I cannot reliably remember where I left my keys an hour ago. I have stood in a supermarket aisle, blindly staring at a shelf with no memory of the items I mentally listed on the drive to said supermarket. Yet ask me what a small orange character sang to a passing crow in 1985, and I will deliver every word without pausing for thought. The information sits in there permanently, taking up the space where useful things should live, and it refuses to leave.
This, I have decided, is the great injustice of growing up in front of a 1980s television. Four channels, no skip button, and the same handful of adverts on heavy rotation between whatever show I actually sat down to watch. The programmes came and went. The adverts moved in, unpacked, and never left.
The jingles that colonised our heads
Let us start with the worst offender, because you already know where this leads. “Um Bongo, Um Bongo, they drink it in the Congo.” That animated jingle for a jungle fruit drink first appeared in 1985, and it has never once loosened its grip. There is now a whole tranche of middle-aged British adults, myself firmly among them, who cannot hear the words “the Congo” in any context whatsoever without their brain cheerfully cueing up a song about tropical squash. A wildlife documentary, a news bulletin, the football fixtures; the jingle arrives regardless, uninvited, humming away like a fridge.
Then came the Kia-Ora advert, with its cartoon crows and its flat little declaration: “It’s too orangey for crows, it’s just for me and my dog.” I could not tell you a single thing I learned in double maths, but that line lodged in me like a Malteser down the back of the sofa, retrievable years later, slightly furred but essentially intact.
And of course the Shake n’ Vac woman, twirling around a suspiciously tidy living room, instructing the nation to “do the Shake n’ Vac and put the freshness back.” To the best of my knowledge, my dear old mum never bought carpet freshener. It didn’t matter. We sang it anyway, doing our little dance with an imaginary tub, because the advert told us to. We were young and easily led.
The characters who moved in and never left
Some adverts didn’t bother with a jingle. They simply invented a person and made them permanent.
The Milky Bar Kid, all cowboy hat and NHS spectacles, first appeared on British screens in 1961 and finally hung up his holster around 1988. “The Milky Bars are on me!” he gleefully announced. Some might say he was merely being generous. Others might argue his reckless behaviour sparked an obesity epidemic.
Better still were the Smash Martians: a family of chortling tin robots peering down at humanity through a spaceship window, appalled that we peeled our own potatoes with a knife, boiled them for twenty of our minutes, and then smashed them to bits. “For Mash Get Smash,” ran the line. That campaign, first aired back in 1974, later topped a national poll of the finest television advert of the entire century, which tells you something about the company we keep. A nation of grown adults, and our favourite piece of persuasion of the last hundred years features robots laughing at spuds.
The finest of the lot, though, belonged to Yellow Pages. In 1983 a gentle, elderly man, played by Norman Lumsden, shuffled from bookshop to bookshop searching for a title called Fly Fishing by J.R. Hartley, growing wearier at every polite refusal, until his daughter handed him the phone book and he finally tracked down a copy. Only at the very end, voice cracking with quiet delight, did he reveal the identity of the author he had been hunting all along: himself. The twist landed so well that readers marched into actual libraries demanding a book by an author who never existed, about a hobby the fictional man had apparently mastered. Somebody eventually wrote the thing for real in 1991, under the pseudonym, and it sold by the barrowload. An advert conjured a book out of thin air, and the public willed it into being. Say what you like about the 1980s: we committed.
The secret drinker and the family cringe
My favourite belongs to a slightly earlier vintage but ran deep into my childhood, so I am claiming it. R White’s Lemonade, and their “Secret Lemonade Drinker”: a man in striped pyjamas creeping downstairs in the dead of night to raid the fridge, caught mid-swig, singing his guilty little heart out. A musician called Ross MacManus wrote and performed that song, first heard in 1973 and airing all the way to 1984. His son sang the backing vocals. His son, it turned out, would grow up to become Elvis Costello.
I find something wonderful in that. One of the most celebrated songwriters this country has produced began his career harmonising behind his dad about the shameful business of drinking pop after dark. Every family has a photo it would rather nobody circulated. Few families have theirs broadcast to the entire nation between episodes of Coronation Street.
Why on earth did they stick?
The honest answer involves no great mystery. Repetition did most of the heavy lifting. With only a handful of channels and no way to fast-forward, we saw the same thirty seconds so many times that the words wore a groove into our minds, the way a river slowly carves a valley. Add a tune, because a melody hooks the memory far more firmly than plain speech, and the thing sets like concrete.
There is a warmer explanation too, mind. These adverts arrived during the one stretch of life when almost nothing had gone wrong yet. We watched them from the carpet, close enough to the telly to be told off for it, in an era before mortgages and insurance comparison websites and the slow dawning realisation that grown-ups are just tall children with responsibilities. The jingles aren’t only lodged in our heads. They are lodged in a particular feeling, and that is a far stickier glue.
The bit nobody tells you
Here is what still catches me off guard. I can summon a full R White’s chorus in an instant, yet I struggle to picture the front room I first heard it in. The advert has outlasted the actual memory. I have retained the marketing and mislaid the moment, which feels like buying the wrapping paper but forgetting to buy the gift.
Perhaps that is exactly why I write the books I write. If you cannot walk back into the past, you can at least reconstruct it, brick by brick, jingle by jingle, and bask in the memories for a while.
If you fancy a longer trip back
If thirty seconds of Um Bongo has left you hungry for a proper visit to the decade, my novels might scratch the itch. The ’86 Fix sends a forty-something man back to 1986 to unpick where his life quietly went sideways, Space Invaders and Texan bars and all. A Page in Your Diary returns to the late 1980s on a far heavier errand, as a man travels back to save the first love whose life his younger self helped to wreck. And The Last Stop Video Shop hands a middle-aged man a VHS tape of a childhood memory no camera ever recorded, and asks whether he would keep rewinding his own life or finally press eject. If the adverts have you smiling, one of those three will likely have you welling up before the end.
For more of this sort of thing, you might enjoy what a night out cost in 1992 or the reality of holidays before easyJet.
Frequently Asked Questions
What were the most famous British TV adverts of the 1980s?
Among the best remembered are the Um Bongo jingle, the Kia-Ora “too orangey for crows” cartoon, the Shake n’ Vac dance, the Milky Bar Kid, the chortling Smash Martians with their “For Mash Get Smash” line, and the Yellow Pages advert featuring J.R. Hartley searching for his own book on fly fishing. Most ran on heavy rotation across the decade’s four channels.
Why do we still remember 80s adverts word for word?
Two reasons work together. Repetition drove the words deep, because with few channels and no fast-forward we saw the same short adverts countless times. A catchy melody then bonded the message to memory far more firmly than speech alone. The fact that we absorbed them in childhood, before life grew complicated, gives the recall an emotional charge that keeps it fresh.
Did J.R. Hartley really exist?
No. J.R. Hartley first appeared in a 1983 Yellow Pages advert, played by actor Norman Lumsden, and the book he sought, Fly Fishing, did not exist either. The advert proved so popular that people asked libraries and shops for the title, so in 1991 a real book of that name appeared, written under the J.R. Hartley pseudonym, and it became a bestseller.
Who sang the R White’s Secret Lemonade Drinker song?
Musician Ross MacManus wrote and performed the song, first broadcast in 1973 and running until 1984. His son provided the backing vocals and later found fame as the singer Elvis Costello.
Which of Keith A Pearson’s novels best capture the 1980s?
The ’86 Fix drops its hero straight back into 1986 with all its period detail, and A Page in Your Diary revisits the late 1980s with real emotional weight. The Last Stop Video Shop, though set in the present, leans heavily on childhood memory and the pull of a rewound past, so it suits anyone in a nostalgic mood.