"I don't recommend it to anybody." ITV (Border) adverts and continuity, 27th June 1994

Looks like Dances with Wolves is over, right? PSYCHE IT'S JUST PART ONE. Possibly they're going with the heavyweight Special Edition that includes a further hour of additional footage (the only parts of which that's are really necessary being the ones with Maury Chaykin, partly for plot reasons but mostly because Maury Chaykin is great). Or not; three hours is quite long enough for ITV to get cold feet. The Special Edition is the one with the proper intermission, though. Either way, it ends, and our taper naturally interrupts the Diet Coke thing for the start of part two the following day. But they jump the gun a bit because we get the adverts first. Starting with a very stupid and pretty visibly 90s advert for Heinz' latest attempt at expansion: getting in on Shippams' territory with their own sammich spreads. (They did already make an attempt with the conceptually similar Toast Toppers, but we will **never speak of them again**). To illustrate this, they've gone with a man wearing a sammich board, purely for the pun, displaying a message hardly worth scrawling on a piece of slate, let alone neatly printing on some MDF. But of course it's all part of the slogan. The spreads look disgusting, but that's a given. And now, here's Jane Asher, then spokeswoman for McVities, and probably one of her own actual children. Today they're going to show you how to make hobnobs, from combine harvester to packet. Particularly the growing of oats, which the sprog manages to parlay into lounging around and not bothering with the advert because who cares. This campaign used the unusual but definitely memorable tactic of having the slogan spoken in rhythm with a melody that fit it exactly and would have made a perfect jingle if it was sung, and in fact does anyway because being spoken instead makes you fit it together in your own head. Lose £10 in a month! Buy a Jim Davidson VHS! Okay so it's Slim-Fast, and unusually an American advert bought-in more or less wholesale - we had nearly identical packaging in this country so it works. We were largely still using the "look at that fat bastard, that's me that is" format over here, while they were having Shari Belafonte yell at us, but no-one really cared. The real issue is the lack of Patrick Allen. Shari's not commanding enough on her own. At least they include the slide-whistle. Why bother otherwise? So you've got your new Ford. Why are we still talking to you? This transaction is over. But suppose you want to change your mind? Well, you'd better just be talking about the colour or we'll kill you. But if that is the case, we're happy to accommodate. A 30 day exchange window for shallow people, RAC cover, and a replacement system in case it breaks down within a year which it won't because we're awesome and how dare you imply such a thing. Meanwhile, some rich bastard in his avant-garde apartment eats carefully-placed grapes and fiddles with his fung shui. Your statutory rights are not affected. Next is that twat in the horrible suit trying to bribe us into buying the Mail. No dice. Followed by a brief vignette of a lesbian couple (respect my headcanon) enjoying some Nescafe by the fire while some animated beans swirl about the place. So there's that. On the other hand, a similarly brief vignette of some Gillette body spray amidst lots of splashing water and sculpted torsos. So there's that, as well. Heyyy, it's the King! Still Prince of Wales at this point, of course, and here's an attempt to try and garner some level of sympathy a year before his divorce is finalised by holding a frank one-to-one interview with Jonathan Dimbleby. His ex-wife would rather overshadow him by doing the same thing a year later for the BBC, of course, but at least Charles picked a decent journalist and not an absolute chucklefuck. Another trailer! Moving Story is largely forgotten now, but it was a pretty good comedy-drama - created by Jack Rosenthal, who was lowkey behind most of the drama worth watching on ITV at the time - about some removals men, starring solid character actors like Warren Clarke, Phil Davis and Kenneth Colley. And then over to good old-fashioned IVC with Craig Austin, Border's continuity kingpin at the time and the main reason why their presentation punched so far above their weight in the 1990s. I'm also pretty sure he's what happens if you merge Hue and Cry into a single person. He promises a bunch of shows for your insomniac enjoyment - a repeat of The Equalizer, some Indycar highlights (which we only care about at all because Nigel Mansell is doing it) and the sitcom Coach, which has officially missed the American Sports bubble in this country and wasn't likely to catch on anyway. But now: part two of Dances With Wolves, which starts (apart from Jerry failing to shut up again) with a faintly bathetic "previously on" sequence like this is the CW or something.