Remember when racism, drug addiction and violence sold soda?
But first, an announcement!
On Wednesday 17th, my co-conspirator Tom Phillips and I will be speaking at NerdNite London on the topic of (you can tell we pulled this one out of the air) “Time, Space & Conspiracy Theories: An Examination of the Evidence”. Basically, we’re going to be telling stories from our book Conspiracy: A History of Bollocks Theories & How Not To Fall For Them, which has just been published in paperback.
It’s in London’s fashionable Bethnal Green district. Why not come along? (Oh go on, if no one shows up I’ll feel really silly.)
Anyway, that’s quite enough of that. Now for our feature presentation.
Some adverts I really hope they wouldn’t make now
A few weeks ago now, the excellent Eddie Robson was writing about the important space year 1988. As part of this project, for Doctor Who Magazine, he tracked down a shampoo advert featuring Lis Sladen, better known in the ‘70s and ‘00s alike for her portrayal of Sarah Jane Smith.
The advert, for Volene, was her “most prominent TV appearance” of the year; watched today, it is... unnerving, mainly for the bit where her husband (Kenneth MacDonald, Mike from Only Fools and Horses) visibly wonders if she’s had an affair with the milkman. “Why is he suddenly thinking about this now, years later?” Eddie asked. “Or does he do this regularly?”
This has got me thinking about quite how many adverts in the past were, viewed from a modern perspective, deeply, deeply wrong. I don’t just mean the ones from the days when even your grandparents were young which just plain lie, telling you that Guinness is Good For You (sure, it contains useful things like folate and fibre, but also calories and, y’know, alcohol), or that your dentist would advise you to smoke this particular brand of cigarettes (dentists love yellow teeth and bad breath!). I mean the ones, like Sarah Jane’s adventures with the milkman, from within living memory, that either have extremely questionable gender/sexual/racial politics or, in some cases, are just plain terrifying.
For example:
The Milk Tray Man. This is a story about a man, dressed entirely in black, breaking into young women’s bedrooms in the middle of the night, and claiming it’s just so that he could bring them some chocolate. And we’re supposed to think it’s romantic? And not, say, a reason to phone the police?
“Umbungo, umbungo, they drink it in the Congo.” No, they don’t; and the existence of Wikipedia articles with titles like “Atrocities in the Congo Free State”, detailing the “rubber terror” period in which the region was the personal possession of the King of Belgium, to me raises questions about whether this is a actually the best bit of European colonial history for a brand of blended and sugary fruit juices to associate itself with.
While we’re at it, that song was sung in a distinctly racially insensitive accent.
Lilt’s “lobsters on south beach!” This advert, for the pineapple and grapefruit beverage with the totally tropical taste, places the jokes on white people, so that’s a bit of an improvement, I guess. But it does still portray entire countries with messed up colonial histories as picturesque places mainly concerned with providing children’s drinks to their former imperial masters, and I’m not sure that’s really on, is it?
Lilt is being scrapped of course – the drink will still be available, but as a flavour of Fanta. While we’re on the topic of fruit-based pop, though, let’s consider this series of increasingly nightmarish ads in which sinister people painted or dressed in bright orange go about menacing innocent members of the public. Is “buy our drink and a half-naked man the colour of Donald Trump will slap you in the face” really a selling point?
“Too many and you might turn Bertie.” “Eat our product, and undergo a terrifying physical transformation!” Screw it, let’s scar children for life, why not.
By almost exactly the same token, here’s a quote from the page on the “The Ad Mascot Wiki” – delighted that exists, by the way – covering the Sugar Puffs’ Honey Monster:
In the late 80s/early 90s, the adverts portrayed a child or group of children attempting to gain access to a packet of Sugar Puffs with someone or something preventing them. They’d then cry, “I want my HONEY!” with the last word being said in the monster’s voice, turning into Honey Monsters with their clothes ripping back (à la The Incredible Hulk). They’d get the cereal with chaos ensuing.
Why was body horror seen as such a profitable vein for advertisers in the 1980s? I surely can’t have been the only child literally terrified of eating any of these products because I didn’t want to wake up and find I’d turned into a monster?
R. White’s: “I’m a secret lemonade drinker.” Actually quite effective – dates from years before I was born, and yet I still remember not only the advert, but the brand, and still have broadly positive associations with it too – but I can’t take it seriously because there was a kid at my school who used to sing, “I’m a secret methodone user” so it will forever be associated in my mind with opioid use.
“My name? Thank you, it’s J. R. Hartley” – less effective, in that I had to think quite hard to remember what this was an advert for (the Yellow Pages; in the olden days before the internet, we had to look things like phone numbers up in a book, and the fact we don’t do that any more is probably why I don’t remember it). But I’m going to be honest, having published two books and thus having ruined book shops for myself forever (“Oh, they’ve got Marie’s book, I notice. But they haven’t got MY book. Brilliant!”), this one hits differently now.
Everything McDonalds has done since 1963. A clown is not a selling point, guys. Children do not like clowns. Children are terrified of clowns. Also, if Ronald McDonald’s job is to stop the Hamburglar, then why is the Hamburglar in all the adverts too? If he’s such a business risk then why does McDonalds continue to employ him? This just doesn’t add up at all.
Actually, on googling, I leaned two important things. One is that Ronald McDonald is like James Bond or, yes, Doctor Who, a role that is passed from actor to actor, and that there have been eight different Ronald McDonalds so far, running from Willard Scott (1963-5) to the incumbent, Brad Lennon (2014-present). The other is that – in the UK at least – the world’s most famous clown is missing in action. Great piece by my former colleague Amelia Tait here.
The Nescafe Gold Blend Couple. Just have sex! Don’t listen to Kate Forbes! You’re clearly both single, you’re allowed to just have some sex! Hey, here’s a thought? Do you think maybe the reason you’re failing to have any sex is because you keep spending all your time together drinking instant coffee? Have a proper drink, you’re British, FFS, you can't possibly expect to show vulnerability while sober.
(Bonus information: they novelised these adverts! Love Over Gold by Susannah James is “the untold story of TV’s Greatest Romance”, which certainly puts the entire rest of TV culture in its place. “Felt the ending left a bit to be desired,” reads one review.)
“It’s not for girls.” The Yorkie campaign, which ran from 2002, showed a bunch of young women in hard hats, false moustaches and so on, giving themselves away by failing to open jars or being frightened of spiders. Brilliant. Other slogans used included “King size, not queen size,” “Not available in pink” and “Don’t feed the birds”.
The thing that really shocked me about this wasn’t just the sexism – I remember post-ironic ‘90s lad culture well enough – but the fact the tagline was only dropped in 2012, when it was replaced by the (I guess this is a bit better?) “Man fuel for man stuff”.
That was only five minutes ago – can you really imagine a company pulling this sort of shit and then claiming they’re actually being ironic now?
Oh, FFS.
Self-promotion corner
The article above is an expanded extract from the archive of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything, a weekly newsletter which goes out every Wednesday at 4pm. In this week’s edition, I wrote about my excitement about the local elections (no, really), considered the largest empires the world has ever known, and examined a map of an extremely populated region.
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