The Honey's My Hero: Westcountry adverts, 1993
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- Опубликовано: 9 фев 2025
- The final set of Poppinsian adverts starts with a Ben Goldacre-provoking bit of shampoo business. Conditioner, actually. Cream Silk seems to only exist these days as a Unilever brand in the Philippines, but back in the day they were innovators, being the first shampoo manufacturers to bullshit about their product containing vitamins which the hair somehow absorbs despite the fact that hair does not work that way.
Next is a strikingly similar advert for shower gel which you may recognise from my Song of the South tape. This has the advantage of taking place in an exotic jungly sort of a location, rather than a brown bedroom, and featuring a naked lady.
Then there's a bit of Squawkie Talkie nonsense with stock footage of penguins and the overlapping voices of Enn Reitel to promote, well, Penguin. Slightly dizzyingly, it's an advert about itself that never gets around to actually being the advert it's talking about. Or something.
Then: hooray! Biscuit Pete and Dud are back! There's a lot more repetition in the adverts on this tape compared with, say, the one from 1989.
Next, it's Cherie Lunghi as the ball-breaking Kenco executive here to tell the stuffed shirts what's what in the world of instant coffee and blah blah blah. By the end of the decade, Lunghi got bored and wandered off to Casualty, and Dervla Kirwan had been hired to replace her. Presumably she oversaw the brand's sale to Kraft.
Then there's that poxy Munch Bunch advert again, followed by dog food! Butcher's Tripe! Featuring a red setter characteristically too thick to tell another dog's bowl from his own.
Next, the Mirror still want you to know about their Thunderbirds stickers. After that, a languid advert for Texas Homecare, which only has two years to live as a seperate entity. Sainsbury's bought it shortly afterwards and slowly absorbed it into Homebase, which it then sold on for more that they would have got for it in 1995.
Finally, a brightly coloured atrocity for Sugar Puffs. This being 1993, everyone and everything has to do a Baywatch parody by law, and this one inevitably replaces David Hasselhoff with a giant orange abomination. It is vaguely - not nightmarish, but like an unpleasant dream, particularly when the Honey Monster won't stop bobbing his gigantic furry head at the end.
A spoonful of Sugar Puffs makes the medicine go down, in a most delightful way...
Too bad I missed Mary Poppins when it aired on TV back then. But if I had watched it back then my reaction to songs like Spoonful of sugar and Supercallafragilistic would have been "I remember these nursery rhymes from when I was in the assessment unit on the tape recorder!". My very first exposure to those 2 songs was on an Early Learning Center cassette called Nellie the elephant and at the time I thought they were either nursery rhymes or songs specifically composed for that tape. The tape also ended with the 60s hit song Simon Says sung by some children. My late maternal granddad also used to sing chim chim cheree when I was little. I finally asked my parents to buy Mary Poppins in 1997 when I saw a promo for it on Snow White and the 7 dwarfs. At least I eventually got to hear the original versions of these catchy songs, better late than never I suppose. I think I got to see The Sound of Music when it aired on TV around Christmas 1995, my parents reluctantly left it on because I took an interest in it. I didn't get to see Chitty chitty bang bang until it aired on TV around Christmas 2002.
In case Applemask wondered whether I was still alive, the Bedknobs & Broomsticks ads are from 25th May 1992 (Late Spring Bank Holiday, as it has been unmemorably known for the last 44 years, but only Hitchens Minor goes on about Whitsun these days) and the Mary Poppins ads are from 12th April 1993 (Easter Monday).
I totally forgot about the inexplicable early-90s Thunderbirds revival
Oh, great adverts there including the Sugar Puffs one which is a spoof of Baywatch that was shown on British television at the time.
@Applemask I've only just remembered that I visited the TSW region (where I did not then live) the day before the Bedknobs & Broomsticks recording. One of the worst days of my life.
Love the Texas guitar twangs.
@col2006ie That makes it look like you consider Honey Monster to be your personal monarch.
@Applemask Nothing to apologise for. Nobody other than me needs to know that.
@RobinCarmody ...I'm sorry?
@RobinCarmody I was going to give you another day, and then start tying a noose.