For Men to Remember and Women to Love: Channel Four (Granada) adverts. 17th December 1986 скачать в хорошем качестве

For Men to Remember and Women to Love: Channel Four (Granada) adverts. 17th December 1986

Still Carmen! It's quite a long opera. And film. So this third break from the movie starts with something you don't really need for Christmas particularly: gum. Wrigley's Spearmint Gum, from the campaign that obsessed over the "spear" part of the taxonomy and its pointyness, so everything had arrows. This is a shorterned version, though, so there's only a couple of those. Mostly it's about ludicrously well-developed young people bouncing around a beach chewing at each other. Like you do in December in the Northern hemisphere. Get some soon. Next, also not particularly relevant for Christmas, Vidal Sassoon hair products. I guess you could buy some for stockings and the like. Matt Frewer narrates some business that's about as 1986 as you can imagine. The fashions, the hair, the sometimes random-looking makeup choices. The angles, the white backdrop. Call it art, call it style: it's actually just advertising. Still not particularly Christmassy: furniture polish. It's Mr. Sheen! Somehow he's shrunk this Deirdre Barlow lookalike and turned her into a cartoon so she can have a quick fly around her living room with him as he metaphorically makes everything shiny. In this version, the woman has a bespoke Cockney accent, because I guess they wanted to make it clear she was a common working-class fishwife. It was later redubbed by what sounded like Bonnie Langford (you can see that version in The Hard Sell: Housework), possibly because they realised how aggravatingly patronising the accent was. I think they also redubbed Mr Sheen with a more confident take, although they kept that annoying lisp. Apologies to lispers. Finally, something relevant to Christmas, although the advert isn't. Hair curlers! I think that's what they are. What Nosferatu has to do with anything I don't know, but here's the Braun styling stick thing anyway and an arguably even more 1986 advert than the Vidal Sassoon one. Quantel collages, video stuttering, dotted lines drawn around everything for no very good reason, and the usual bright colours and feathered hair. It's like the title sequence from Gems crossed with a stick of rock. Check out the fluorescent leotards! More gifts: it's Accurist and its fishwatch again. And then more smellies. Make her Christmas really special. Okay, I mean, I don't know her or have any reason to care what her Christmas is like, but she's pretty so I guess I'll give it a go. It's Mystique by Lentheric, whose adverts were generally the worst, being cheaply made and full of the worst, most cringeworthy copy, but this one's actually okay because it's more or less in and out the door before it can shit itself. And as if to make up for the lack of Christmas in the first half of the break, here's the most Christmassy advert imaginable. Starting with a snowed-on Ford Sierra and a mock-Tudor mansion, zooming into a sophists' house party with chuckling and sherry, and then transcending dimensions altogether by zooming further into a Christmas card which opens up to an impossibly sumptuous Victorian/Edwardian festive snowscene with horse-drawn carriages, robins, wooden fences, gas lamps, people huddled around burning bins for warmth (actually, that's still pretty common), snow-covered rooftops and the glow of fireplaces, everything but an eight-year old chimney sweep dying of tuberculosis but with a toothless smile despite everything. BUY SHERRY. And finally that British Airways thing where the brilliance of the airline destroys architectural landmarks the world over. Thanks a lot, Sir John King.