08-03-2025
I've been rewatching the best old TV ads – and everything we loved has gone
It was a private rebellion against World Book Day. Despairing that in some corners of this nation it's suggested that you might look at a book once a year and, at vast expense, dress up your kid as a giant peach, I took to YouTube. I doom-scrolled and the algorithm thrust at me a programme first broadcast by Channel 4 in April 2000: The 100 Greatest TV Ads. It was almost three hours long, and as I watched, it turned into a soul-tearing hymn to a now dead art.
Presented by a youthful Graham Norton, sweetly free of beard, it was like a tour of a graveyard of beloved cultural icons.
At the number-one spot (sorry if I'm spoiling this, but you've had 25 years to watch it) was a Guinness advert. Released in 1999, it tells the story of a Polynesian surfer who has the patience to wait for the perfect wave. When it comes, and he rides it, the white horses of the sea's foam become actual horses. While others wipe out around him, he rides the wave to shore and is leapt on by his fellow surfers as they congratulate him.
In its extended one-and-a-half minutes, there is much to ponder on and marvel at. Not least the freedom that the advertising agency AMV BBDO was given by its client so it could make a film of such beauty and subtlety. There is symbolism that the waves are like the frothy head of a Guinness and, more acutely, it's a pint that is worth the wait; a proper pint of Guinness must be poured no more than three-quarters full, rested and settled before topping off. And if that necessity is controversial, everyone agrees it's marketing genius.
Then, within the narrator's script there's an unintended nod to a future scourge of our planet: 'Tick, followed tock, followed tick followed tock'.
For that is now the beating heart of advertising, TikTok. Vapid, trivial, egocentric, vain, amateur and that most hideous of terms that sums up all that is wrong in modern media: user-generated content.
From TikTok and other social media channels comes today's inspiration: adverts that mirror the content of 'influencers' – think of every commercial for food delivery, deodorant, apps and more, aping the hand-held mobile phone video. Although it's getting confusing now, because the influencers, now called ' social creators ', are simulating the movie makers with more professional styles of filming.
All of which must cause even more pain for directors such as Jonathan Glazer, who made that Guinness advert and went on to create the gangster film Sexy Beast.
The ad world doesn't use or nurture talent like that anymore. When I was 19, I got work experience in the post room at Saatchi & Saatchi on London's Charlotte Street. I always made particularly slow deliveries to one office, that of the director of the Silk Cut campaigns; he had framed images on the walls of the likes of knives cutting through purple silk.
Today that fabulous creativity can't see the light of day, it is banned. Legal restrictions and woke sentiment have eradicated these ads, and it's reflective of the lost spirit and adventure of Britain. Or, to summarise: no booze, no fags, no fun.
You see, the authorities no longer trust us. Even a witty portrayal of an outdated attitude is forbidden, lest we lose our marbles and enact it.
Remember that advert with Penelope Keith for Parker Pens from 1975 when she taught a class of girls at finishing school 'How to spend Daddy's lovely money'? One girl sticks up a hand to ask, 'Does one spell pence with an 'S' or a 'C'?' 'I don't think you need worry about that, my dear,' replies Ms Keith.
Today we must be shielded from jokes about the aspirations of women.
Then there was the Tango advert of 1991, in which a slow-motion replay reveals an oversized orange person slapping the face of a man who has just taken a sip of the fizzy drink. It was pulled from broadcast after school children started mimicking the advert and hurting each other – sometimes bursting ear drums – in the process.
And there's the plethora of adverts, across the 1970s, that feature the twin horrors of the pleasures of alcohol and the advances of men. Cointreau specialised in featuring lascivious Frenchmen plying young women with twice-distilled triple sec orange liqueur. A 1984 Fosters ad depicted a woman as needing shielding (by Paul Hogan of Crocodile Dundee fame) from a ballet dancer 'with no strides on', while Castlemaine XXXX famously saw a pick-up filled with lager collapse with the addition of two bottles of sweet sherry 'for the ladies'.
Such humour is now a no-go area, as is the idea of a man dressed in black, crossing snow-filled mountains to bring a box of Milk Tray chocolates to a woman who lives alone in a smart chalet. Back then, this Bond-like character was the stuff of female fantasy. Now he's a creepy intruder.
We must also tread carefully to avoid offending our neighbours. Thus you wouldn't today watch an Audi advert mocking stereotypical Germanic behaviour, as happened in 1984 with a voiceover saying, 'If you want to get on the beach before the Germans, you'd better buy an Audi 100.'
One of the great ad men of the 1980s was Robin Wight, now a London ex-pat living on remote Exmoor. Wight and his firm WCRS created a spoof version of the Dambusters film to advertise Carling Black Label lager, and he tells me, 'I couldn't have made that now, as we're not allowed to upset the Germans.'
Thus a nostalgic watch of the greatest ads of all time is a distressing tale of lost culture and humour. No Hamlet cigar ads, because you cannot relieve misfortune with tobacco; no saucy Flake adverts, because they demean women, are pornographic and encourage you to flood the bathroom floor. While Fry's Turkish Delight is an abomination because it depicts white people as sexy nomads in thawbs and shemaghs.
Still, if you want to access all that's foul, murderous, bullying and immoral, it's just a click away on Google.
