Child Of The 1980's

These days they just don’t seem to make television adverts with sing along jingles at the end, do they? I’m racking my brain to come up with some examples and the only one I can think of is “Compare the Market (pause) dot com“, and even that isn’t really a jingle but the name of the company set to music.

One brand that did have a classic jingle when I was little was Fairy liquid. You know the one:-

Now hands that do dishes can feel soft as your face,
with mild green Fairy Liquid.

It seems the people from Fairy washing up liquid must have noticed this too, because they’ve brought back the classic jingle from their old ads, although it has been twisted a little. It’s the one with the kiddie with the dirty scooter who tries to put it in the dishwasher at the end. It’s a nice attempt at reuse, if a little confusing:-

Now hands that do dishes can get everything sparkling clean,
but unfortunately you can’t get your scooter in.

Why talk about hands washing dishes if it’s advertising dishwasher liquitabs? I don’t get it… Here’s the ad so you can see it for yourself.

Anyway, this all got me thinking about some of the old Fairy liquid ads from my childhood, and I distinctly remember two styles of advert that were used back then.

The first type featured actress Nanette Newman extoling the dishwashing liquids long lasting virtues, compared to the next best brand. This was illustrated by showing a massive stack of washing up which the “next best brand” had managed to wash up. Nanette then slyly smiles at the camera with a quip of the “pretty impressive, eh?” variety, before revealing a much larger stack which the bottle of Fairy had cleaned. Here’s an example I managed to find on YouTube:-

The other type were the ones where a mother was washing up and their little kid would come up to them and ask why the mother’s hands were so soft. These were actually fairly well observed, with the mother patiently explaining all about Fairy and its mildness whilst the kid came about with a barrage of questions like “What’s milder?“.

The child was normally playing a pretend game as well, my favourite of which was the door-to-door salesmen offering dishmops in “pink and yeyyow” which the mother declined because she loved washing up with Fairy so much. Unfortunately I couldn’t find that particular advert, so here’s one with a little boy pretending to be a policeman instead.

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This entry is filed under TV - Adverts and was posted on August 26th, 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.