Cheshire Cheese in Three Colours: TV-am adverts, June 2nd 1989

Jane Fonda after this break. It's TV-am in its relative pomp, which is to say that glorious period between the strike and the fax when it was riding the third-term Thatcherite zeitgeist and the richest TV station on Earth. It's June 2nd, 1989 and it comes to you from Chris Benson. The actual programming can be seen here: • The Benson Archive - J... , also featuring Barry McGuigan sporting a spectacular shiner. Here's the advertising.
Commercials at breakfast time have long since relaxed from their self-conscious beginnings, but there were still distinguishing features. Plant food and the like, for instance, were unlikely to have been advertised in prime-time, at least in major franchise areas. Daytime was the place for anything you'd buy in a garden centre, and that included Breakfast. Here's the decidedly uncommercially named Phostrogen with a very simple advert which practically smells of compost.
After that, a date with the racially questionable Kia-Ora campaign. I mean, it is a visual stereotype, but on the other hand there's no malice in it - fundamentally, it's just a kid who happens to be the colour of charcoal. The troubling part is something almost indefinable, so subtle it's practically homeopathic, and theoretically easy to fix if you can just figure out what it is that needs fixing. Anyway, it's not the one with the "I'll be your dog" conga line (which did include several more obvious racial stereotypes); that was five years earlier and made by Grillo and Simonetti at Klacto films. This is just a brief revival promoting the new mixed fruit variety with a particularly stupid crow and much more surreal and neutral imagery. This one was made by Geoff Dunbar at Grand Slamm (sic) Films, later known for kids shows like Percy the Park Keeper and Angelina Ballerina.
Next, a rare treat: an advert featuring Enn Reitel on camera rather than off. That's him in the glasses. Not saying a word. Seems like a strange use of your Reitel, but he does have previous form in silent comedy. Specifically two seasons of The Optimist, a kind of halfway mark between Eric Sykes' Rhubarb or The Plank and Rowan Atkinson's Mr Bean. But not as funny as either. Anyway, here he is sitting miserably in a carriage in black and white in what looks like Stalin's Soviet Union, eating Bastard Brand Peanuts, surrounded by the dead and despairing, gazing longingly at a passing train which is in colour and populated by 80s hotties eating KP, because KP is so great and such. Reitel doesn't even get to deliver the voiceover at the end, possibly because he's too depressed.
Then, having enjoyed a sequel to one of his most famous works, here's Oscar Grillo himself, delivering a sequel to someone else's. Tasty, tasty Rolos had been advertised through the 80s by a fourth-wall breaking set of adverts starring a lovelorn line drawing petitioning his artist for help in winning the girl of his dreams - first by drawing her in the first place, then by drawing some Rolos to bribe her with. Those were made by the future Disney hero Eric Goldberg (the man behind the Genie), initially at Richard Williams' studio, then his own, Pizazz Pictures. When the Mouse came calling, Rolo and J Walter Thompson turned to Grillo and Klacto Studios to continue the basic aesthetic, although this one didn't do much with the more meta aspects. Instead, with the help of Ned Sherrin, it concentrates on the whole "Do You Love Anyone Enough" motif which ultimately took over as the main conceit of Rolo advertising. Note what a "designer suit" is thought to look like in 1989.
Cheese! The Cheeses of England and Wales are still vying for your attention! The Richard Purdum-animated whimsical anthropomorphs weren't connecting with the increasingly sophisticated 80s audience, so instead they've gone with a you-know-what-y jingle and some celebrity endorsements. Like former Prime Minister Ted Heath, who very slowly makes an obvious joke about colour preference on behalf of Cheshire. Ken Livingstone did the same, only for Red Leicester. DO YOU SEE. When the campaign started the ending shot would have had the specific cheese spelled out in blocks of itself, but that was a few years ago and they can't be arsed anymore. Lymeswold!
Try delicious new Dalepak vegetable grills! You might as well! We paid these three actors to look delighted while holding a mouthful, so I guess that proves...nothing at all, but still, give it a go. Morrissey said you should. What if we do a half-arsed 50s song reference and comp on a nightmarish animated mouth? Is that anything? Dalepak! Astonishingly, they still exist, or rather the name does, having been handed around to whatever company will take it for the past 30 years. That kid is clearly not related to those people.
And then back to Camden Lock for that Jane Fonda interview, which turns out to be promoting Old Gringo. Might as well have not bothered then. (It would have helped if they'd explained who Ambrose Bierce was)