MFI Crazy Sale Prices: ITV (Yorkshire) adverts, 18th July 1985

The second break from "Airport 79-80 Season Update" starts with the kind of thing you might find on the Tenuous Adult Channel: a big red dome-shaped wobbly jelly with a squirt of dream topping on top, wobbling from side to side. It's only an advert for Birds' Dream Topping, though. Could really have been made at almost any time between 1970 and yesterday, really, apart from the video quality and, especially, the powerfully 1985 drum machine sounds. And maybe the giggling voiceover that I genuinely can't tell if it's a grown woman or not. Just add milk. Next, as seen here before: some yuppie flirtation techniques with Harvey's. Drinking a mixer sherry neat? It's not as unlikely as it sounds! Featuring two icy white people and a subservient black man, although I'm not suggesting anything deliberate is going on here. Then: quiche. Amazing quiche, judging by the power-pop accompaniment. Alright, Gary Watson calls it a "flan" but that's just because it sounds less girly and French and frou-frou and homosexual and gay. It's a Birds Eye Menu Master special - you know, the microwavable meals Created For The Way You Live Today. Which is apparently sitting in a beige living room watching your teenage daughter run up the phone bill. And now: cat shit kebab. Except for the kebab part. Glade have invented a spray to make your moggy's litter tray not stink up the house quite as much, they've put a cartoon ginger job on the tin, and they've hired Roy Kinnear to voice the animated version in the manner of Richard Briers' Custard. He doesn't explain how this is formulated specifically for cat waste, though, and why it's therefore worth buying this in addition to the usual air fresheners. Never mind, here's Charlie Chaplin. Well, not really, obviously, but it is the Little Tramp, played (brilliantly) by Billy Scudder. Anyone who's seen Modern Times would be dubious at best about Chaplin agreeing to endorse a technology company, but he was highly dead by now, and Bubbles Incorporated (the company Chaplin set up to run his image rights) had no problems licencing him - or more accurately the Tramp - to IBM for what turned out to be a massively successful campaign. The slogan was even "A Tool for Modern Times", which is almost certainly deliberately taking the piss. Anton Rodgers provides the words. If you could take a mosquito net with you wherever you went this summer, it would be very stupid. As this advert, and a subdued and wry Enn Reitel, demonstrates. Fortunately, you can just get creams and salves instead, like Auton. I mean Autan. All very genteel and English, despite the wacky premise. THE SYSTEMATIC SALE IS ON NOW AT MFI. And if you're puzzling over what could possibly be systematic about it, it's a brand name. They make bedrooms and kitchens. Look, here's some. Unfortunately the first one that stays on screen long enough to actually take in what it looks like is actually quite ugly. Bedroom's okay though. Anyway, buy some of that. EMM EFF EYE! REMEMBER THE AMAZING STRENGTH OF LOCTITE SUPERGLUE III. Edward Judd forgets to raise his voice at the end of that sentence so it sounds like an order rather than a question. But anyway, now there's something even better. Superglue IV: The Quest for Peace? No, just Superglue Extra. It doesn't run! Unlike Steve Ovett, who uses it to fix his gym equipment so he can continue to generally be better than Sebastian Coe. Proved in industry for use in the home, and the gym apparently. Keep away from children. Finally: madness. A row of identical blonde secretaries babble a mantra about nuggies and an engineful of firemen do the same in imitation of a siren. No wonder Kentucky Fried Chicken was in the doldrums at this time.