2 posts tagged “advertisements”

This was a great find at Take Note in Lower Hutt today. Take Note is a post office and gift shop run by my friend Mandeep but I have never bought a book from there before. I was surprised to find it displayed prominently and being an automobiliac I paid the $40 for it.

   My cover differs slightly: the News Gothic-set headlines have been replaced by the same text in ITC Benguiat, while the lettering around the masthead is now Akzidenz-Grotesk. Inside, there are great Car articles from 1965 to 1974, covering the best of the first decade (I became a reader, thanks to Gary Hayvice, whose daughter was a classmate of mine, in 1981). I grew up with Llewellyn, Bishop, Setright and the rest; I remember Bulgin, and very briefly, wasn’t there a chap called James May? But some of the earlier talents appear in this compilation.
   Some articles are prescient—the warning that Honda could be a big player if it chose to build saloon cars, and the war for oil and how it might run out (from the first fuel crisis in the 1970s)—and others are less so, such as the warning that a Channel Tunnel would be a folly. Others are plain out of place in today’s politically correct world, namely the nude models that adorned cars at motor shows.
   There are even old advertisements, including one for women—flogging copies of Good Housekeeping. It was very sexist and the idea that cars were designed to pull birds was very much in evidence.
   It’s hardcover, so it should be a proud collection of 1960s’ and 1970s’ motoring journalism in my home.

 

The BBC went all out earlier this week with Life on Mars’ second and final season. Before the programme started, the TV ident changed back to 1973’s, with the BBC 1 Colour wording (before that geometric monstrosity that came in 1974). Both are below. It ties in beautifully to earlier promos (above) that had the 1973 style. (BBC Wales did a similar treatment, though with the different aspect ratio of televisions, they are re-creations. In addition, Arial, which the Welsh one is set in, was not designed in 1973.)
   The BBC logo itself lacks a little verisimilitude—the designer seems to have just used Neue Helvetica and slanted it a tad more—but on the lower resolutions of TV screens, few would have really noticed.

 

   And just to show that humour has not deserted the British, try this Camberwick Green one for size.