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The Queen thought that 1992 was an Annus Horribilis, probably because on top of Royal events in that year, it was the final year of Thames, TVS, TSW, and TV-am, but on the other hand, I thought that the same year was an Annus Mirebilus - my nephews were born and I was doing so well at school - Year 9 was the best one. And I suppose one thing that I do remember from 1992 when making use of my parent's licence fee were the ad breaks - I was probably trying to escape from hours of sport and Eldorado, and bumped into them quite a bit during the summer while seeing Euro 92 and the Olympics from that year.
These are the ten main adverts that I remember from 1992 - most of them are on YouTube in order to jog one's memory:
1) TETLEY TEA BAGS (Theme Park / Fun-Fun-Fun) - Not too long after the revolutionary round teabags were introduced, the advert had reminded me of my day trip to Alton Towers on the penultimate day of the school term prior to breaking up in July. The animated Tetley Tea Folk characters explore a theme park and have ride on rollercoasters, dodgem-alike tea cups and so on to the tune of the Beach Boys' Fun-Fun-Fun. Was on the TV, mostly during Coronation Street from the summer until the end of the year - around six months. Brian Glover was still on duty to do Gaffer's voice.
2) ANDREX (Kid on a toilet) - The classic kid on a toilet - the famous Labrador steals the half a mile long distance of toilet paper, spinning around on the holder - the paper gets thinner and thinner until only the carboard tube is left on the holder. Cue young kid going "Mum!" "MUM!" when he realises he's in trouble when he finishes what he was doing.
3) PERSIL MICRO (Jackie Wilson song) - Great tuneful advert which was Jackie Wilson's Reet Petite (the 1950s song which became the 1986 Christmas number one) with Persil Micro sung to the lyrics. I suppose that as I was about to be an uncle around that time, I had the feelgood factor of singing it when it came on the TV.
4) FORD ESCORT - Ford had a brand new body design for its Escort models and the advert blew me away at the time. It looked so modern and updated back then - the then new K Reg cars looked a treat! Around the time when they had the "everything we do is driven by you" slogan. Ford used the design for its Escort until 1995 at least.
5) WEETABIX (Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd) - The ITC didn't permit actors appearing in adverts adjacent to the shows that they appeared in back then, but the rule didn't extend to cartoon characters - Bugs Bunny was made an exception when he appeared in the Weetabix advert which Central at least had scheduled during the premiere of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in which Bugs also appeared in. The characters were reminiscent of their cartoons while singing a version of Run, Rabbit Run. I think that it had been a couple of years after they had to ditch the "Skinheads" series of adverts due to political correctness and the comparisons with far-right groups and that Weetabix had struggled to find a replacement advertising campaign such as the Robin Hood one. The advert was also the first one to be shown on GMTV on New Year's Day in 1993.
6) PRETTY POLLY LEGACY (clock "hands") - A woman who was wearing a black wide-brimmed hat sat down on the surface of a clock face while wearing the aforementioned tights on her legs, and made her legs look as if they were the hands of the clock, going from one hour to another until the finally met each other at the 12 o'clock point at the top, while the tune of All Day and All of the Night (cf The Kinks) played quietly in the background. Very impressive and memorable for a number of reasons. A guest came on Des O'Connor Tonight and made reference to the advert, saying that he would like to see her at a quarter to three!
7) PUSH POPS - Seen during Children's ITV ad breaks. A lollipop-alike sweet that looked like a lipstick where one would need to push it from the bottom in order to lick it. The adverts had a girl on a swing saying: "don't push me - push your Push Pop!" One assumes that they were marketed for the female market, but they did come in a number of flavours.
8) LUCKY CHARMS - Also seen during Children's ITV ad breaks - a cereal that was not made by either Kellogg's, Nestle or Nabisco, and had coloured pieces of various things which made it to the cereal bowl. The adverts were cartoons with stereotypical leprechauns in them. They seemed to disappear after 1992, but a Tesco store close to where I live still sells them in the "World Foods" section and the price of them are a bit too expensive compared to Kellogg's cereals!
9) VESPRE SILHOUETTES PLUS - Claire Rayner's finest hour (or should I say 30 seconds). I don't think that we would have had the Vanessa, Trisha, or Oprah Winfrey breed of daytime talk show if it wasn't for this advert. Cue a lot of women in the audience going on about how it makes good feminine body tarpaulin at least once a month - of course due to product placement rules this wouldn't have happened in a real talk show. Around a decade later Esther Rantzen (during her BBC 2 "Esther" era) almost did the same trick by using a mock talk show audience in order to flog the "have you had an accident in the last three years?" ambulance chaser deals. Cue the blue liquid proving how waterproof the towel was when worn. Just like Paul McCartney was 15 years previously, they were with wings.
10) KELLOGG'S NUT FEAST - Inside a door which says "Kellogg's Nut Feast - Casting Inc" on the glass, an over-parodied American office setting consisting of a businessman going "nuts, nuts" and his dizzy Sandra Dickenson-alike assistant. After we see what a bowl of the cereal looks like, we get to see the female assistant on the telephone and eating a bowl of the cereal at the same time, looking as if she has taken advantage of Pretty Polly Legacy herself.
An honourable mention should go to the late Dudley Moore who after over a year being advertising tool on behalf of Tesco, and had seemed to have found everything for the supermarket except chickens. The Kraft Cheese Slices advert with a boy called Malcolm getting to terms with a sandwich which has the cheese slices in them, and the tune of Workers' Playtime, while the same company's Free Choice salad dressing vouched that the condiment was either 97% or 99% fat free depending on which version of the advert was been shown, and it had the tune to You're Sixteen in the advert as well. While Jackie Wilson's song was loaned to Persil Micro, the man himself could be heard in the Immac adverts, targeting the Pretty Polly Legacy audience with his song "I Get the Sweetest Feeling" while a woman is so proud of how her legs look that she trims off her black dress before going out for the evening.
Dolland and Aitchison (as a bifocaled Yours Truly I was a customer of them at the time) had a great, albeit lowkey advertising campaign with an unidentified cover version of Johnny Nash's I Can See Clearly Now - a Nescafe advert from around that time could also be heard with the more traditional version on there. Nash also lent his dulcet tones to the Citroen ZX adverts complete with cartoon cupid and arrow in the advert, although the original by Sam Cooke is usually played on the Gold radio stations. Speaking of opticians, I can see (so to speak) from YT that Michael Parkinson (just before he did Ghost Watch in the same year) was also the face (and eyes) for a branch of opticians based in the HTV region. PG Tips relaunched their advertising campaign, still with Molly Badham's chimps in the "Meet the Tips" series - in particular, the Blind Date parody Cupid's Cup. And Danny Baker started to harass housewives on behalf of Daz.
Whilst there was to be huge changes on ITV in 1992, the ad breaks I think were ones which would be noticed many years later. Television advertising was in strong shape in that year with campaigns well remembered many years later, but going back to 1992, are there any adverts you remember in addition to the ones that I have mentioned above? Was it really 27 years ago from a 2019 perspective?
These are the ten main adverts that I remember from 1992 - most of them are on YouTube in order to jog one's memory:
1) TETLEY TEA BAGS (Theme Park / Fun-Fun-Fun) - Not too long after the revolutionary round teabags were introduced, the advert had reminded me of my day trip to Alton Towers on the penultimate day of the school term prior to breaking up in July. The animated Tetley Tea Folk characters explore a theme park and have ride on rollercoasters, dodgem-alike tea cups and so on to the tune of the Beach Boys' Fun-Fun-Fun. Was on the TV, mostly during Coronation Street from the summer until the end of the year - around six months. Brian Glover was still on duty to do Gaffer's voice.
2) ANDREX (Kid on a toilet) - The classic kid on a toilet - the famous Labrador steals the half a mile long distance of toilet paper, spinning around on the holder - the paper gets thinner and thinner until only the carboard tube is left on the holder. Cue young kid going "Mum!" "MUM!" when he realises he's in trouble when he finishes what he was doing.
3) PERSIL MICRO (Jackie Wilson song) - Great tuneful advert which was Jackie Wilson's Reet Petite (the 1950s song which became the 1986 Christmas number one) with Persil Micro sung to the lyrics. I suppose that as I was about to be an uncle around that time, I had the feelgood factor of singing it when it came on the TV.
4) FORD ESCORT - Ford had a brand new body design for its Escort models and the advert blew me away at the time. It looked so modern and updated back then - the then new K Reg cars looked a treat! Around the time when they had the "everything we do is driven by you" slogan. Ford used the design for its Escort until 1995 at least.
5) WEETABIX (Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd) - The ITC didn't permit actors appearing in adverts adjacent to the shows that they appeared in back then, but the rule didn't extend to cartoon characters - Bugs Bunny was made an exception when he appeared in the Weetabix advert which Central at least had scheduled during the premiere of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in which Bugs also appeared in. The characters were reminiscent of their cartoons while singing a version of Run, Rabbit Run. I think that it had been a couple of years after they had to ditch the "Skinheads" series of adverts due to political correctness and the comparisons with far-right groups and that Weetabix had struggled to find a replacement advertising campaign such as the Robin Hood one. The advert was also the first one to be shown on GMTV on New Year's Day in 1993.
6) PRETTY POLLY LEGACY (clock "hands") - A woman who was wearing a black wide-brimmed hat sat down on the surface of a clock face while wearing the aforementioned tights on her legs, and made her legs look as if they were the hands of the clock, going from one hour to another until the finally met each other at the 12 o'clock point at the top, while the tune of All Day and All of the Night (cf The Kinks) played quietly in the background. Very impressive and memorable for a number of reasons. A guest came on Des O'Connor Tonight and made reference to the advert, saying that he would like to see her at a quarter to three!
7) PUSH POPS - Seen during Children's ITV ad breaks. A lollipop-alike sweet that looked like a lipstick where one would need to push it from the bottom in order to lick it. The adverts had a girl on a swing saying: "don't push me - push your Push Pop!" One assumes that they were marketed for the female market, but they did come in a number of flavours.
8) LUCKY CHARMS - Also seen during Children's ITV ad breaks - a cereal that was not made by either Kellogg's, Nestle or Nabisco, and had coloured pieces of various things which made it to the cereal bowl. The adverts were cartoons with stereotypical leprechauns in them. They seemed to disappear after 1992, but a Tesco store close to where I live still sells them in the "World Foods" section and the price of them are a bit too expensive compared to Kellogg's cereals!
9) VESPRE SILHOUETTES PLUS - Claire Rayner's finest hour (or should I say 30 seconds). I don't think that we would have had the Vanessa, Trisha, or Oprah Winfrey breed of daytime talk show if it wasn't for this advert. Cue a lot of women in the audience going on about how it makes good feminine body tarpaulin at least once a month - of course due to product placement rules this wouldn't have happened in a real talk show. Around a decade later Esther Rantzen (during her BBC 2 "Esther" era) almost did the same trick by using a mock talk show audience in order to flog the "have you had an accident in the last three years?" ambulance chaser deals. Cue the blue liquid proving how waterproof the towel was when worn. Just like Paul McCartney was 15 years previously, they were with wings.
10) KELLOGG'S NUT FEAST - Inside a door which says "Kellogg's Nut Feast - Casting Inc" on the glass, an over-parodied American office setting consisting of a businessman going "nuts, nuts" and his dizzy Sandra Dickenson-alike assistant. After we see what a bowl of the cereal looks like, we get to see the female assistant on the telephone and eating a bowl of the cereal at the same time, looking as if she has taken advantage of Pretty Polly Legacy herself.
An honourable mention should go to the late Dudley Moore who after over a year being advertising tool on behalf of Tesco, and had seemed to have found everything for the supermarket except chickens. The Kraft Cheese Slices advert with a boy called Malcolm getting to terms with a sandwich which has the cheese slices in them, and the tune of Workers' Playtime, while the same company's Free Choice salad dressing vouched that the condiment was either 97% or 99% fat free depending on which version of the advert was been shown, and it had the tune to You're Sixteen in the advert as well. While Jackie Wilson's song was loaned to Persil Micro, the man himself could be heard in the Immac adverts, targeting the Pretty Polly Legacy audience with his song "I Get the Sweetest Feeling" while a woman is so proud of how her legs look that she trims off her black dress before going out for the evening.
Dolland and Aitchison (as a bifocaled Yours Truly I was a customer of them at the time) had a great, albeit lowkey advertising campaign with an unidentified cover version of Johnny Nash's I Can See Clearly Now - a Nescafe advert from around that time could also be heard with the more traditional version on there. Nash also lent his dulcet tones to the Citroen ZX adverts complete with cartoon cupid and arrow in the advert, although the original by Sam Cooke is usually played on the Gold radio stations. Speaking of opticians, I can see (so to speak) from YT that Michael Parkinson (just before he did Ghost Watch in the same year) was also the face (and eyes) for a branch of opticians based in the HTV region. PG Tips relaunched their advertising campaign, still with Molly Badham's chimps in the "Meet the Tips" series - in particular, the Blind Date parody Cupid's Cup. And Danny Baker started to harass housewives on behalf of Daz.
Whilst there was to be huge changes on ITV in 1992, the ad breaks I think were ones which would be noticed many years later. Television advertising was in strong shape in that year with campaigns well remembered many years later, but going back to 1992, are there any adverts you remember in addition to the ones that I have mentioned above? Was it really 27 years ago from a 2019 perspective?
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