Spirit of the South: ITV (TVS) Continuity and Adverts, November 28th 1992

This one comes from Megan Earley's box o'VHS tapes, and dates from 1992 and a showing of Who Framed Roger Rabbit in the last weeks of TVS. Apparently November 28th (thanks to Mark Pentler). You'd think a major film, then only four years old, would be saved for closer to the big event. But then you'd think the same of Tom Hanks in Big, which premiered on ITV in 1991, pissed away on the 4th when it was perfect for Christmas Day. People weren't still buying shit by Christmas Day, you see, so they made more scratch putting the big movies in the build-up. Besides, at this point ITV had officially given up on competing with the BBC for Christ's birthday itself, in a way that bordered on outright nihilistic despair. I imagine the "reforms" of the Broadcasting Act were bringing them down, not to mention the fact that some of their biggest franchises (and one of their smallest) were actively dying. More on that later. So this is TVS' last Christmas, but unlike their predecessors they didn't mark the fact by dressing in hooded black robes and chanting continuity announcements in Latin while circling a huge onyx tombstone to the sound of an endlessly tolling bell. In fact it's all quite jolly. The tape begins halfway through a trailer for that year's Christmas treats, punctuated by a cartoon sheep bounding through some snow, dressing as a reindeer, or doing a highland twirl. Recycled from a couple of years earlier because why bother making something new. Said treats include yet another Alright on the Night, with the late Denis Norden and his various archive-scraping festivals doing a lot of light-ents heavy lifting for ITV at the time. As was Jeremy Beadle, scourge of the credulous and Britain's most hated man at the time, largely because we were told he was, even though he was actually a lovely man who just made shit television programmes. Finally, Michael Barrymore doing his usual whatever it was he did before he was Troubled. The TVS sheep murders a partridge in a pear tree out of sheer exuberance. Quick Bruce Hammal-voiced reminder of what's on next, then: adverts. First up: lager again. Can't get enough of it. Griff Rhys Jones does the can-can in celebration of an invention that really drove the final knife into the 3.2 Standard Lager: the widget, that makes a tin of lager taste like draught through science. Next: face softener. Two Persian monks and a Scottish Widow wander through a sandtrap as someone narrates the story of how they just nicked the secret of silk from China. And now that very substance has had some softening-type makeup named after it. Fancy. NOW, FOR THE SUPER NINTENDO, that lightgun I never saw one of in the wild. It's a bazooka, for heaven's sake. Why does a bazooka need to be precise to a single. Television. Pixel? Also, why are two of its games Tetris-style block-arrangers? What use is it for those? Then: two particularly thick Paparazzi on a boat get pointlessly overexcited about some guy's breakfast, having apparently never heard of Fruit 'n' Fibre before. At least Jon Glover is amused. Next: oh, right, it's Christmas. Soon. Amongst the presents under the tree: a big box reading "Blockbuster Video". A Cyril Shapsian voiceover that you're clearly supposed to take for Father Christmas (possibly provided by Jon Glover again) suggests you get your kids something from the Walt Disney Classics range! Which, you'll remember, includes every movie they ever made no matter how recent - hence the appearance of The Rescuers Down Under from two years earlier. A perfectly good film, but not in Disney's front rank. Comfortably in the second tier, though, as are Robin Hood and The Great Mouse Detective. Cinderella's definitely Premiership, though. NB: £12.99 in 1992 cash is roughly £25 now. Next: Meridian are bastards. Well, that's harsh - they've got a right to promote themselves ahead of their launch, and where else are they going to do that but on the vanquished TVS? But it does unavoidably feel like gloating, even if it isn't, to put a montage of smiling coastal faces and subtle introductions of the new logo as an advert running in TVS' last weeks. I don't remember Westcountry doing this at the same time, although GMTV did, and with Carlton it's a tossup between their capacity for evil and their complete lack of interest in ITV itself beyond strip-mining it. Enjoy this dog's penis. Finally: furniture. The Suite Shop and Just Leather are giving away vouchers for now-quaint looking triangular Tesco stores to blow-dried women in dressing gowns throughout the region. They very weakly manage to tie it in with Christmas at the end. After the film, Denis Norden being wry in between clips from B Movie trailers. You see what I meant about the heavy lifting. But first: Robert Zemeckis' best movie (fight me IRL). I do have the three commercial breaks from within the film, but it's so early in December that there's nothing overtly Christmassy in any of them. Therefore they'll keep until the new year.