RSS
Jacob’s Club have been around for years and are still going strong today, but the 1980’s was a particularly popular time for them thanks mainly to the advertising campaign for them, of which more in a moment. The bars themselves come in a number of different flavours, the most common being mint, orange, milk chocolate and fruit, although I’m sure there have been others over the years. They consist of a biscuit, normally topped with a layer of flavoured cream, which has then been thickly coated in chocolate, and very tasty they are too.
Anyway, in the 1980’s Jacob’s had a very strong TV advertising campaign for the biscuits which centred around the jingle “if you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our club“. There were several different adverts made around this theme, but they followed the pattern of having one person start eating a Club biscuit and somebody starting to sing the above line. When they got to the end of the line somebody else would join in and start singing it too.
Cars have always had seatbelts as far as I am concerned, at least in the front of the car anyway. In Europe it became compulsory for all new cars to be fitted with front seatbelts in 1965, but it wasn’t until 1986 in the UK that rear seatbelts also became compulsory in all new cars sold.
The Nescafé Gold Blend couple kept the people of the UK on the edge of their seats for the better part of the 1980’s with their “will they won’t they” approach to their relationship. Looking back it has to be said that the TV adverts were pretty cheesey, but it got to a point when people started tuning in to the adverts between shows because it was made known that a new installment in the series was about to air.
Unsurprisingly advertising the very same breakfast cereal they were named after, the Weetabix Gang was an immensely popular ad campaign that ran during the 1980’s. The first tv advert starring them aired in 1982, and they proved popular enough that they managed to remain the official Weetabix mascots until 1989.
The Home Computer Course was one of those “part-work” magazines that you collected up every week and filed in the supplied hard backed binder to eventually build up into a useful reference library - or at least that was the idea. The Home Computer Course, by Orbis Publishing, was one such example of such a publication. It aimed to teach you everything you needed to know about computers from playing games, to home accounts, to programming in BASIC (Leading to many annoyed Dixons staff when some kid came in and entered the classic 10 PRINT “BIG BOO IS COOL!” 20 GOTO 10 on all the demo machines). In reality of course it was never going to make you a computer expert, but it had fun trying.
Has anybody ever used Glade Shake ‘n’ Vac when vacuuming their house? I never understood the thinking behind a product that causes you to make more mess when tidying up around the house. The product was supposed to bring an air of “freshness” back to your carpet, and the way it achieved this was for you to sprinkle something that looked a bit like talcum powder all over the floor, then hoover it all back up again. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t, I really don’t know, but the product will always be remembered for it’s well remembered (if somewhat cringingly terrible) television advert.
The games may look laughable by todays standards, but when the Atari 2600 launched in 1977 it was state of the art. Before then, games consoles had often been monochrome with a limited number of games, normally all of which were just slight variations on Pong. The Atari 2600 blew those machines out of the water with its colour graphics and, most importantly, wide range of varied games. It also reinvented the method of control by coming with a 8 directional, single buttoned joystick. Prior to this most machines used a twisty dial thing to control the game, which is why Pong was so prevalent - it was about the only game you could do on such a system.
When I was but a child my Mum would only buy us fizzy drinks when there was a special occasion like Christmas or a birthday party. One reason for this was the cost, as fizzy drinks tended to cost a lot more (in relative terms) than they do now, and supermarkets didn’t often have their own brand pop at this time. The other reason was because Mum always said it would blow us up. Of course, I always thought the blowing something up meant a big BOOM and an explosion, so whenever Mum said this I thought it was odd that you would be allowed to drink something that could potentially be explosive. Of course, what she really meant was that it might make us burp a lot…