A series of ladies in various costumes (nedgligee, flowery frock, birthday suit) an locations (bordello, meadow, bath) slip a hard chocolate bar in their mouth and wipe and lick the crumbs away. Made the day (and long nights) of many an adolescent pornboy.
Sex. of course. is what we most often repress. so it’s not surprising that the notorious Cadbury Flake commercial became so
A soft focused lady gets her chocs off
6 THE lIST 27 Andi
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popular. The ever changing beauties at the centre of these commercials — culled from endless magazine images of what we're told we should think of as erotic. have one thing in common: each is alone. and sexually aroused (though rather easily).
Let the urgent. insistent ringing of the phone be ignored. and the overflowing of the bath be forgotten. for these women are lost in onanistic rapture. practising flakeio with a chocolate bar. While they're alone. they’re using that well-known substitute for intimacy and affection. chocolate (sex is another substitute. but the advertisers won’t wish to tell us that): we all know what they really need. and you. fella. are the man for the
job.
Of course. real life must never intrude. so the
answerphone doesn't
kick in with ‘lli.[
can't come to the phone right now
because there's a big green lizard on it’. and we don't worry about the downstairs neighbours’ leakage problems. because this is a projected world of total indul- gence without respon— sibility. a return of our repressed selves.
Nick Kamen jockeys for advertising space with Levi's
r. ; :- Ly. [5,.“ :1: uh
In an attempt to locate the book he has written on flyfishing, one J.R. Hartley turns to good old Yellow Pages to solve his woes.
The body is also the source of anxiety. We all fear age and the decline of our bodies. so we‘re told little about that sweet old man JR. Hartley's rubber pants and dentures. Instead. we’re given the aspirational model of an old man with none of the pension poverty of the aged in today's society.
His main source of concern is finding a book. Given that this book was made available in all bad bookstores by mid-campaign. you can't help but suspect that his inability to locate it was due to .»\l/.lieiiiiei"s. but the advertisers emphasised instead his good health as he trudged busily from shop to shop. in profoundly unobservant quest.
We too could enjoy this healthy. if rather fatuous state. if we truly aspire and use the product. ()ddly. later campaigns included an elderly woman receiving footage of her long dead husband and a decrepit gardener on his last legs until he receives the boost of a new mower. You don’t have to be a coffin—dodging old duffer to benefit from Yellow Pages. but it seems to help.
Ring if you're glad to be grey