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Back to my old stand by when I can't settle to writing a proper post: some old commercials.  These are from 1976 and are all ads I remember well from my childhood.  I have to say that, even as a child, I found those two kids in the Birds Eye beefburger commercial incredibly irritating.  Where I lived, in the South, children just didn't speak like that.  Despite being voiced by Bernard Cribbins, I also found the cartoon bird advertising the virtues of telephone call boxes irritating.  Today, the idea of advertising phone boxes seems bizarre: with the advent of the mobile phone, those boxes are becoming an endangered species, with many being turned into things like mini-libraries (!) or used to hose defibrillators.  (I find it surprising that none seem to have been converted into public toilets, as that often seemed to be their actual role back in the day).

There are also a couple of classics in there - an example of the Smash ads featuring the Martian robots and one of the Campari series featuring Lorraine Chase.  The Yorkie ad is another still well remembered today, as Rowntree tried to establish the masculine image of their chocolate bar.  The Corona ad is of interest for several reasons, not least the continued popularity of Sgt Bilko on seventies Britain, thanks to BBC2's continuous late night repeats of the Phil Silvers Show.  But, beyond the contradiction of advertising sugary soft drinks with a campaign featuring a fitness regime, the product itself is something that has now vanished - not soft drinks, of course, but soft drinks which were sold door-to-door.  It doubtless seems ludicrous to young people today, but in my childhood the 'Corona' man used to come round, like a milkman, with a lorry loaded with crates of litre bottles of carbonated drinks, collecting the empties as he delivered this week's order of orangeade or lemonade, (or even limeade and the then highly exotic cherryade).   Finally, the Guinness ad is of significance because it references the scorching Summer of 1976, which I remember vividly: there were times when it was just too hot to even set foot outside of the house.  Unfortunately, I wasn't old enough to be allowed to drink a cooling pint of chilled Guinness.