Shot in Aromavision: TSW adverts, Christmas 1992

The News at Ten interrupted Aliens, so this is the last commercial break from within the film, and my dad diligently stopped the recording the instant the film ended so this is it. We start with Black and/or Decker, with a member of the subspecies Dad expecting all sorts of power tools and suchlike for Christmas and instead getting bollocks. LET THIS BE A WARNING. TO YOU.

After that, an advert for Batchelors rice which is cute to the point of irritation. "Aromavision" apparently consists of animated steam spelling out what it's meant to smell like. Then the Scotch VHS tape skeleton arrives to have a massive mental breakdown. His name is Archie, although how anyone knows that I don't know. He's also suddenly become Scottish, with Richard Wilson providing the voice, presumably because he looks like a skeleton already. I literally just found out that it is the same company as actual sticky-backed Scotch tape.

Why don't we see adverts for watches so much anymore? The only place I see them advertised is my spam folder. This is for Citizen, and apparently a magic watch that displays bittersweet moments from your past over the clockface, which would have been perfect for Marcel Proust.

Then a Frenchman makes the mistake of arriving in a bar at the climax of a Tour de France stage and is served via whatever the French is for Heath Robinson. Oddly advertising Stowells of Chelsea, whose explicit Englishness sits oddly amongst the rest of the advert, which is twice as French as a massive slab of cheese floating in a pool of wine near an ashtray full of dogshit.

Next, City Slickers was a very popular film the previous year; here's something explicitly repeating a scene from that film, with the help of that simultaneously doughy and craggy cowboy character actor. Car-ling Black La-bel. Frost and Arden have long since departed, but the slogan continues to have legs.

Then Kelly le Brock is back to say almost nothing, followed by Braun! A year after Michael Jackson took Godley & Creme's "Cry" and kicked it to death, here's the Black or White technique advertising some hair straighteners or some damn thing. As a Bloke, this baffles me. I have to buy stuff twice a year for my 25-year old sister; every year at this time, I'm standing in the Body Shop with no clue what I'm looking at. Somebody drop a UN aid package full of shampoo at my feet.

That's the last advert, but I've also included some other interesting bits of ephemera that showed up on the tape afterwards: as the movie credits roll out, we get a "TSW Night Time Production" caption, which must be pretty rare. It also demonstrates that they were using this identity, at least for this purpose, unto their death.

After that, a marionette of Stan Laurel playing Bill Gates shows up. No idea what this is or where it's from, because it's murdered a second later by the title sequence to an early 90s episode of BBC anthology documentary thing "40 Minutes". No, I don't have the episode. Just the titles.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Christmas
• commercial
• Advertising
• Commercial Broadcasting
• Commercials
• Television
• Ads
• Television Advertisement

[TheGerkuman]

Isn't the Scotch tape thing a bit of a scam? There was no way that video could ever re-record at the same quality and they knew it.

[Applemask]

@TheGerkuman There was also almost no chance they'd ever get called on it.

[ste1bro]

Those 40 Minutes titles are terrifying, in a Videodrome-ey way.

[docmagnus88]

It's nice that Gus slimmed down and found work.