Also Available in Paste: Channel 4 adverts, 1994
Вставка
- Опубліковано 29 сер 2024
- More adverts from Nineteen Eighty-Four from 1994. Someone had an interesting idea of who would be watching this film: the mix of cosmetics and car-care bollocks, here on the other two, leads me to picture a middle-class married couple in their thirties. Sure, why not.
We start with makeup from Yardley, whose spokesface at the time belonged to Helena Bonham Carter. Here she is, painfully overlit and with a disturbing blonde flattop look that's about ten years out of date. It still looks good on her, because she's Helena Bonham Carter. Not to mention so blasted with light she's practically a floating face.
And now, a strange metaphor to sell photographic film, which was a thing once and increasingly feels like it needs to be explained. It definitely didn't work like this, with bits of your photos liable to fall off purely from how high resolution the picture is.
This is THE original colour magic car polish from Turtle Wax. Beware of inferior imitations, I guess. An extremely basic advert with almost no technique whatsoever, just flatly shot demonstrations and packshots and a bland voiceover, all shot on videotape. It's basically an informercial condensed to the length of an actual commercial and therefore more generic than obnoxious. Now in 13 colours, most of which seem to be white. Or black.
And now: tanning. An exact date still escapes me but this is definitely late May or early June: time to start thinking about the summer. Here's a lady who's mostly legs on a sun bed on the beach dangerously close to the tide, not that she seems to care as she turns to give you a good old ogle at her arse. Meanwhile, various brand names and qualities appear as Charlotte Rampling shows her approval. It's Boots! The "Who Cares" slogan evolved into "Someone Cares" and now "We Care Because You Do", which I think is where Aphex Twin got that album title from.
Next, cars again! Specifically a Renault 19. Another case of an entire advert squeezed into a small box so lots of small and less small-print can go around it, with the effect that it's quite hard to follow the premise. Fortunately that premise doesn't matter and you should be listening to Tim McInnerny anyway. It's all worked out beautifully. Oh, wait, that's the Laguna.
Then, kickin' dance energy junglist massive inna area or whatever. The latest Energy Rush compilation of the freshest pounding club floor-fillers for people who keep getting turned away at the door. It's the eighth, so they've made a sort of vague Dalek pun, not that any of these kids know what a Dalek is. Mark Goodier pays his gas bill again.
Next, what I believe to be an actual French advert, albeit with no synchronized speech for ease of dubbing. In a grey void, several ordinary people look longingly at a big old spiralling Swiss Roll of cheese. A decorating lady, a business lady having a romantic dinner (apparently alone), a dad and his sproglet, all look down at the cheese and then up at the camera and smile as if it tells us anything. There's one with herbs and garlic and one with salmon. Or you can get mini ones as canapes, although they don't mention those here. In fact they don't really say anything much. Eat cheese.
Finally, a classic from Guinness. Adapted from the last gnomic Rutger Hauer commercial (he can still be seen on the TV screen), which was even more complicated, this zooms into a glass of the black stuff sitting in what looks like a medieval laboratory (albeit with a TV) in a ruined tower to find an entire universe floating within the bubbles. It chooses a galaxy, then a planet, and finally zooms down to an identical tower with an identical laboratory and an identical glass of Guinness. Then it does it again. The process could be repeated indefinitely, or at least as long as "We Have All the Time in the World" goes on. Certainly blew my little eleven year old mind.
In the Guinness advert, which I was obsessed with as a child, I was intrigued to learn that the tower was based on the Tower of Babel by Bruegel. For what it works, I also think that Guinness is iconic enough to be presented alongside with Bakelite telephones, CRT TVs and toy robots from the 1950s as the sort of thing that humanity would want to preserve in the tower. If it was for Turtle Wax that would have felt it was over reaching.
I was also absolutely fascinated with that Guinness advert as a child. Love that song too.
This was shown on June 3rd 1994.
Did some looking around, and no, this was the first version, and I'm not experiencing Mandela Effect - there was a later version which didn't loop and played the animation only once as a man stares mindlessly at his pint, with Anticipation appearing in the TV screen, which is the bit that stuck in my mind.
I was just about to post that I remember a version with the dancing man appearing on the tv screen instead of Rutger. I'm glad I didn't imagine it.