well, i'm at a bit of a rare loose end, so let's go right ahead and have a look at some more random images that i have extracted from the internet. i was, look you see, actually on the prowl for some classic music adverts, but seem instead to have found a whole load of non-music stuff off of the 80s.
yeah, i know there are a few sites and "apps" dedicated to randomly sharing images like what i am doing here, but i for some reason think that there are people out there that quite like the idea of a few comments thrown in and not just the visuals.
there are, unless i am very much mistaken, 14 or if you like fourteen images that i have on the go here, and it seems that they will crop up in a quasi alphabetical way, depending on what i called the image file. just about all, i think, are marketing and branding things. starting with.....
yes, an example of that thing which has been gone from the world for, what, 20 or so years, now? an advert for cigarettes, no less. that is indeed for the fancy, posh version of Benson & Hedges; the kind smoked only by the ruling elite, members of the aristocracy and other assorted landed gentry.
oh, no, you are not missing anything - the advert really is the total crap that you see. as best i can work out for you, the concept is that a milkman has delivered some B&H in the snow, and some sort of bird - presumably a robin or perhaps a sparrow - has hopped along to have a gander. i think it's supposed to be a play on the problem we had in the 70s and 80s of birds, in particular magpies, stealing a drink of milk from doorsteps. this problem was, of course, resolved by the public execution of all milkmen after a fabulous show trial, and now everyone just buys milk from shops.
did adverts such as the above really inspire people to start smoking? if they did, well, i'd then suggest that was really all rather a quite natural - and valuable - trimming of the herd than it was an issue. be that as it may, we no longer have class adverts like that on the go. or, for that matter, this next one.
indeed the above is from America - 1982, i think. it's off of that Bloomingdales lot, a company which i believe enjoys a distinct level of fame and brand awareness around the globe. that's probably because the name gets mentioned from time and again in films and TV shows off of America.
i have absolutely no idea if the above approach was a success, but i would suspect not. despite the fact that there was one scene of the sport in the film, i for a start think it's a bit much attempting to use the film Chariots of Fire to sell cricket whites, since the film is generally better known for celebrating another form of athletic endeavour.
would i think that selling the classical English cricket look to America in the early 80s would be a win? well, not really. i mean, this was a couple of years before Miami Vice, but i mean, still. they had smart things like Dallas and Soap on to guide their fashions, i would have thought.
an 80s public service announcement off of British Gas, in order to give this post some semblance of credibility, purpose and worth? sure.
it strikes me as that would be very confusing for a lot of people today. for a start, telephones do not look like that any more. if confronted with a phone with a dial on it, i suspect the Millennials who wander around aimlessly with stupid haircuts would get blown up or experience some other form of distress as they attempted to simply touch rather than spin the buttons.
also, it's not like you can actually smoke inside any building in the UK anywhere any more, so the chances of blowing yourself up whilst you have a fag as you call British Gas to come and fix their shoddy installation are remote, to say the least. if you did do that, they'd probably put what remains of you on trial for smoking indoors.
a simplistic, no-nonsense approach to advertising for a stock brokerage type of firm off of America during the early 80s, before the economy all went knacked? done.
actually i really quite like this no nonsense approach to advertising. it's a no-nonsense, "this is us, give us your money" statement, saved from being 100% business card formal only by the gesture of a snazzy font being used for the text. the same advert for today would feature clouds, trees or some other such abstract; thought up by a branding guru to underline the "aspirational" nature of giving all your money to a brokerage.
would i have wished to work at an early 80s American stock market brokerage, based in New York or similar? absolutely. to me it looks like a lot of scribbling on paper whilst you smoked very affordable cigarettes right there at your desk, also eating doughnuts and getting completely and utterly sh!tfaced on bourbon or similar as and when the market periodically crashed. now, sadly, it's all finger sandwiches and muesli, along with health fanatics making decisions on touch screens.
whatever happened to C&A? i am fairly sure that when i left England in the early to mid 90s they were still a going concern, but now i am back they seem to have gone. no doubt they were another business destroyed by an "internet", which we shall get to later, or just poor business administration. i note with interest that more classic British businesses have gone bust during the time of EU expansion than internet, however.
no matter, what hurts here is that it would seem that we now live in a world where one cannot with any ease purchase smart Jinglers branded clothes. that yellow shirt - brown cord trousers combination is an absolute win, and i would be delighted to be able to stride around town in such fashions.
more early 80s American stuff? OK, sure, why not. i mean, for some reason i am getting a good deal of readership and traffic off of the former USSR these days, and they were quite the ones fascinated with all things America at that time. here you go, comrades, behold the car of the bourgeois.
on balance i think yes, i would like a Cadillac to drive. sure, it's massive and so i will dent and knock it, and i would wager that fuel economy was nowhere near the thinking of its design or build. you can be certain, though, that such a car would have an absolutely amazing cassette deck in it. possibly even an 8 track player, which would be sort of OK although i don't have a recorder and so could not make tapes for it.
no, i am not looking into getting a new car. if i was, i suspect a Lada would be it, or some other sort of product from the Soviet bloc. hey, if all of them are reading this blog, the least i can do is have one of their cars.
i am also not really in the market for a new direction with my hair. if i was, however, i would totes be at David's, as it seems he would be boss at styling my hair in a way that was more extraordinary than it was simply ok.
one of the most exciting aspects about David's? that he was on the go every day of the week, assuming that America has seven days to a week too. here the English way of doing things means that you cannot get a haircut on a Sunday, lest you wish to be arrested as some sort of sexual deviant or other such form of social misfit. it was only in the 60s, i think, that they stopped hangings for people found to be shaving or combing hair on the Day of the Lord, goodness knows what very public humiliation would befall those who took cutting implements to their fringe.
that last point is all true, as you can find it here on the internet, and as we all know if it's on the internet it must be true, for why would one report falsehoods on it? on that note, Jeff Goldblum must be getting pretty tired of dying whilst on location in New Zealand by now, and this whole "internet" thing is not quite so new as everyone takes as a given as it being.
what's that above? that, ladies and gentlemen, is a prototype "internet directory" from the 80s. we did not, however, call it an "internet"; we called it "teletext". if you had the right sort of television, you could press a button, type in numbers and retrieve information in a mostly text based format off of Oracle or Ceefax. if you had a stupendously fancy television, you could also print off pages from it for use elsewhere.
a good many people claim that they invented "the internet". that total bellend off America, what's his name, Al Gore or something, is one. also that English bloke, Tim something, who got a knighthood for it. i would suggest that "invented" is a relative term. it was not that much of a leap of imagination, or too much of a game changer, to move teletext off of television sets and on to computers.
more on "internet invention" in a bit, but now on to a truly great passion of mine. if i were asked what materialistic thing do i miss the most - that i long for, and wish i could have every day, then the answer would be Marlboro. if i were asked to elaborate on that, i would without doubt say soft pack Marlboro in particular.
sigh. gone are the days. they are just too damned expensive here in England, alas. as in, they cost about £4 a packet more than the brands that i make do with. it is super awesome amazing when someone treats me to a packet, as Spiros most recently did, but for the most part they sadly remain elusive and absent from my life as i know it these days.
hey ho, i can at least look at the above and remember the days of glory when they were accessible and affordable, i suppose. yeah, sure, smoking is bad, silly, awful for you, etc, but Marlboro are just the most awesome thing ever, i'm afraid.
a little earlier in this blog post we had a look at the formal, no-nonsense approach to brokerage and stock market representation preferred by our friends in America. a look at how the English way of doing things took to encouraging people to dabble in stocks and shares is to be found below.
yes, indeed, quite. the British approach to stocks and shares was less formal brokerages, more adverts on behalf of the Government placed in television guide magazines.
the most famous Government sell off that saw shares theoretically placed in the hands of the great unwashed proletariat was, of course, British Gas, what with its "if you see Sid, tell him" approach to advertising.
i might very well be quite mistaken, but so far as i am aware gone are the days in which one could become a shareholder (admittedly a minor one, but still) in a major airline simply by filling out the form they found in the TV guide. these days it all has to go through agencies and brokerages, and of course must be signed off and approved by a wide range of financial conduct authorities. where's the fun in that?
strewth, what's that above? just my efforts to add a touch of glamour and class to this post. all i know of it is pretty much all that you can see on the above -a supplier of exquisite lingerie that is only slightly laced. why so? no idea, perhaps the American sexual psyche was simply not ready for full on lace during the early 80s.
speaking of early 80s America and the partial way in which they did things, back to all things "internet invention". here, look, you see they had an internet on the go in 1982. via a VIC-20, no less.
other than all them boss games and things you can see on the left, on the right is the world of excitement and adventure you could get from hooking up your smart VIC-20 to if not the internet then a "network of inter connected computers". see, you could access CompuServe, do shopping, book holidays, play online games, etc. basically, everything you can do on an internet today, except illegally download stuff, look at nudies pictures or show images of your cat to random strangers.
this whole internet thing has simply adapted and evolved over many years, then. it's silly and crazy to say that one person invented it or is responsible for it; that's like saying whoever invented the DVD is responsible for the creation of home entertainment. other versions existed before, and did the same thing in a different way.
Watergate, then.
one of the earliest phases of "dumbing down" the world, to get us to the stage where, and I quote Noel Gallagher here, "99% of the population are as thick as pig sh!t", saw 'Watergate' be somewhat misinterpreted by the media in terms of how the "Watergate Scandal" brought down President Nixon, a Head of State who was one of the few, if only, ever to be referenced in a Bowie lyric. the Watergate was and probably is still a hotel. this is to say it was not a gate for water, and had no relation to the actions and activities that brought down a President. yet every time there is a scandal that looks to rock or bring down a person from power, we get the word "gate" stuck on the end - Irangate, Emailgate, Lewinskygate, Infaltegate, etc.
some of that WWF, now WWE, stuff to finish off? sure, yeah, why not......
that's a UK TV magazine snippet from early 1987, and suggests that it is announcing the first ever screening of the American form of wrestling on British TV. up until that stage, wrestling for us in England began with Big Daddy and ended with Giant Haystacks. every now and then in an American film we got a snippet of their version of it - the opening of Highlander comes to mind - but mostly we didn't get to see it.
which is the best version of wrestling? all are quite smart, i suppose. there's a particular type that Spiros engages in which, frankly, is unlikely to get broadcast on TV any time soon. he seems to enjoy it, despite the fact that there's no potential for branded clothing from it.
anyway, that will do. should any of this random stuff have been of interest, nice one!
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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