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There is at least one particular advert which was mostly on ITV region screens between around 1986 and 1988 which I found rather exciting, yet its jingle could be annoying at the same time. The word Yuppie was the basically the word Chav of the second half of the 1980s, and Yuppie sounded more like an adjective to describe it. At the time it did remind me of that slightly irritating sitcom Watching, and in particular, actress Emma Wray (she who was responsible for that mondegreen: fourteenth carrot whip [sic] in the theme tune) playing the annoying Brenda Wilson who a bit like a Liverpudlian version of Lexie Patterson out of Prisoner: Cell Block H. They never did an episode called Annoying as far as I know.
Alright, does anyone remember these adverts? And can anyone identify the two people featured on the nightshirt that she wore in the first one? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I63czQQ4wyw
Brooke Bond D probably was not as well-known as their other main brand of tea, PG Tips, not even in the mid-1980s, and with PG, their chimpanzee-themed advertising campaign that ran almost as long as advertising has been permitted on British television, did feel as if I was taking more trips to Twycross Zoo in the commercial breaks than the late Molly Badham did back then. Brooke Bond D seemed to cater for those with more than enough on their plate, never mind their cup and saucer. I keep bumping into this advert on YouTube (almost on purpose), so therefore I thought that I would write about it for the sake of doing so.
At the start of the advert, we are greeted on the left of the screen by an analogue clock with negative-looking blue eyes perched on a wooden bedside table which, because it was 8.20 in the morning, allowed it (or him?) to have a frowning face as well as to represent a suitable time that most people get up to; the opposite of the smiling 10.10 or 1.50 clock faces frequently seen in magazines and catalogues, and 3.40 felt too early or too late. The clock has a metal left arm (and not hand) and hits its (his?) owner on the head, producing several cartoon-alike yellow stars.
The owner in bed getting up just happens to be a young woman in her late teens or early 20s back then (minus the Oil of Ulay or the Nivea), and, according to a YouTube comment from a few years ago, she was the actress Sally Anne Jackson; someone with a full IMDB plate and she was also that teenage girl who had appeared in Coronation Street back around the same time as its twentieth anniversary celebrations in 1980 as Karen Oldfield, a girlfriend for Elsie Tanner's niece Martin, who he had proposed to, but soon afterwards, Karen had broke off the engagement before she left the series and had left the engagement ring on the table at Number 11. She might have worked on the machines in Mike Baldwin's factory as well.
In the advert, after the inflicted bump on the head, Jackson's character gets out of bed as if she has been sleeping for eight hours (although the reality is that it is close to eight minutes if not eight seconds), and in doing so, she is sporting a white nightshirt or long t-shirt which looked very 1980s looking, and seemed to have a black silhouette of two members of a very 1980s pop group of the day on; two men with sunglasses on and had a hat with a jacket and tie on - (could anyone on here identify who they could have been, which group they were a member of, and whether the nightshirt could have been available to buy at the time? - I have always liked the look of it!) Please let me know if you can!
Our nightshirt-ed hero walks along the landing from her bedroom, yawning and she did so, she passes either an older sister or even her mother, already dressed and carrying a yellow towel on her left arm; we see full view of her great-looking nightshirt with the two males on the front of it. She turns left (i.e. our right) into the bathroom and passes a peach bathrobe young lady (another sister, perhaps?) just about to come out of there at the same time. In the bathroom (which was only seen on the 40 second versions of this advert, and not the 30 second version), she looks in the mirror, still in her nightshirt, and the glass cracks presumably due to the fact that it simply could not cope with her first-thing-in-the-morning stare, and, we assume, seven years of bad luck would be ahead of her, blighting her life even further. She breaks the fourth wall and gives us one of those stroppy feminine looks to the camera. We then see an image of the box of teabags with an animated picture of someone putting teabags into a cup on the front of it.
Our hero has to get changed because she needs to get to work in her office; here, she is wearing a yellow and black bumblebee jacket. A man with pink tie and a hand on his watch, gesturing to her that she is late as she speeds along to her seat and looks as if is about to do Leroy Anderson impressions with her black typewriter. She works at such speed that the Out pile on her left is greater than the In pile on her right. The man is impressed, fluffs his hair and goes over towards her, but the girl catches him with the platen part of the typewriter, giving us a poetic justice expression to the fourth wall. Tea in a white mug with a yellow band at the top of it, is stirred.
After work, Jackson's character walks down the street with an animated rain cloud following (or perhaps even stalking her?) as she goes; she looks up but still looks happy enough. She joins the back of a queue of what looks like 20 to 30 women in a line, dressed in white, with rain cloud still just above her. We get to see her black shoes below which look like plimsolls that have dark green bows on them, and we also see cartoon hammering, sawing and nailing on top of her shoes.
We return to the animated box of teabags and a female hand lifting the full cup of tea from the illustration. Finally, we see her at home on the sofa drinking tea from presumably the same mug; the camera pans back to reveal the two other females who we saw on the bathroom landing enjoying a cuppa as well; one sitting with legs on the seat and the other perched on the arm (we do not see her face as she was sitting so high up). The advert ends with a green (very 1980s) graph-paper grid pattern as a background to the words: D Revives U and Brooke Bond at the bottom in capital letters. The 30 second version of the advert omits the breaking mirror in the bathroom scene and the rest of the advert looks slightly sped up to fit within the time frame.
The song sung in the advert I Could Do With a D (which I doubt that Sally Anne Jackson herself had sung it) does get slightly annoying, even for the 40 second duration of the advert. It did seem to be aimed at women, usually the Take a Break or Jackie magazine readers, unlike the masculinity of Brian Glover doing Gaffer's voice for Tetley teabags which is a brand that I usually use when I put the kettle on. While Tetley teabags are still being sold in places like Tesco (even if the original Tea Folk had been long retired), Brooke Bond D has seemed to have disappeared from supermarket shelves; when did they stop making them, I wonder, in particular as PG Tips have never gone away? Some in the educational system (that is, kids at school), had parodied the song in the school playground as I Could Do With a Pee and other word variations.
In 1993, (as observed during a Carlton ad break of Mary Poppins on Easter Monday that year), there was a revived (pun intended) and more colourful version of the advert, put the song almost remained the same. Here, a woman was asleep in bed and all of a sudden, some animated children, one banging a drum and one holding an orange basketball or football; the girl was playing up, and the boy was in tears. Downstairs in the kitchen, their stereotypical Mum was in her dressing gown (we assume); she has a cup of tea while some light green squiggly images start to appear around her head with other colourful shapes coming from the girl's direction. The mother gets the kids into a white K-reg car (which dates this definitely to early 1993); she is seen in the driver's seat, while a moustachioed man with sunglasses, looking like a ginger-haired Desmond Lynam in a black Capri-alike sports car looks on. The mother shouts out, and the man's black car speeds off in a sub-Hall of Mirrors animated way.
Continued in the next post...
Alright, does anyone remember these adverts? And can anyone identify the two people featured on the nightshirt that she wore in the first one? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I63czQQ4wyw
Brooke Bond D probably was not as well-known as their other main brand of tea, PG Tips, not even in the mid-1980s, and with PG, their chimpanzee-themed advertising campaign that ran almost as long as advertising has been permitted on British television, did feel as if I was taking more trips to Twycross Zoo in the commercial breaks than the late Molly Badham did back then. Brooke Bond D seemed to cater for those with more than enough on their plate, never mind their cup and saucer. I keep bumping into this advert on YouTube (almost on purpose), so therefore I thought that I would write about it for the sake of doing so.
At the start of the advert, we are greeted on the left of the screen by an analogue clock with negative-looking blue eyes perched on a wooden bedside table which, because it was 8.20 in the morning, allowed it (or him?) to have a frowning face as well as to represent a suitable time that most people get up to; the opposite of the smiling 10.10 or 1.50 clock faces frequently seen in magazines and catalogues, and 3.40 felt too early or too late. The clock has a metal left arm (and not hand) and hits its (his?) owner on the head, producing several cartoon-alike yellow stars.
The owner in bed getting up just happens to be a young woman in her late teens or early 20s back then (minus the Oil of Ulay or the Nivea), and, according to a YouTube comment from a few years ago, she was the actress Sally Anne Jackson; someone with a full IMDB plate and she was also that teenage girl who had appeared in Coronation Street back around the same time as its twentieth anniversary celebrations in 1980 as Karen Oldfield, a girlfriend for Elsie Tanner's niece Martin, who he had proposed to, but soon afterwards, Karen had broke off the engagement before she left the series and had left the engagement ring on the table at Number 11. She might have worked on the machines in Mike Baldwin's factory as well.
In the advert, after the inflicted bump on the head, Jackson's character gets out of bed as if she has been sleeping for eight hours (although the reality is that it is close to eight minutes if not eight seconds), and in doing so, she is sporting a white nightshirt or long t-shirt which looked very 1980s looking, and seemed to have a black silhouette of two members of a very 1980s pop group of the day on; two men with sunglasses on and had a hat with a jacket and tie on - (could anyone on here identify who they could have been, which group they were a member of, and whether the nightshirt could have been available to buy at the time? - I have always liked the look of it!) Please let me know if you can!
Our nightshirt-ed hero walks along the landing from her bedroom, yawning and she did so, she passes either an older sister or even her mother, already dressed and carrying a yellow towel on her left arm; we see full view of her great-looking nightshirt with the two males on the front of it. She turns left (i.e. our right) into the bathroom and passes a peach bathrobe young lady (another sister, perhaps?) just about to come out of there at the same time. In the bathroom (which was only seen on the 40 second versions of this advert, and not the 30 second version), she looks in the mirror, still in her nightshirt, and the glass cracks presumably due to the fact that it simply could not cope with her first-thing-in-the-morning stare, and, we assume, seven years of bad luck would be ahead of her, blighting her life even further. She breaks the fourth wall and gives us one of those stroppy feminine looks to the camera. We then see an image of the box of teabags with an animated picture of someone putting teabags into a cup on the front of it.
Our hero has to get changed because she needs to get to work in her office; here, she is wearing a yellow and black bumblebee jacket. A man with pink tie and a hand on his watch, gesturing to her that she is late as she speeds along to her seat and looks as if is about to do Leroy Anderson impressions with her black typewriter. She works at such speed that the Out pile on her left is greater than the In pile on her right. The man is impressed, fluffs his hair and goes over towards her, but the girl catches him with the platen part of the typewriter, giving us a poetic justice expression to the fourth wall. Tea in a white mug with a yellow band at the top of it, is stirred.
After work, Jackson's character walks down the street with an animated rain cloud following (or perhaps even stalking her?) as she goes; she looks up but still looks happy enough. She joins the back of a queue of what looks like 20 to 30 women in a line, dressed in white, with rain cloud still just above her. We get to see her black shoes below which look like plimsolls that have dark green bows on them, and we also see cartoon hammering, sawing and nailing on top of her shoes.
We return to the animated box of teabags and a female hand lifting the full cup of tea from the illustration. Finally, we see her at home on the sofa drinking tea from presumably the same mug; the camera pans back to reveal the two other females who we saw on the bathroom landing enjoying a cuppa as well; one sitting with legs on the seat and the other perched on the arm (we do not see her face as she was sitting so high up). The advert ends with a green (very 1980s) graph-paper grid pattern as a background to the words: D Revives U and Brooke Bond at the bottom in capital letters. The 30 second version of the advert omits the breaking mirror in the bathroom scene and the rest of the advert looks slightly sped up to fit within the time frame.
The song sung in the advert I Could Do With a D (which I doubt that Sally Anne Jackson herself had sung it) does get slightly annoying, even for the 40 second duration of the advert. It did seem to be aimed at women, usually the Take a Break or Jackie magazine readers, unlike the masculinity of Brian Glover doing Gaffer's voice for Tetley teabags which is a brand that I usually use when I put the kettle on. While Tetley teabags are still being sold in places like Tesco (even if the original Tea Folk had been long retired), Brooke Bond D has seemed to have disappeared from supermarket shelves; when did they stop making them, I wonder, in particular as PG Tips have never gone away? Some in the educational system (that is, kids at school), had parodied the song in the school playground as I Could Do With a Pee and other word variations.
In 1993, (as observed during a Carlton ad break of Mary Poppins on Easter Monday that year), there was a revived (pun intended) and more colourful version of the advert, put the song almost remained the same. Here, a woman was asleep in bed and all of a sudden, some animated children, one banging a drum and one holding an orange basketball or football; the girl was playing up, and the boy was in tears. Downstairs in the kitchen, their stereotypical Mum was in her dressing gown (we assume); she has a cup of tea while some light green squiggly images start to appear around her head with other colourful shapes coming from the girl's direction. The mother gets the kids into a white K-reg car (which dates this definitely to early 1993); she is seen in the driver's seat, while a moustachioed man with sunglasses, looking like a ginger-haired Desmond Lynam in a black Capri-alike sports car looks on. The mother shouts out, and the man's black car speeds off in a sub-Hall of Mirrors animated way.
Continued in the next post...
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