If you weren't around, or at least old enough to have to fend for yourself, at the time that Halifax ad came out, you probably won"t understand why it grated so much.
It epitomised everything we despised about Thatcher's Britain. Given that they can, and could, compartmentalise ad broadcast by ITV region, I've never understood why they chose to broadcast it in regions like Central, as it was then
But maybe it was just the likes of us - students, graduates unemployed or on lowish incomes, Grauniad readers - who were enraged by it. Maybe the people who worked in hosiery and knitwear factories, and lived on the same estate their parents had been housed on in the 1960s, and saved up for holidays in Marbella, found it aspirational
The hosiery and knitwear factories are gone now. The estates are still crap, but with bad porches and conservatories tacked on to the houses piecemeal because of Right to Buy. The people seem to get by. The high level of crime committed by people from those estates is probably a statistical anomaly.
I think the one thing that annoyed me most about that ad was that the amount he took out of the cash machine, on a Sunday morning, because he needed to buy a pint of milk and the Sunday paper, was equivalent to about two months' dole. I wasn't on the dole myself at that time; but there's such a thing as rubbing people's nose in it.
Anyway. It's annoyed me for nearly thirty years, so it's unlikely to stop annoying me now. Enough about it.
It epitomised everything we despised about Thatcher's Britain. Given that they can, and could, compartmentalise ad broadcast by ITV region, I've never understood why they chose to broadcast it in regions like Central, as it was then
But maybe it was just the likes of us - students, graduates unemployed or on lowish incomes, Grauniad readers - who were enraged by it. Maybe the people who worked in hosiery and knitwear factories, and lived on the same estate their parents had been housed on in the 1960s, and saved up for holidays in Marbella, found it aspirational
The hosiery and knitwear factories are gone now. The estates are still crap, but with bad porches and conservatories tacked on to the houses piecemeal because of Right to Buy. The people seem to get by. The high level of crime committed by people from those estates is probably a statistical anomaly.
I think the one thing that annoyed me most about that ad was that the amount he took out of the cash machine, on a Sunday morning, because he needed to buy a pint of milk and the Sunday paper, was equivalent to about two months' dole. I wasn't on the dole myself at that time; but there's such a thing as rubbing people's nose in it.
Anyway. It's annoyed me for nearly thirty years, so it's unlikely to stop annoying me now. Enough about it.
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