reacting to british 80s adverts

An old McDonald’s advert made me want a Big Mac. An advert for pre-cooked microwave sausages made me want to send the microwave back. Watching British adverts from the 1980s turned out to involve quite a lot of opinions about food I wasn’t actually eating.

I wasn’t born in the 1980s, so this wasn’t a trip through commercials I remembered from childhood. I was watching part of a compilation from Zombie Boy’s VHS Vault and finding out what British viewers had been sold. Some of it looked appealing. Some of it absolutely did not.

Watch the video on YouTube.

McDonald’s did its job

I don’t think McDonald’s is good, but sometimes I want that very specific taste. It had been so long since I’d had a Big Mac, and seeing the advert made me hungry all of a sudden. I went from watching an old commercial to thinking it was Big Mac time.

That reaction was much more straightforward than the one I had to Baileys. I do like Baileys, but the advert involved a cat drinking from a bowl and licking itself. I could see that it was trying to be sexy. A cat washing itself did not make me want the drink.

I liked Baileys itself, but the cat drinking from a bowl and washing itself was a gross way to sell it to me.

Coffee was familiar in a different way

The Nescafe Gold Blend advert brought me back to one of the differences I’ve noticed living here. Instant coffee still strikes me as a funny thing because the North American coffee I was used to was filtered coffee. Even at a truck stop or convenience store, I’d expect a pot of brewed coffee.

Seeing an old advert for instant coffee was another reminder of how ordinary it is in the UK compared with my own experience. I don’t have that same background of treating it as the usual cup of coffee.

The cereal adverts brought up preferences too. Given the choice, I’d rather have Crunchy Nut than cornflakes, especially the versions with chunky clusters. I realised I hadn’t had it in a long time.

Convenience had its limits

Then came instant mashed potatoes, sold with little robots. I thought the use of special effects and animation stood out among the adverts I’d seen so far. The product itself made me sad, although I can accept that there’s a time and place for instant mash.

Pre-cooked microwave sausages were harder to forgive. The advert presented them as a quick way to get hot, brown sausages without mess, and I hated the idea. I was upset enough that I refused to let them be the last thing I watched.

I couldn’t get past sausages going into the microwave. Even after moving on to other adverts, they were still what I was thinking about when I finished. I’d watched quite enough, and I was still angry about the sausages.

Chocolate was a better subject

The Milky Way advert made me wonder who it was really speaking to. It looked like a children’s commercial, but its promise was that the chocolate wouldn’t spoil an appetite between meals. I wondered whether that reassurance was aimed at moms deciding what to give their children. That’s my reading of the pitch, rather than something I knew about the campaign.

M&M’s gave me a simpler verdict. I prefer them to Smarties, and I still love them even though living in England has changed what I expect chocolate to taste like.

I grew up eating Hershey’s in Canada. That was simply what chocolate tasted like to me, until I got used to British chocolate, which I think is better. Going back to Hershey’s afterwards, I found it shockingly waxy. My preferences have changed, but M&M’s have survived. The microwave sausages never had a chance.