Unpopular Opinions: Adverts
Also mentioning a strange fascination for Deltics, magician posters, and Type B buses.
It is very rarely what I'm meant to be looking at which captures my attention, rather incidental detail.
I can no longer recall the book's title, but can clearly remember purchasing a battered leather-bound Victorian edition of some classic or other in a large Broadstairs' bookshop in the late eighties. For those who haven't had the pleasure, it was a far, far more impressive building than it's exterior appearance would have suggested, the second floor a ring of cramped walkways around it's walls, permitting storage of thousands of books. It was on the second floor, in a far corner, where a variety of seemingly forgotten titles had been abandoned that I located this tome, and it immediately sang to me.
Hundreds of hours must have been spent in that building, poring over their extensive selection of Penguin classics, old film guides, thick coffee table books, and more. This purchase, though, was my first vintage book, and even though it was worn, scuffed, and bore tell-tale marks on it's spine, of having been well-read, it spoke to me in a way that few modern editions did. Even now, being aware that there is likely greater care taken with layout, and supplementary materials, I am drawn to original states as they are a snapshot of a work's formative existence.
These are how Victorian authors would have recognised their work's appearance to be. First editions (and their subsequent impressions) are, in many ways, the "real" versions of novels, and no amount of explanatory notes, or celebrated designers' work, or added footnotes, can replace their immediacy.
With my new purchase, I sat in the shade of the pavilion, where art exhibitions took place during summer months, and opened my new treasure. It's pages felt different to modern books, somehow slicker, but fine, and remarkably thin, letters printed upon these pages seeming to be more precise, more deliberate, than anything I had experienced up to that moment. It's always been a treat to take in the entirety of a book, and when it is so beautiful in every regard I am lost in it's creation as much as any world it contains.
The great surprise within was found shortly after it's contents page: an advert for some cream or tonic or lotion of unknown being.
Adverts within books weren't completely unknown to me, though they usually appeared after a text's end matter, restricting their pitches to other titles within a series (as Star Trek paperbacks often did), or were sneakier in their marketing - there is reason to suspect that a number of film novelizations of the eighties largely made their money before they ever hit bookshelves, taking payment for glowing mentions of all manner of goods1. But a proper, entirely unconnected, advert, lurking within a novel? This was a shock to my young brain.
Working my way through the story, I found more of these single page adverts, always with text continued on their reverse, so that their excision was impossible, and found myself reading their copy. Sales pitches working their way forwards through time, seeding interest in products which haven't existed for the better part of a hundred years... I'm not sure how long I sat in the shade, reading, but it was probably long enough that my absence caused some anxiety. Maybe it was to be expected though, at that point, my disappearances to book shops fully understood to last the day.
At the start of 1991 a retooled Eagle was reprinting Charley's War, and one thing, in particular, jumped out at me: the Type B bus. There was a die-cast model of one of these in a Canterbury shop, ridiculously over-priced (in my eyes, at the time) at about sixty pounds, which I had seen on a day trip, and spent a good five minutes looking at with desire. Absent the possibility of purchasing the model, I made do with books which featured imagery of these mysterious vehicles, and it was in an over-sized collection of photographs that I found dozens of pictures, both being used for their intended purpose and in war.
And something about their appearance caught my eye - most of the Type B's were covered in adverts.
Image sourced from internet, representative of the Type B in all it’s glory.
Buses still have adverts on their sides, of course, but these are typically restricted to one large image. The buses in this book seemed to have three separate adverts to the front of the vehicle, plus up to five or six ads on either side. I was slightly obsessed with these buses at the time - not that I've ever stopped being obsessed, if I am entirely truthful - so I sought out more imagery of their era, and it was surprising to see just how many of them were plastered with adverts for various tonics, sweets, shows, and devices of unknowable use.
I eventually got to drive one of these buses, around a converted farm, and learned that they are not particularly nimble, graceful, or easy to control, but my love for their appearance has never diminished. The owner of that bus was sat right behind me, saying "ease back a little," "steer more than you think you need to," and "give it some welly" all the way around, laughing hysterically the whole time. What stood out in particular was it’s sudden lurches in speed, and unexpected twitchiness, requiring serious concentration to remain in control.
The example I drove did not, alas, have adverts on it’s frame. I didn’t even have a full compliment of seats, and I doubt - thinking on it now - that it would have passed it’s MOT. They are bloody great fun, irrespective of their flaws, and if given the opportunity to get behind the wheel of one again, I would leap at the chance.
Into the mid-nineties, and at a stall somewhere (Dumpton Park possibly?), or in a charity shop, I found a compilation tape of Quatermass and the Pit. Most of my purchases were of Hong Kong and Japanese action films and comedies, with an odd Indonesian B-movie thrown into the mix, but this was something that I had read about in Marvel’s film magazine Hammer Horror, and I couldn’t pass up the chance of three hours of entertainment for a pound.
I must have watched that serial a dozen times or more over the winter, and something about it's setting resonated with me. The train bug never bit me in the same manner as it did for Geoff Marshall (much, surely, to everyone's eternal relief), but it led to many train documents, books, and historic timetables being purchased in a variety of locations. In these, also, I found strange adverts.
For about three years there wasn't a book on railway stations I would pass on - although, to my shame, it was only recently that I understood that wooden finials hanging from the roofs of stations actually held some inherent significance, so what I was learning from those books is a mystery. I found many images of iconic middle-England stations preserved in a quirky, timeless not-quite-thirties, not-quite-modern state, and pored over imagery of immense viaducts and seemingly endless tunnels. The industry around trains is far more interesting than engines, which travel along lines set in the ground and offer little surprise.
There was one particular setting which, because I had already been primed to look for them, immediately jumped from the page - the London Underground.
There are photographs of various stations on the London Underground which show walls filled with adverts of all kind, obscuring any information boards in an overwhelming, utterly unbelievable, state of sensory overload. It's difficult to imagine what it must have been like for someone to arrive at one of these stations for the first time, only to be bombarded, in every direction, with endless adverts. Even within some of their timetables, towards their rear, adverts lurked. Some amusing, some puzzling, and a great many simply descriptive, lacking any sense of urgency in their reading.
Image also sourced from the internet, with a rather understated collection of advertisements comparative to other imagery.
I still vastly prefer Deltics to steam locomotives, so my rail geek credentials are probably not worth the paper they're written on... There's a certain inherent appeal to all of the heritage railways (especially those with stations maintained in a state which evokes the past), and I'll freely admit that wooden interiors are vastly more aesthetically pleasing than anything indicating modernity - of the past or present - but there's just something about the Deltics which I can't properly articulate. You either love them or don't, and I happen to find them insanely cute.
Now this is going to be an equally unpopular statement: I will not apologise for feeling any affection for adverts. In print or on television, they can be just as entertaining as what they punctuate.
A great amount of conversation at present seems to be in absolute opposition to adverts of all kinds, specifically those which assault the eyes when searching the internet (and not without reason), yet there is an argument to be made that we are living in a world which is, largely, absent constant advertising. Train stations have limited advertisements on their walls to a predetermined number, spaced out, so that there isn't a sense of claustrophobia within their environs, and - aside from an odd billboard here and there, and illicit fly-posters, our streets aren't filled with an abundance of adverts either.
If a visitor from a hundred and fifty years gone had an opportunity to see our modern world, they would be shocked at how little advertising exists around us.
I can’t speak to the current state of television as I do not possess one - not a working television, at any rate. This is likely equally as unfathomable and unpopular a stance to take, but I doubt that there is much I am missing. Most things are available online, and exclusive television moments are few and far between.
The internet, however, has skewed our perception of advertising. We perceive there to be more advertising than there is thanks to omnipresent advertising across major sites, and that perception is carried out into the world, where there is a tendency to notice what we have been seeing. Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is probably the correct term, though that psychological quirk isn't exactly right in this particular instance, and there's an added wrinkle to this in modern advertising being so ineffective comparative to historic campaigns. Gone are the days when all it took was a known individual to state they won't wear fur, or be photographed with a milk moustache, to gain attention - that isn't what gets clicks, or column inches in the press, and those are metrics by which success seems to be measured.
They are, in a way, advertisements - it was their original purpose, after all - but posters of magicians of old hold a lasting appeal for me. I doubt there was more than twenty or so in my original purchase2, secured for a cardboard box tucked under a shelf in an old bookshop or antique shop, but they started me off collecting other magic memorabilia. Part of the appeal was in the attire of featured performers, but an equally important aspect was where - and when - they would be appearing. My favourites were always those which advertised long-vanished theatres, as they often had a small image of the building alongside whichever star turn was highlighted.
Even slightly more modern adverts have made their way into my hands. I'm still kicking myself for letting my film poster collection go, though. There was a while when everyone seemed to want them, and it was easier to give in and sell them on than to constantly rebuff offers.
Throughout the years, through all the things I have found myself collecting, it is adverts which continue to surprise me.
Before records, when music came on cylinders, boxes would contain sheets of adverts wrapped around those cylinders, for not only other recordings, but other products also. Often there was a logic to these, but sometimes these adverts would be rather random, It is impossible to know if all of these were original to their packaging, or if they had been secreted within to preserve them for some reason, their discovery would always elicit a slight thrill, permitting me a glimpse into the past. Records (shellac or vinyl) was always a comparative disappointment, their accompanying texts usually being limited to various cleaning cloths, needles, and players.
Adverts are a valuable resource that has often been entirely overlooked, pushed to one side while the "real" historical record is focused on. You want to know why this approach is, and always has been, flawed? Most people in 1914 wouldn't have known who Franz Ferdinand was, had he not been assassinated, but everyone would have immediately recognised each of the adverts which surrounded them on a daily basis. The changing names of products, and companies, and altered uses of various potent mixtures as regulations were enacted, tell us so much more than we tend to imagine.
We shouldn't be talking about how we can avoid adverts altogether, rather how we can avoid bad adverts.
I was going to include a handful of Frank Langford’s print adverts, but a few websites with selections of his work are offline at the moment, and compiling a representative selection from here and there would take too long. His work is what I immediately think of, when the blanket statement that adverts are bad is made, and some refutation of this ridiculous notion needs to be made. If a collection of these were to be made available in a hardback book I would be ecstatic - they are well worth preserving in a more concrete form than they have appeared.
Even television adverts have, thanks to YouTube, been given a second life. The celebrated Tonka truck ad is there, and Cadbury’s gorilla advert, and various Tango skits which… actually haven’t aged all that well, seeing them afresh. Kia-Ora's "I'll be your dog" is represented, along with the PG Tips chimps, Shake n' Vac, and any number of Hamlet ads.
People can say that they hate adverts all they want, but there is an audience for good adverts.
Why I started reviewing film novelizations has been lost to my fog of memory, but there were dozens online at one point, and my common refrain was “this couldn’t be more obvious if it tried.” Some adaptations were far more blatant than others, and a handful were so bad that I found myself unable to finish reading them.
Providing numbers of how many magic posters I initially bought is problematic. There has been many additions to their number over the years, and their present location is unknown = there are too many locations where things have been squirrelled away, and I don’t have the time to conduct an exhaustive check.