"Boom Boom Boom Boom - Esso Blue!" A Sign Of The Times

Unilluminated Esso Blue sign (left) and illuminated (right).

Dashing home from school on winter's evenings in the 1970s - eager for The Tomorrow People, The Kids From 47a, Robert's Robots or Josie and the Pussycats, I used to pass a sign like the one above. It was in the window of a local greengrocer, who also supplied Esso Blue paraffin for domestic heaters.

The little man with the bowler hat was Joe, from the Esso Blue TV commercials, and he'd been around since 1958, with the catchy "Boom Boom Boom Boom - Esso Blue!" jingle.

The sign was always illuminated during the dark evenings. When I was a little lad I thought the sign must have very sophisticated inner-workings. It never occurred to me until I was about eight that it was actually lit by a single 60W light bulb!

Joe disappeared from our TV screens around 1974/75, but the sign lived on for some time, and a metal sign outside another shop bearing the character's image survived for many years after that, ensuring that Joe was a presence in our neighbourhood long after his TV tenure had ended.

Milk

A magazine advertisement from 1973.

Are you getting enough? (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, oower missis, etc, etc).

After the 60s sexual revolution, "amusing" double entendres were everywhere.

Saturday Cat

Here's dear old Saturday Cat advertising Real Dairy Cream in a December 1973 magazine advertisement. I remember his existence as being fairly brief. If anybody has any further information about him, I'd love to hear. Go to my profile for the e-mail address.

Commercial Break...

"Blue Band - every bit as special as the people who enjoy it."

Dead classy this - by 70s standards - take a Ritz cracker, daub it with Blue Band margarine, slap on some caviar and away you go. This was posh grub befitting...

... none other than Joan Collins. Caviar and marge. Lovely.

"Birds Eye Peas, sweet as the moment, sweet as the moment when the pod went..."

"...POP!"

Dear little Patsy Kensit charmed a generation of ad lovers at a very young age. She wasn't scared.

Radio Rentals Colour - Highly Superior!

A newspaper advertisement from November 1978.

It's great to see the remote control sets, but these wouldn't be making their debut in my family home for several years yet. The reasons? A) lack of money and B) we didn't see the point. Nowadays, of course, I wouldn't stand for a telly without remote control in my house.

In those days, we didn't have a video recorder, either. Only 5% of UK households had them in 1980. Yes 1980 - amazing, isn't it?

Mind you, what you'd never had you never missed and we didn't realise we were living in the dark ages. We rented a colour telly in 1978 (colour had arrived in 1967) , with a coin meter on the back, but we couldn't afford to keep feeding the meter, so we went back to our old black and white set. The horizontal hold was "going" - the picture was a thin band across the screen (people on our telly looked like eggs on legs) - but we were used to it.

And that was how it was until the early 1980s!

I liked the Radio Rentals telly ad (I have so many 60s, 70s and 80s telly jingles lodged in my brain!). "Radio Rentals Colour" was sung, and then a posh female voice (Penelope Keith's?) said: "Highly superior!"

Seems like yesterday...

1979: Grown-Ups Were Eating "Our" Rice Krispies. Apparently.

It's 1979, and on the telly (pre-strike!!) and in the TV Times a militant boy is on a crusade to stop grown-ups from eating Rice Krispies. Nice little ads - but barbecued Rice Krispies?!

Back in the 1970s, my mother dismissed the idea of barbecued food as "foreign muck" so I'd never tried it.

Nowadays I love it, but I think I'll leave out the recipe here.