Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 3 November 2016

The advertising supremos of the Sixties were paid exorbitant amounts  of money to get us hooked on sugar and salt

‘Look at them, they’re all fat,’ he said. I’d slowed the car to allow four children to cross the zebra crossing. One of them secretly signalled thanks on behalf of them all as they trooped across. Polite. But they were all indeed a little on the plump side. ‘Even in France they’re getting fat now,’ he lamented, leaving unsaid the conclusion that if the French were getting fat, then that’s that, game over. ‘Of course it’s the working classes who get fat first,’ he explained. ‘Eating all that sugar and salt.’ I thought I detected blame and took exception. ‘Well, if anyone is to blame,’ I said, ‘it’s you.’

In the early Sixties some of the most highly educated minds of that rising British generation went into advertising and made an absolute packet. He was one of them. He and his Cambridge mates were handed exorbitant amounts of money to produce lavish and seductive television adverts that would brainwash us all into wanting things we didn’t need or were bad for our health. Remember that Silvikrin advert? The one with the model shaking her glossy blonde barnet in slow motion? Viewed from behind? That was one of his. ‘We must have shifted thousands of gallons of the shit,’ he once said of that particular success.

I watched television all through the Sixties and even today my mental furniture is comprised almost entirely of advertising jingles from that period. ‘P-P-Pick up a Penguin’. Remember that one? That’s another of his. ‘You formed our minds,’ I said. ‘We were like putty in your hands. It’s you and your mates who got us all hooked on industrially manufactured, highly addictive sugar and salt products and made us fat. And then you all retired to your own soft-focus dream images of Tuscany and Provence.

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