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Keep Talking: Westcountry Adverts and Continuity, 1994

More Christmas adverts, with a bit of interlacing goin' on goin' on. Christmas Day 1994 again, this time in my own region, which at the time happened to be the bland but (in hindsight) quite charming Westcountry. It starts with the end of that year's Christmas edition of Blind Date, hosted as usual by Ronald MacDonald's mother. This is that period when LWT had two prodcaps, one for LWT Productions, and another for the station itself, which were separate entities at the time for reasons beyond the realm of normal human understanding. Then there's a Christmassy trailer - mirrorballs appear to have been the motif - for Honey I Shrunk The Kids. Last year I uploaded a similar trailer for the same film from the Central region; this one's unsurprisingly based around the same scene, but with markedly less special-effects footage, and with the omnipresent voice of Peter Griffin (seriously), who sometimes seemed to be Westcountry's only voice man. Griffin then announces that a silver-haired Dave Allen would be on at Boxing Day, presumably calling the Pope a twat or something. And coming next: Heartbeat! Presumably because Christmas Day was a Sunday that year, and Heartbeat represents TV so bland your eyes fall off the screen, which is what Sundays are all about. Then: adverts! Starting with Professor Stephen Hawking, waxing philosophical (via computer box) on the subject of communication. This is the advert famously sampled by Pink Floyd that year for the last album released during the lifetimes of all the bandmembers. I speak of course of the really rather good The Division Bell, which is underrated to the point of madness. Then there's a frankly surreal experience: an advert for Britvic orange juice that's all Michael Cretu noble-savage ambient spiritual nonsense about oranges, but with a voiceover from Steve Coogan so mannered that you can't help but wait for the other shoe to drop. He seems to be trying to channel Peter Serafinowicz impersonating Tom Baker. Except Coogan was then just on the point of becoming huge - Paul and Pauline Calf were starting to get national notice, and The Day Today and Knowing Me, Knowing You had been shown a few months earlier, bringing Alan Partridge to TV for the first time. By the following year's Christmas special, Coogan was the biggest star in the country. But at this point he's also still doing anonymous voice-overs for adverts, and had been the voice of Britvic for at least couple of years. So there's no punchline. What you see is what you get. Unless I'm missing something, and I usually am, this really is as patronising and irritating as it seems to be, but with a famous comedy actor's voice. Then, Enn Reitel goes through the motions as Lunn Poly's snowmen again, and Magnet have a sale. Next, virtual reality! Everyone thought this was the best thing ever in 1994, because it totally wasn't at least a decade too soon to be worthwhile! Some lady sits in a chair in the future and shakes up her glass of vodka-related abomination on the rocks to sample several exciting scenarios, including Lambada! The Forbidden Dance, the Britvic commercial from earlier, and Bude with the saturation turned up. Then V05 show up, apparently unaware that it's already Christmas Day, to command you not to be so mean to your hair, and suggest some kind of oily shampoo thing to repair your follicles or something? I very much doubt that hair works that way. Another sale, this time at House of Fraser, with its poor man's Penguin Café orchestration, and then we're abruptly plunged out of the adverts and into another trailer (with Peter Griffin's voice again). It appears to be standard issue celebrity-gawps-at-creatures fare, with a possible extra interest in that the celebrity is the great Robin Williams, swimming with dolphins - a creature I was thoroughly sick of at this point in my life, mind you, having spent almost the entire first half of 1994 workshopping and training and rehearsing and finally performing the opera Arion and the Dolphin, as a nameless extra dolphin for my school. That's not the dolphins' fault, mind, and nor is it Robin's - although he can't be that comfortable in the water; surely all that hair must slow him down? Or at least chafe in that wetsuit. I know whereof I speak, because I'm a prodigiously hairy man myself. Not up to Robin's gorilla-like standards, but still pretty fuzzy. Then Westcountry's frosted Christmas ident pans across a Christmas tree as Peter Griffin introduces Heartbeat. Quite nice, really.