That episode of Morse comes to an end. It was a Zenith Production for Central, everyone! Which just means a Central Production really since Zenith was a subsidiary of theirs. Perfect excuse to bust out the cake in all its glory as a production caption! Central did this briefly when frontcaps were scrapped, but it didn’t catch on.
Coming soon on ITV: Dead Man Walking, the story of a man on death row. No, not the Tim Robbins film, he won’t make that for another seven years. This is an American TV movie where Danny Glover has to decide if Ruben Blades is still mentally fit enough for the state to horribly kill him, which is admittedly one of the many fascinatingly twisted questions that the death penalty often poses. The original title was «Dead Man Out» but maybe that came across too comical so they changed it. I dunno. Coming soon on soon-to-be-generic ITV.
And then we tumble headfirst into the pit of adverts. It was an early Easter in 1989 — 26th March — so they’re breaking out the Mini Eggs adverts in February. (Although the things obviously went on sale before Christmas). They haven’t come up with the idea of hiring Viv Stanshall to bowdlerise «Mr Slater’s Parrot» yet, so here’s something even more annoying: an announcer doing a mid-Atlantic accent and bellowing egg puns over the top of a combination of line drawing and stop-motion.
Next, an almost tragic attempt at bringing some continental sophistication to the failing British motor industry, as a woman is entranced to run through the streets of a foreign city in pursuit of the car of dreams? They had to sell the damn things somehow, but it’s still almost painful to watch Yello’s «Oh Yeah» playing out over footage of a Mini Metro. «Beautiful.» Well, no.
IN THE CITY SITS AN EAGLE ASTRIDE A STAR. It sounds like Anthony Hopkins is introducing some sort of Justice League, but it’s just an investment firm, who have a new account or whatever to pitch and have decided to do so by staging a little soap opera. It’s different. Two ordinary if impossibly good-looking and imacculately power-dressed employees hash it out one night over a polygonal cup of coffee and come up with this brilliant investment plan thing, while the travails of a potential customer are intercut. And that’s how they came up with it! Chinny reckon. Eagle Star: we have a superhero movie logo because it’s the eighties. Member of Lautro.
Then some black-and-white styles for Pretty Polly, the hosiery experts. They’re telling the story of Wallace Carothers, inventor of nylon. Which is fine, except that the story of Wallace Carothers is bloody horrible — he suffered from severe depression his entire life. Things this advert doesn’t mention: he carried a capsule of cyanide around with him in his pocketwatch, he had an affair with a married woman (which gave him guilt on top of everything else) and he almost didn’t invent nylon because he had a breakdown towards the end of the process and drove from Wilmington, Delaware to Baltimore, Maryland without telling anyone. But as far as Pretty Polly are concerned he «dedicated his life to women». Not because he looked after his mother and his sister, the latter of whose death precipitated his own, just because he invented nylon. Ah well, this advert means well, and it does teach people the poor sod’s name.
Next: breakfast cereals of the ooooold west. Yep, Tony the Tiger is playing with a Western theme today, which involves the slightly confusing sight of a 2D animated cat riding a real live horse. The apparent strategy is to pitch Frosties to an adult demographic, with a noticeably subduded Tony as a wise white-hatted stranger against sceptical, snickering and apparently pretty thick («who was that striped man?») cowboys.
Finally, a PIF! Or a shortened version of one. ET was not an alien, it was «Employment Training», the third-term Thatcher government’s attempt at replacing YTS with something similar but less slavery-ish. This was promoted via this highly symbolic rigamaraole set in a vast unforgiving landscape containing nothing but a massive stone monolith, a colossal round hole in the ground, and a crowd of little people with chisels and, later, a crane.
Then a very Granada trailer (Jim Pope on pipes) for a very Granada production: a How We Used to Live style drama-documentary about a) how completely great Manchester is, b) how COMPLETELY great Manchester is, c) how horrible workhouses were and d) Elizabeth Gaskell was nice. Her story is told in «Voices for Change» but we don’t know when because the recording dies before Jim can explain further.
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