Here’s something short I wrote for Transdiffusion‘s YouTube channel to accompany an odd video.
Advertisements in the 1980s sometimes provoke a smile of nostalgia. And sometimes a thrill of horror. Did we really have our hair like that, eat that rubbish and think grey, white and red slanty stripes were all you needed in a wallpaper or book cover to look super-stylish?
And then there’s the French. Who knows more about style than the French? Nobody. But that comes with a failure to understand that some images can disturb. Now, *obviously* that is going to include Captain Birdseye dubbed – and badly overprinted – as Captain Iglo. But here we have a scratch card that wins you polystyrene bricks; customers who get violent if you don’t stock Babybel; cats with radioactive footprints; margarine being chronically misused; an actor in a white coat pointing at a VDU (“trust me! I wear a costume and point effectively!”); children failing to eat biscuits; and dyed canaries. And then they bring out the naked dancing women-chips, who cheerfully dive into hot fat (don’t try this at home, kids) and then… go ice skating. Inexplicably. Don’t have nightmares.