about 1973. He didn’t make many personal appearances, but obviously felt it worth his while to promote his ‘improved’ e.g. utterly disgusting extra frothy Cresta formula. He was a vision of cool with his nifty wraparound shades giving out badges & cans of blackcurrant and strawberry nectar, the consistency of which was similar to what comes out of the washing machine when the thing needs a service.
    Somewhere I may still have the autograph he signed for me (!)

  26. Adverts now no good? Well, stop fecking fast forwarding thru’ them on recorded stuff! They know, you know!
    Serious point: given the adverts pay for the telly, outside bee bland anyway, if everyone FFs then thety will stop funding,
    Won’t they?

  30. Two cigarette ads from more innocent days that caused considerable tittering :

    A man at sea will often hanker/for the flavour of an Anchor (sung to the tune of Drunken Sailor)

    and

    Take a tip, take a Bristol

  33. I still stick a finger in my mouth and go ‘pop’ when served with peas & I’m old enough to know better. The Hofmeister beer was fun when it started and thereafter became bloody irritating. I very much doubt that the age of the train campaign will be appearing in a history of British Railways. The one campaign I remember above all was the PG tea and the chimps. Once we were preparing for an office move, I offered to make the tea, returned with tray and a “cooee mr shifter”. I got some very strange looks.

    Coincidentally, though not tv ads, I went to see a newly opened exhibition about Mac Conner, a New York based illustrator known for his ad work and one stuck with me, extolling the virtues of nuclear reactors. Just extraordinary. It’s at the House of Illustration in London’s swinging Kings Cross.

  39. ‘Jammin, we’re jammin…/ Hope you like jammin too/We’re jammin… Momma’s little babies love shortning, shortning/ Momma’s little babies looooove…Cook, cook, cook, cookability/ That’s the beauty of gas’

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