The "What's Up, Doc" Tape Part One (TSW commercials, September 1989) скачать в хорошем качестве

The "What's Up, Doc" Tape Part One (TSW commercials, September 1989)

I got a fancy new video capture doohickey! Actually, it's not fancy, it's a Chinese knockoff of the market leader for which you literally have to programme your own software, but it works. After a fashion. Anyway, my favourite videotape is now 24 years old and is one of the earliest tapes in the house. It's called the "What's Up Doc" Tape because the bulk of it consists of the (excellent) Peter Bogdanovich movie of the same name. I used to zoom through it watching the adverts all the time. It's from 1989, the year we bought our first VCR. According to Robin Carmody, International Man of Mystery, What's Up Doc was on ITV on the 12th of September, 1989. Actually, this first extract might be from earlier: it comes from a showing - presumably on ITV, given that the programme caption doesn't have the 4 logo on it - of David Gordon's "Dance in America" ballet thingy "Made in USA", starring Mikhail Baryshnikov with Gordon's wife and muse Valda Setterfield (lithest granny in the world) and a bunch of other guys in three pieces. I'm not a particular ballet fan, but I liked these. "Murder", the last one, is funny (co-written and designed with Edward Gorey, no less), and while TV Nine Lives (which you can see start here; it's a Western pastiche in more ways than one) passed me by, the first piece, "Valda & Misha", is fascinating. It's just Setterfield and Baryshnikov having a conversation using their entire bodies, around a spartan set which occasionally uses CSO to illustrate what they're dancing about. It was created by Gordon specifically for the medium of film. And for those two dancers. So I've included the last bit of that for the hell of it. And then: adverts! The first advert is an interesting bit of history. It's an advert for South West Water which doesn't show their logo, but does show the logo of "The Ten Water and Sewage Businesses of England and Wales" - ie the watery England thing from the end of those Water Awareness adverts. By September 1989, the water was being actively sold off - whether this commercial break is from September is another question - hence this advert's explicit insitence that water is a BUSINESS, more of one than you think even. More importantly, however, this is a year after the poisoning of Camelford - in which a tankerful of aluminium sulphate ended up in the water supply, scraping off the lead and copper in the pipes as it went. It's still not been dealt with properly, either. At around about this point, my town was placed under Boil Water Notice lockdown after the supply was contaminated with chlorine or some damn thing. So yeah, if anyone needed a nice big publicity campaign, it was the company then still known as SWW. (Anyone else remember their old logo? The circle with a wave and "SWW"? No?) The nasal, upper-class baritone voiceover - which might belong to Jeremy Brett - leaves you in no doubt that THIS IS SERIOUS, MUM. Best bit: some dick in front of a radar screen turns to another guy and says "Looks Like More Rain On The Way". Then! Another one from BP's "For All Our Tomorrows" campaign. The one with the rocks. Not the best joke ever, but the voice of Tom makes everything better. Then! One from Hitachi's big late eighties early nineties campaign of insisting that their goods are not shoddy. Possibly influenced by the rise of Goldstar the previous year. All the adverts featured the great Sparrow and her signature song (outside of France, that is; her real signature song is La Vie en Rose, but this is the one us Anglophonics associate her with) and the voice of Geoffrey Palmer. Then! A naked lady! All the best videos have naked ladies, and this one's going commando in an attempt to somehow illustrate how great Soft & Gentle is. She's that familiar kind of rich, shoulder-padded aspirational figure, all living in a mansion surrounded by swans in a lake with a glass fountain. Probably. She was all the rage in the 80s and was on the way out as the recession began to take hold. Please don't ask me what the music is; I'd like to know too. It's strangely haunting, a kind of adman's approximation of the Cocteau Twins. Then! Famous advert for Simple in which a flower is destroyed to prove a point and Joanna Lumley stands too close to the microphone. Note that the soap is white, which means that the famous slogan isn't quite true. White is artificial. Simple used to be brown, but around 1988 they finally bowed to the fact that everyone wants soap to be white, and changed the colour, covering their arses with two-page adverts in the Family Circle about how it still didn't COUNT. Then! Pedigree Chum! Fairly standard doggy-dinscapades, with the help of that year's Crufts winners, all of whom are long dead. That big hairy job running around after the packshot won. Potterdale Classic of Moonhill, her name was, or Cassie to you. Bearded Collie. An actual dog-looking dog, anyway. Then! Back to the ballet for a segue. More of this tape coming up as my VCR and GraphEdit permit.