Clockwise from top left … Hamlet’s Baldy Man, Nick Kamen in the Levi’s launderette, the Gold Blend couple and Smash’s aliens. Composite: Courtesy: History of Advertising Trust/ Alamy View image in fullscreen Clockwise from top left … Hamlet’s Baldy Man, Nick Kamen in the Levi’s launderette, the Gold Blend couple and Smash’s aliens. Composite: Courtesy: History of Advertising Trust/ Alamy Art and design Baldy Man, Gold Blend flirters and mash-mad Martians: TV’s golden age ads As the History of Advertising Trust turns 50, our writer revels in its vast archive, remembering the bread boy on his bike, the suggestive coffee-drinkers and the Hamlet smoker adjusting his comb-over
Stuart Jeffries Wed 8 Jul 2026 06.00 CEST Last modified on Wed 8 Jul 2026 08.00 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google H anging over the toilet in the gents’ loos at the History of Advertising Trust’s archive in deepest Norfolk is a photograph of Ian Botham. It’s not just the cricketing great’s mullet that tells you this is 1986, but the fact that Beefy is smoking a cigar. The caption below answers the question that has troubled philosophers since Aristotle: “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet.”
If the past is a foreign country, then the history of advertising is a whole alternate universe, one in which excitable metallic martians induced us to buy Cadbury’s powdered potatoes with the slogan: “For mash get Smash.” It’s a place where bowler-hatted chimps dressed as removal men wooed us into buying PG Tips tea, while legions of sports stars energetically advertised carcinogenic smokes.
Read more For gen Z-ers and younger, many of the 10m items in HAT’s collection, not to mention the 50,000 commercials on its website, will be beyond weird, but for boomers like me, they trigger non-stop Proustian rushes. Look! There’s Nicole and Papa in 1991, pastiching soupy French films like Jean de Florette to sell us Renault Clios. There’s the Gold Blend couple, AKA the late Anthony Head and Sharon Maughan, whose romance blossomed over Nescafé instant coffee – and whose climactic kiss was seen by 30m viewers in 1993. There’s the little lad in a flat cap pushing his Hovis-laden bike over cobbles to the sound of Dvořák’s New World Symphony in the 1973 ad by Ridley Scott.
A 1940s advert for Craven A cigarettes claims they prevent sore throats All these gems are held online and in former barns leased to HAT by Sir Nicholas Hickman Ponsonby Bacon. If TS Eliot’s Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons, many of us can measure ours in ads. For instance, bow-tied and top-hatted Frank Muir leaning on his Rolls-Royce convertible endorsing a certain Cadbury’s chocolate in a 1977 TV ad while singing the following ditty: “Everyone’s a fruit and nut case / I find it very healthy for my ego / It makes one feel more vital / As if one had a title / Lots more fun than plumbing / Or a saxophone recital.”
View image in fullscreen Tick followed tock … 1999’s Guinness surfers. Photograph: Courtesy: History of Advertising Trust Then there was that all-too-relatable moment in 1986 when Gregor Fisher’s Baldy Man went into a photobooth and arranged his comb-over for a passport snap. But then something went wrong – the seat collapsed repeatedly, his locks got messed up and Gregor sank beneath the frame. A few seconds later, Bach’s Air on a G String struck up and a plume of smoke rose. It may not have been possible to claim at that time that smoking was good for your health, but the implicit suggest…