A Pleasant Turning Point: ITV (Tyne Tees) adverts, 20th December 1986

Trading Places break number two starts with the bumper eating the film and an advert for yet more smells. Audace from somewhere or other. The spirit of seduction, as depicted by a model shimmying for a poundshop Alain Delon up a tower in Morocco for no reason, because this is a classy French smell and needs this kind of meaningless location filming. By contrast, here's a barely animated vignette of the migration of salmonses that just needs some plinking reverb-heavy synth keys to be complete. Unfortunately Orinoco Flow is still in the future, so the synth is set to flute and the reverb relatively modest. Anyway the animation's nice to look at, although one or two corners have been cut without successfully compensating, and there's an unsettling bit where a salmon leaps into the air and then jump-cuts to a tinned slices of itself on leafy bed. Tom Baker at his most luxurious entreats you to buy John West, which I'm sure looks as tasty in real life as this drawing of it. It's the eighties. Saxophones are everywhere. Including on the stoop of some random shack in what looks like a Western ghost town. Actually, it's somewhere in the Caribbean. Look at all the adorable black children, and adults actually, being entertained by the smooth sax sounds of this white guy. Until it momentarily breaks down into avant-garde OMD-style bleeps, but it soon recovers. There's also a white lady, who rewards our saxophonist's labours with a tin of Lilt, since that's what they're advertising. Tropical soft drinks were being explored at the time, with a concerted effort to make grapefruit popular with the likes of Quatro and Squirt that failed miserably. Lilt's the only one that had legs in the end. Then there's an enigmatic beer advert so curt and oblique that it was bloody hard work just figuring out what it's for. The advert doesn't have the courtesy to show the product prominently onscreen, or at all, or even mention it directly in the slogan. It's Newcastle Exhibition Ale, anyway, as evidenced by the beer mats and the brief glimpse of a branded beer pump. And as not really made particularly clear by the vague "Ex" pun that this campaign revolved around. Apparently you can still get it, in Newcastle anyway, which is a surprise given this advertising. Early CGI! Combined with live action, yet! It's a banking advert, clogging up the Christmas airwaves with a soothing voice explaining your potentially wonderful future with Midland of crudely modelled three-up-two-down suburbia, and greenhouses, and golf, all of which I'm assuming looked impressive at the time. Certainly these two at the centre of it look serenely contented. Maybe they've been taking valium. That would also explain the hallucinatory visuals. Everything's shiny and plastic because textures aren't really possible yet without a Cray supercomputer. A brief cameo for the Richard Briers griffin, sans Briers - it wasn't really his era anymore. All in all it's too nice for it's own good - it makes the Midland seem vaguely eerie and even dystopian, like an advert for Soylent Green. Midland: the Definitely Not Made of People Bank (Except In The Sense That People Run It) Then: cigars. Ronnie Barker essentially reprises the role of Norman Stanley Fletcher, having been Going Straight for eight years now - that could have been still on, had Richard Beckinsale not died for no particular reason beyond God's periodic reminders that he doesn't exist - but still not above helping out his old compadres on the inside by sneaking in the odd bit of snout. Except today, because today he has Castella classics, which are too fat for the chicken wire. Two years later Ronnie would abruptly (as far as the rest of the world were concerned) retire, possibly having realised that it was his only escape from reprising Fletch and Arkwright and spoonerisms for the rest of his life. More smells for Christmas, and a borderline psychotic advert for the classic men's fragrance Brut, consisting of several bottles and boxes of the stuff in front of an eye-searing black and green striped backdrop, with seemingly random Top of the Pops zoom effects, and an even more random jingle that flails about in various directions searching for a tune, doesn't find one and ends up tripping over the resolving C chord and ending twice. A far cry from the homoerotic Cooper/Keegan shower scene. Finally, a tosser. No, that's the premise of the advert, this guy's a tosser. Spray tan, medallion, fake chest hair, leather chaps, that sort of thing. Admittedly the advert uses the word "wally" because it's pre-watershed. Quite what the point is I don't know - maybe the copywriter had some resentments to get off his chest - but anyway it's for Heinz soup, because of course it is. Minestrone, specifically, or "Mini Strone" as Anna Wing pronounces it. Taste and texture not unlike their tinned spaghetti, last time I tried it.