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Applemask uploaded a new video
(3 weeks ago)
Second and final from Quick Change. (I have more adverts on the tape from the premiere of Groundhog Day, but that recording is so horribly ravaged ...
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Second and final from Quick Change. (I have more adverts on the tape from the premiere of Groundhog Day, but that recording is so horribly ravaged that my ezCap doesn't even recognise it as a video, unfortunately - anyone know a workaround?)
The first advert is another age-of-gunmetal-and-silver-pomposity car ad that proves that even the cars themselves were sick and tired of this sort of thing. Vorsprung Durch Technik, as they say at the Walker Art Center (incidentally, why in Christ's name are the British Television Advertising Awards held in Minne-bloody-tmesis-appolis?).
Then there's something in a very similar vein for rum, of all things. A terrifying, terrifying rum. Bacardi Spice is apparently "matured for up to two years in charred oak casks, Bacardi Spice is based on an ancient Cuban recipe containing a blend of nine rums and spices". In Hell, apparently. Alcohol advertising practicaly invented being this overwrought, of course, although with the restrictions they're operating under now they have to be a lot more coy these days.
Then there's a trailer for Trevor Nunn's film of one of the slightest plays Wild Bill Shakespeare ever wrote; this being Nunn, Imogen Stubbs is in it. I've been to that big house they're prancing around in front of: it's Lanhydrock! It was filmed entirely on location down here in Cornwall, with other exterior scenes in Padstow, where I've also been, so I'm famous so there.
Then, another highly of-its-time historical artifact. What we have here is an advert advertising another advert. Weekly scheduled show-adverts which spanned the entirety of the break were a highly American sort of an idea which briefly caught on over here in the form of, as seen here, Miller Time. I never saw an episode of this, but it looks like your standard apocalyptic zoo-format shriekfest; TFI Friday and Don't Forget Your Toothbrush were the boats riding the zeitgeist, and no-one did them better than Chris Evans in 1996, including Chris Evans at any other time of his life. Chillingly, this advert seems to suggest that this was the second series of Miller Time. Anyway, this brand of metallic tasting, slightly fermented liquid carbon dioxide weren't the only people do to this: I remember being confused and frightened by a similar "show" made by Pepsi and airing during whatever the Christ was on Saturday night ITV at the time. Literally all I can remember about that was the whooping crowd, the red and blue colour scheme, the fact that the presenter was blonde and one nightmarish sequence, which seemed to be a regular feature, showing a dwarf entering a house through a catflap and declaring "It's Great To Be Small!" We only think standards have fallen.
Next, an advert for the BNFL! That's British Nuclear Fuels The L Doesn't Stand For Anything. (Used to be Limited, but it's plc now so the L's just sort of left dangling at the end there). Anyway, it's the old nuclear power board, hence the heavily reassuring tone of the advert, which at times borders on the sociopathic. The presence of VR is another signifier of the era. Was it ever really used for this purpose? Anyone? The BNFL doesn't exist anymore in any practical sense, having basically sold itself off in chunks over the past decade before finally being unceremoniously slaughtered a few months back as part of the Cameron government's zero-tolerance policy on things the government does which cost money (other victims include aircraft carriers, which could have been useful right about now).
Then there's a slightly offputting advert for the Sega Saturn and what I seem to remember being a pretty shit and awful game. There seems to be some half-arsed attempt at introducing the Sega scream to these shores at the end, but as the Saturn was already dying on its arse it's all a bit sad really. SEGA!
Then there's an advert for Finish which is so route-one it's impossible to say anything witty or even remotely interesting about it at all. Then that Bacardi advert gets a reprise for no reason at all. Finally, Bob Elliott hates knives. And on that bombshell...
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Applemask uploaded a new video
(3 weeks ago)
New tape! From a 1996 showing of the underrated Bill Murray film Quick Change, to which I can imagine Bertolt Brecht nodding along in appreciation,...
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New tape! From a 1996 showing of the underrated Bill Murray film Quick Change, to which I can imagine Bertolt Brecht nodding along in appreciation, part of the "Kings of Comedy" strand on Channel 4, which apparently also included the other films named in the background of the caption, if you can be bothered to squint at it, which if I were you I wouldn't, quite frankly. Note the rings. They'd just been introduced and were already less popular than penis cancer. This is the early stages of the look, when Channel 4 were still following through on the initial concept; there's a couple of trailers at the start of this tape adhering to the original style rules (4 circles: one big one showing the programme, one showing the logo, one showing a clock to denote when it'll be on, and one showing some vaguely relevant image) which I would have uploaded were the tape not simply too raddled for my ezCap to read.
First up is a car ad. The mid-nineties was, for car ads, an era of escalating ridiculousness and pomposity, influenced by the likes of Tony Kaye, a man who defined the look of television advertising in the first half of decade with adverts like the Volkswagen one with the little girl, and later the headache-inducing ads in which such as stuntpeople and action photographers explained why Volvos were so bloody great. Cars were always advertised as status symbols, particularly when yuppies came along, but the first half of the nineties was the era of cars as fetish objects. More often than not in black and white, with the contrast knob turned right up, the entire advert twice as sleek and metallic as the car itself. Often the car would be also running some kind of surreal gauntlet across a winding cliff face or around the lip of a cocking volcano for no reason at all. Anyway this one's for some BMW or other which I'm sure was a very nice car. I dunno.
Then there's an advert for the Pentium, which had just been invented the previous year. This campaign was ingenious in the way it pitched the actual chip itself inside the computer. Obviously to modern eyes it all looks so impossibly primitive it might as well be painted on the wall of a cave, but this was a revolution at the time.
Next up, one of the biggest failures in Saatchi history. That is to say, M&C Saatchi as opposed to Saatchi and Saatchi, which contains no Saatchis at all and hasn't since 1994 when they fired them, leading them to set up M&C Saatchi in a fit of pique. I like Australia and I like Australian humour, but Roy and HG were just too Australia-specific to actually work anywhere else, The Dream notwithstanding - that had the hook of the Olympics in progress to keep non-Aussies grounded. Without that, us right-way-up people just don't have the context to fully appreciate what they're riffing on. It doesn't help that this Foster's campaign wasn't a great fit. It was the follow-up to the Mad Max derived storyline which concluded around 1995 in which some skinny guy was searching for The Amber Nectar in a post-apocalyptic future, so it made a change at least, but the fact that no-one understood a word they were saying finally led to the campaign quietly being dropped at the end of its initial 18-month lifespan. I actually find it quite funny once I've tuned my brain to the right frequency. They're no TISM, though.
Then there's a trailer for a shit film, and then a highly generic spot for Head and Shoulders which, inevitably, suggests that a handful of particles of dandruff make you a complete social pariah who genuinely deserves to die. And I like that hat. Neil Morrissey observes, unnoticed, from a distance.
Then there's one of those adverts featuring an old bloke and his grandson which couldn't be broadcast now without lots of sniggering because child abuse is inherently funny. It's for Commercial Union, who shortly merged with General Accident and were then nonchalanty eaten whole by Aviva, who, along with Santander, now own literally everything in Britain to do with money.
Finally, a brief spot tying in with the fairy tale slash cod-medieval campaign for Lloyds Bank, with a very, very lame punchline indeed.
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Applemask uploaded a new video
(3 weeks ago)
A brand new PIF for organ donation which uses the time-honoured tactic of GUILT. Organ donor PIFs are a tricky one, though, because even the "
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A brand new PIF for organ donation which uses the time-honoured tactic of GUILT. Organ donor PIFs are a tricky one, though, because even the "nice" side of the issue depends on someone dying, probably before their time. This PIF embraces that bleak truth, piling on the guilt so hard that by the end of it, you're actually a Catholic. Gina McKee on drums.
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Applemask uploaded a new video
(3 weeks ago)
The end of an old videotape is a fractured, flickering dreamscape of random images and sounds that have been captured in their magnetic amber simpl...
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The end of an old videotape is a fractured, flickering dreamscape of random images and sounds that have been captured in their magnetic amber simply because they happened to be there when the net was lowered. Old commercials, television programmes you wouldn't watch in a billion centuries, forgotten continuity, all flickering and changing, fading in and out of one another like dreams, ephemera manipulated by chance. The end of my Song of the South tape is a canonical example of that, because it ends with an obsure piece of video art followed by a goofy advert for stout.
Before all that, though - and I haven't included this in the upload but I thought I'd mention it - the initial marathon recording finally comes to an end right at the end of the first refrain of Sleeping Satellite - by contrast, we got the whole of East 17's "Everybody in the House of Love" - which then segues into a randomly captured clip from a repeat, presumably in 1992, of Life on Earth, depicting some genuinely eye-popping footage of kangaroos being born. Having seen this, completely by chance, I now have greater respect for kangaroos than I'd ever thought possible. Those guys are more hardcore just BEING BORN than I have ever been in my entire life. They come out as foetuses, looking like mouth ulcers that learned to crawl, and they cold hike from their mother's womb all the way up her torso to the pouch. Before they even get legs. Takes 'em five minutes, and mother doesn't help them a bit. Kangaroos are HARD MOTHERFUCKERS. Check out Life on Earth episode 9 for some absolutely brilliant footage of this going on.
Anyway, that soon seques into a similarly random capture: an edition of Channel 4's "The Dazzling Image" which I, using my Carmody-like powers of research, have learned apparently went out on June 29, 1992 (a week after my ninth birthday, in case you care). "The Dazzling Image" is basically what they called the third and fourth series of "Ghosts in the Machine", a biannual series of short films from new talent. The new talent in this case is Richard Heslop, and it will surprise no-one to learn that he was a protegé of Derek Jarman. The film is called "Floating", and it's "about" a London bus driver driven mad, or possibly just saner than everyone else, by the squalor and despair of modern block-of-flats living. Either way, he decides that a second flood is coming and proceeds to destroy his flat in the process of making a boat. Meanwhile, ravers and punks outside the tower medicate themselves with self help tapes and indulge in meaningless physical activities to the sound of pounding house music in Jarmanistic montage sequences. Apparently it's a comedy. Quite an interesting film, actually, from the little I have of it. I'd like to see the whole thing. It won Best Short Film at Cannes, you know.
Anyway this file I've uploaded, eh? It starts with the last minute and a half of "Floating" before the credits - for all I know this is how the film ends - and then cuts to the omnious caption for The Dazzling Image. The first advert is an extremely cute Creature Comfort for the Electrics.
After that there's a strange commercial for Murphy's Stout. It doesn't really work terribly well but I'm damned if I can figure out why. Soundtracked by the Andrews Sisters, which is why you're not watching this if you're in Germany. Later on Murphy's hit on the campaign set in Ballykissangel-Ireland and starring Gerard Rooney in the role he was born to play ("Handsome Man").
Then, Fiat! Quite an old-fashioned advert, this; could have been seen in 1989 without standing out. Starring Mark Strong! Which is appropriate, because he's actually called Marco Giuseppe Salussolia and is Italian-Austrian. Fact!
Then Midland Bank! Now they're HSBC, they don't really try to be nice anymore. They did back then, though, because they were the Listening Bank, and even old ladies are welcome.
Finally, most of a famous Barclaycard advert. The tape ends right before the punchline, but I'm sure you know what it is anyway, even if you haven't seen it.
The fascination of all this, for me, is the same as that one description of photography as "a shadow of something that has actually happened". All these things were transmitted and broadcast at that particular moment in 1992, and they weren't intended to last any longer than it took to see them. They are things that happened, and won't ever happen again, and here they are on the Internet for some reason. Brilliant, what they can do with technology today.
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Applemask uploaded a new video
(3 weeks ago)
Wherever we were that day, we were out a long damn time because here's some more adverts! There was no break in the middle of The South West Week, ...
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Wherever we were that day, we were out a long damn time because here's some more adverts! There was no break in the middle of The South West Week, so instead here's the end of that, which is so lame it's almost thrilling, followed by the rarity that was the TSW production caption, which was about to go extinct altogether. Then there's a Summer TSW next slide for the ITV Chart Show.
The first advert is that Do It All one again; slightly different products being illustrated (mostly) but basically the same advert. Then! An incredibly dopey advert for Shell's toy car giveaway thing, starring the voice of Simon Cadell and the face of that blandly comical looking guy who was in at least one advert every day between 1990 and 2003 or so.
Then there's what one would expect was a pretty cheap advert - a collection of You've Been Framed footage of shit happening in service of Scottish Amicable in some extraordinary manner. Simon Cadell again on vocals, apparently having set his pipes to "seductive" by mistake.
Then there's the final fate of the Courts irritant again, and HALFORDS! BECAUSE THEY HAVE A SALE! HURRY DOWN! DON'T MISS THE BARGAINS! DO NOT MISS THEM! IF YOU DO NOT COME DOWN RIGHT NOW AND BUY A BIKE CHAIN AT A BARGAIN PRICE YOU WILL REGRET IT FOR THE REST OF YOUR MISERABLE LIFE! HALFORDS! NOW! NOW!
In contrast, that festival of bellowing is succeeded by a tranquil desert island thing for Bounty. There were loads of these over the years, all basically identical.
Then there's a nightmarish piece of claymation attempting to get us to buy a product even its own advert is dubious about. The late eighties and early nineties were the pinaccle of the INSTANT! trend, with instant coffee being drunk by even the middle classes, and things like Oxo's disgusting-sounding but undoubtedly fast ready-made gravy in a carton being invented. Everything had either to come already "ready" or otherwise to be freeze-dried and just-add-water whether it liked it or not, including that most sacred of liquids, tea. Insanely enough, you can still get Typhoo QT, even though the very notion of it is basically the opposite of England itself. Oh well.
Next we're informed that the new album by Roxette exists, and then an ITV trailer appears (slightly mistimed) for what they say is a movie but was actually the feature-length pilot episode of a TV series that no-one watched and which, pilot aside, wasn't even shown over here: Covington Cross. An Anglo-American co-production (symbolised by the presence in the cast of a redheaded Ione Skye), it was apparently a sort of comedy-drama version of one of those shows that Pat Reynolds of Achewood would watch. It ran for half a season on ABC and ITV to absolutely no notice whatsoever. Pity, really, because it looks etertaining enough, and Nigel Terry - favoured voice of Derek Jarman - is and will always be awesome. Note also the presence of the late Glenn Quinn of Angel. Not pictured: Cherie Lunghi.
Then Fitz returns to offer us dead suave actors and introduce the ITV Chart Show, ie the second best music TV show ever made, the opening minute of which I've included for curiosity's sake. This is what we were listening to in 1992. Full disclosure: I like "Sleeping Satellite".
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