The Hard Sell

Advertising: the rattling of a stick in a swill-bucket? Welcome to the show where the stick rattles back: The Hard Sell. Adverts from history, treated with the respect they deserve.
This episode: The Olympics! If you thought you could avoid them you're wrong. They're everywhere. In 1988 they were even on ITV and Channel Four, which meant they were also covered in the TV Times! So what was advertised in that issue, and how much of it was Olympic-related? And most important of all, will it fill 25 minutes?
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bobthefish.org.uk

[@DiseaseShaker]

My family had our first video recorder (VHS) around the time of the Seoul Olympics, with a Scotch cassette sporting the Olympic rings (Scotch must have been an official partner). That tape lasted for years and survived much mangling in the machine, proving the lifetime guarantee true!

[@ttrjw]

SERP/Abbey Ad: The irony is that if you were youngish then, with the 2016 pension reforms and subsequent pension changes you could have done better .

[@Scottfree166]

I remember Olympics ‘88 for the Ben Johnson scandal and for Harvey Smith causing a small scandal when he said “It’s a good job a boxing match was stopped, because the loser would’ve ended up with a cauliflower arse! (or words to that effect) live on air on Channel 4 😂

[@MrGluben]

All I hear is Tears for Fears in that 1988 intro.

[@edwardburek1717]

Interesting that Thames were charged with broadcasting Olympics coverage on behalf of ITV, as the ITV Sport division was operated at the time by LWT. Mind you, I guess that arrangement would have been easier at the weekends. And they need to reintroduce that logo now.

[@rjbride]

The worst part of getting a colonoscopy if you haven’t had one before is not knowing how easy it is to go through! Get a colonoscopy. It’s well worth it, it takes 15 mins, they give you a sedation that hits the same as drinking 2 pints in half an hour and there’s 60 seconds of trapped wind pain and that’s it! You don’t even feel it entering you because they use numbing gel ..down there.

[@liamh1982]

I always liked The Olympic Track, despite it relying far too heavily on synthesised samples of vaguely Korean sounding things - at least ITV bothered to commission an original tune, unlike the BBC just using Chariots of Fire again (which sort of made sense in '84 as the first summer games after the film came out, but just smacked of laziness by '88).

[@areasquirrel]

Certainly, sitting in bed recovering from a different kind of -oscopy, on my birthday, I don't have anything better to do... * party whistle *
Nice nostalgic flashback to Dextrosol, which my dad would later have stocked in multiple packets, and would have to keep in his pockets because me and my sister refused to accept that despite their very juicy flavour, crumbly nature and moreish-ness, they aren't bloody sweets. At least we enjoyed the branded football they gave away in a Euro '96 promotion, by which time we'd finally gotten the message. When Lucozade Sport entered that particular niche, all bets were off.
RTE still gets the second channel to clear the decks for the entire competition period, which in this age meant the children's programmes airing on RTE1 with very formal announcements. "Now on One, we enter the magic door with all our friends in today's edition of Bosco." How exciting.
Allez les verts, I guess.