On Radio Luxembourg of the time, the evening was divided into 15-minute programmes, each one associated with a sponsor and, generally, a single record label. The Wrigley’s programme was fifteen minutes of Pye records, and this jingle was used during the show.

On Big L, shows were unsponsored and a mix of discs from various labels was played, with spot advertising in-between. This Radio Luxembourg jingle became a 30 second spot advert on Radio London.

Incidentally, Teddy Johnson’s other claim to fame was that he had a popular programme on Radio Luxembourg, and was even resident in the Grand Duchy in the early 1950s.

The post Juicy Fruit adds to your fun! appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Matt Monro sang…

“Zal is freshness with a zing!
Everyday, yes, Zal’s the thing!
For the springy, zingy smell of pine!
Zal disinfectant every time!

Zal kills germs, kicks them out!
Zal leaves the zing of pine about!
You’ll notice the difference with everything!
Zal is freshness with a zing!”

Children of the sixties – or ‘babyboomers’ as sociologists are wont to call us – carry with them an unusual legacy to accompany their memories of black and white television, President Kennedy and the Beatles. As independent television spread through the regions in the late fifties and early sixties, children were brought face-to-face with the power of the advertising jingle.

Imported from American commercial radio of the forties, these were ITV’s secret weapon in its first decade of advertising. The only screen commercials with which the British public was familiar – in the cinema – had been the hard sell with relatively little use of jingles. By the time Lew Grade, Sidney Bernstein and Howard Thomas were in full swing, jingles were hitting the ear from every angle.

As a baby boomer now in his sixties, I remain haunted – nay, assailed – by the jingles of my youth, which play in my head without invitation on an almost daily basis (“One, two, three, four, reasons why Julie Andrews likes Ryvita!”). Whether the original advertising agencies intended these children to be humming the tunes fifty years later is not on record.

But, as many of the products concerned are no longer available, one suspects that their efforts peaked too late. (“In days of old, fruits were sold that had to be washed by hand, but now they are sold ready washed by Whitworths. Whitworths are a girl’s best friend!”). In the advertising world of today, jingles themselves are passé. Some have survived (“A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play!”) whilst others have been hurriedly modified to suit the advertising standards authorities (“Malteasers, the chocolate with the less fattening centre!” becoming a more truthful though less fun “Malteasers, the chocolate with the crisp, lighter centre!”).

The jingles of the sixties were, of course, the nursery rhymes of the electrical age. Sung in the playground, hummed in the classroom, even used in freeform essay punishments, they were the very essence of capitalism, worming their way permanently into your brain. A peculiar feature of 50s advertising, which credited viewers with being gormless, required the product name to be endlessly repeated (“Remember the name, Persil!”). This habit so infected speech patterns that even today, on stating a brand name, one can be tempted to repeat it endlessly.

A particular feature of 50s and 60s copywriting was twisting the wording to make it rhyme (“Eveninks and morninks I drink Warninks! Warninks Advocaat!”). Or the even more absurd tendency – to state the utterly meaningless with sublime conviction (“Eden Vale yogurt is the young idea!”). The implication of the deranged state of a shopper’s mind was never far from the surface. The suggestion that housewives – for it was always housewives – thought of nothing but product was strong. (“Always ask for Newfarm, Newfarm eggs, fresh from the farm for you!”). While the equally offensive suggestion – that husbands were always on hand to sort things out – was also a constant refrain. Some jingles have entered the folklore of the nation. “Don’t forget the Fruit Gums, Mum!” and “Beanz meanz Heinz!” always there to remind us of the power of marketing.

But it is the poetry of the obscure that stays with me (“Look into the jar, it’s a deep rich brown, ’cause there’s coffee pot freshness all the way down!”). These rhymes were the mantras of a secular age. Questions, statements of loyalty, a form of hypnosis (“All the family loves Carnation, ’cause it’s creamy rich!”).

Whether to laugh or cry is never entirely clear. I am both the prisoner of these nightmares and reminded of the comfort of a sixties childhood while in their soothing embrace. Even my gravestone may one day bear the footnote “Ricicles are twicicles as nicicles!”.

The post Brainwashes whiter appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Days before the official end of World War II in Europe, the coalition government decided to abolish the civil defence structure built up in the run up to and during the Blitz.

Peace was at hand, and civil defence was expensive. Keeping a large payroll of officers and men, plus the physical manifestations in Emergency Water Supplies, Air Raid shelters and First Aid Posts now that there was no longer any threat from Germany was expensive. That money – and so much more – would be needed to fund the reconstruction of our battered islands.

The decision was seen as being proved right when the US ended the war completely in August 1945 by the use of a new ‘superweapon’ – the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan in an effort to save the 2 or 3 years and 1,000,000 Allied lives it had been thought that a conventional war in mainland Japan would cost.

However, the United States’ atomic bomb project was heavily leaking, and the USSR soon had its hands on the full specifications of ‘Fat Man’, the Nagasaki bomb. Using captured German rocket scientists and their own nuclear physicists, the Soviet Union set out to develop their own superweapon – largely out of fear that the West would use their A-bombs as a threat to keep the Soviets in their place.

On 29 August 1949, the USSR detonated ‘First Lightning’, their recreation of ‘Fat Man’. On 1 September, a US weather plane, which was looking for signs of fallout from Soviet tests, found the atmospheric pollution caused by the explosion. The Western monopoly on nuclear weapons was over. The Cold War had begun in earnest.

The Attlee government reactivated the Civil Defence system. Whilst there was far less infrastructure compared to that of the Second World War, a command structure and wardens would be needed in the event that this new Cold War became a Hot War, as inevitably this would mean a nuclear exchange would take place. Even if it happened in continental Europe, fallout would remain a problem. People would panic. There would be a need for air raid wardens to help keep the peace. There would be pressure on the ambulance services and the fire brigades. Someone would need to take charge. What if London was hit? The Civil Defence system would need to keep the rest of the country running until central control could be reestablished.

Through the 1950s, the Civil Defence system was kept going largely as a reserve. Bring people in, train them, send them back to their lives, ready to be called back up should The Bomb drop.

And then came the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1961 there had been an armed stand-off between Soviet forces in East Berlin and American, British and French forces in the west of the city. This had exposed how a nuclear war would most likely be triggered by a conventional war, and both types of war would be fought in Europe. Partially as a response, NATO positioned US nuclear missiles in Turkey, as close to the Soviet Union as they could get. Too close.

The USSR responded by sending nuclear missiles to be stationed in Cuba, as close to the United States as they could get. Too close.

Another stand-off happened, lasting almost a fortnight, before both sides quietly withdrew their too close for the other’s comfort weapons. But this stand-off was terrifying, especially to politicians of all stripes. It showed that a nuclear war didn’t have to be started by a conventional one. Instead, one could just happen, with effectively no notice at all.

The Macmillan government started to put a lot of money and time into the Civil Defence system. The telegraph wires and poles strung along the edges of almost all railway lines were hurried buried under the cess at the edge of track. Broadcasting stations, large railway signal boxes, government communications hubs, even council offices, were quickly reinforced against all but a direct hit. Infrastructure started to appear again. Most of all, the appeal went out: if you’re able-bodied, we would like to train you in civil defence and keep you in reserve for when – it didn’t seem like it was if – for when a nuclear war came.

This 1964 advertisement appeals to men and women to join the Civil Defence system, get their training, become part of a unit ready to be activated at any time. The training included first aid, fire fighting, civil disorder and defence-in-depth tactics. It was backed with a campaign that ran on television. There was no expense spared on this vital service.

In 1968, following a sharp devaluation of sterling, the Wilson government started to look for ways to save money. The £20 million a year cost (£346 million in today’s money, allowing for inflation) of the Civil Defence system looked like it was being wasted. The Cold War had gone quiet. The two German states had reached an entente; the Berlin Wall effectively separated not only the people of Berlin but the occupying forces as well; the Vietnam War was distracting the Americans; a war of words with China that was to spill over into a border conflict was distracting the Soviets.

The task of Civil Defence was handed directly to local authorities instead of being decided – and financed – by the Home Office. Each council drew up a local plan and co-ordinated it with their police, fire and ambulance services. The Civil Defence reserves were abolished and the build-up in infrastructure reversed. Should there now be a nuclear war, the government would provide advice and information on how to protect and survive to the people, but everything else was down to your local council to organise.

There was an element of gambling in this – local authorities had often been woefully bad at organising Civil Defence in 1938/9, so it was hoped that the younger members now in most council chambers would be a bit better should it be needed again. There was also the gamble that Civil Defence would actually never be needed – that the massive stockpiles of weapons held by NATO and the Warsaw Pact (and, from 1964, China) meant Mutually Assured Destruction, and therefore those weapons would never be used.

We’re still waiting to find that out.

The post People like you are joining Civil Defence now! appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Two Lotteries Acts – 1934 and 1956 – had made national lottery games illegal in the UK. Small, local lotteries could be run, but under very tight rules. Successive governments disapproved of gambling, permitting it only on-course and in members clubs. The only notable exception was football.

The football pools were – and are, they still exist, although they’re no somewhat overshadowed by other forms of gambling – were felt to be harmless. The stakes were small and the payouts were generally small too – the huge wins were rare enough to be national news. The system of pools agents, collecting the coupons and dispersing the prizes, was seen as a good thing, keeping a national game local. And if the the pools didn’t exist, then there was a big possibility that the people would start betting between themselves, or with local back-street bookies, and that would be A Bad Thing.

The pools also required skill, which wasn’t necessary in straight betting on the results of a match, with the person playing using previous form to work out the likely wins, draws and losses each week. This was much more like on-course horserace betting, which suited the great and the good better than the thought of someone betting next week’s rent on a single game.

Horace Batchelor’s Infra Draw method, however, didn’t use form or or any other method of predicting outcomes. Instead, it was more like modern spread betting. People who joined would send their coupon and stake to him, and he’d fill in the coupons. His method rarely won huge payouts, but was pretty well guaranteed to result in a constant stream of small payouts – certainly enough to pay for next week’s entry.

His main outlet for advertising was Radio Luxembourg, and he recorded the advertisements himself, in the (correct) belief that presenting himself as an ordinary guy who had just happened to developed a method he wanted to share with other ordinary guys would be a good sell.

His operation was based in Keynsham, a town halfway between Bristol and Bath that nobody except its residents had heard of. It’s one of those British towns designed to confuse foreigners – the spelling and the pronunciation only having a tangential relationship with each other – joining such mouthbenders as Kirkcudbright, Leominster, Alnwick, Bicester and the kings of these towns, Shrewsbury.

Add that to Radio Luxembourg’s famous fade and the vagaries of medium wave transmission, and you’ve got to spell the town’s name out to ensure your post gets to you. With the adverts in constant rotation on Luxembourg, the line “Keynsham – K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M – Keynsham” became famous, and people still know the joke of saying it, even though most will have no idea at all what the joke is about.

The post K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

It doesn’t look subtle to modern eyes, but there are a couple of subtle tugs built into this advert.

For a start, the housewife doesn’t look frazzled, as she would on television until introduced to the product. Instead she’s in mod clothes, with her freshly set mod hair, looking relaxed and happy as she does her chores.

The addition of the skipping girl attaches to the ‘that means germ-free!’ tag line, reminding the reader that it doesn’t do just to have everything looking clean: it must be sterilised if you have children in order to protect them.

The text subtly reminds us to buy two bottles one for the lav and one for the kitchen. Why can’t one bottle be used in both places? Well, it suits Lever Brothers better if you buy two, obviously. But also, it subtly implies, the germs are different in the kitchen and the bathroom. Don’t let the two mix. You need two bottles.

The final tug is the last image, the housewife with her bottle of Domestos, looking for all the world like she’s going to drink it. This product has a nice smell, it hints, even though it doesn’t. You’ll enjoy using it, it presents, even though you won’t. And it’s safe around children, it shows, even though it isn’t. All very subtle.

Meanwhile, a bottle is only one shilling and threepence, is glass, and you’ll get twopence back if you return the bottle to the grocer you bought if from. Since lorries arrive full from the depot at a modern supermarket and leave to return empty, one would think that this old system to reduce waste would be easier now than it was in 1964. Apparently not.

The post More than clean – Domestos clean! appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

“As free as this. People who go their own way get National. The choice of one motorist in every seven. So go all the way. Go your own way. Get National.”

The post National petrol appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

When Sir Alec Douglas Home became prime minster, he made a self-depreciating joke that he worked out the nation’s finances using matchsticks. His reputation never really recovered.

Labour, under its new, dynamic, ‘young’ leader Harold Wilson, made a big play on how the PM was out of touch. Labour, he said, wouldn’t use matchsticks: we’ll ask a scientist to use a computer for such things. The white heat of technology would sort out Britain’s problems.

The public really warmed to this idea. Technology, automation, computers – they were things of the future and they were happening now. Scientists, the guys (for it was always guys) behind these innovations, knew more and knew how to find out more stuff. Advertisers leapt on this concept.

Washing powder adverts ceased to show a man in a suit explaining the benefits of the new Whizzo brand to a frazzled housewife. Instead, the actor donned a white coat and explained that the benefits of the new Whizzo were due to science. All manner of other products donned this scientific mantle, with everything from bread (our bread is lighter due to science!) to central heating (our boilers are more efficient due to science!) getting a man in a white coat to explain how wonderfully scientific each product was.

Here, featuring the frazzled housewife, the man in a white coat and a series of scientific-looking diagrams, Gibbs uses science to explain why you should switch to their scientifically proven scientific toothpaste with the scientific addition of science-based fluoride.

The post Toothpastes are all the same… appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

A little public information film, run during advertisement breaks on ATV Midlands and Granada in the mid-60s, reminding people to Keep Britain Tidy.

The post Keep Britain Tidy appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Memory fails us: we don’t remember what the new mystery flavour turned out to be. Do you?

The post Spangles mystery flavour contest appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Despite the official disapproval of Radio Luxembourg, government quangos had no problem placing adverts with the Grand Duchy’s international radio station. Here the Milk Marketing Board urges us to never bicker with a vicar but drinka pinta quencha thirst.

The post Drinka pinta milka day appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Automatic washing machines are a new thing. Most people have a twin tub – a top-loading washing machine paired with a spin drier, which you wheeled out of storage, connected to the tap and put a bucked under the outflow to collect the dirty water. Many others were still using the technology of the Victorian era, boiling water on the stove and washing the clothes in a large bucket or tin bath, then putting them through a mangle to get the excess water out.

Therefore, rather than boasting about what Hotpoint automatic washers can do versus other brands, this advert has to tell the housewife why she should move away from the twin tub or the mangle in the first place. And explain the concept of an automatic washing machine as well.

Note that they show the top-loading automatic in a fitted kitchen, but the text refers to it being on rollers – most people do not have fitted kitchens and buyers of automatic washing machines are still unlikely to have them plumbed in – they will still be wheeled out, attached to the tap, and wheeled back out of the way when the washing is done.

The post New Hotpoint automatic appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

From the mid-1960s, your Saturday Night Suit is by John Collier, says Radio Luxembourg.

The post The Saturday night suit by John Collier appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

What’s most notable about this advert is that it catches British Railways halfway on its journey to becoming British Rail in 1965. The trading name of the organisation is still British Railways and hasn’t been truncated yet, and the double-headed arrow hasn’t been introduced. But the Rail Alphabet typeface has arrived. It was first tested at Liverpool Street in London, and the process for changing all signage began in 1965.

However, British Rail decided that signs would only be replaced as and when they had life expired – fallen off, become illegible or as part of a bigger upgrade. The last of the British Railways ‘totem’ station signs were not replaced until the 1980s.

The post Enjoy a British Railways mini-holiday appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

A fantastic earworm for Fairy Snow from the 1960s with Craig Douglas and the Mike Sammes Singers. Unusual for having Craig Douglas narrating and breaking out into song.

The post It gets white to the heart of the wash! appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.