A new advert has appeared in the Pearl & Dean [UK cinema advertising] presentation that precedes feature films. It is for Hovis bread. It is not a blockbuster, but it is very well filmed. And it recoups the period detail and nostalgia that graced the earlier adverts for this product by the Scott Brothers. The new advert lacks, though, their distinctive regional narrator’s voice and its supporting brass band.
It seems to be the Edwardian period: a bread shop and a boy with a loaf under his arm: and he runs through the streets clutching his purchase. As he runs we see a newspaper poster about the Titanic; a suffragette demonstration; soldiers marching off to the front of World War I; families fleeing the Blitz of World War II; a victory party; men celebrating with flags, likely the 1966 world cup victory or Tottenham’s European Cup win; a confrontation between lines of police and lines of miners, we are in 1984, the seriousness is dissipated by a joke about the boy’s bedtime; the Millenium firework display; and he runs on into a recognisable contemporary and multicultural Britain; reaching home he enjoys a slice of the rich brown Hovis loaf.
This vignette is a timeline, like that so successfully used in Notting Hill (1999) However, it reminded me most of the opening credits for the BBC 2’s series The People’s Century (1995) Here, for every episode, a series of snapshots of significant events from the 20th century unfolded: wars, revolutions, disaster, inventions, heroic deeds, sporting triumphs, families . . . The backdrop to this was a road unrolling before the viewer, changing from black and white to vivid colour. This image seemed to me to embody the values of a triumphant western capitalism: (one of the final images is the destruction of the Berlin Wall), erasing the contradictions and the costs of this so-called progress. The Hovis advert appears to create the same value laden images of time and change.
This is the first Hovis advert I remember seeing at the cinema since the earlier classics. It is ironic that this should happen when the price of bread is turning it from a staple into a luxury. Presumably it is these very increases that have made the firm of Hovis feel they need some extra advertising. It struck me later that we never learn the price of the bread that the boy carries: does it increase as the timeline runs on? And one other significant matter is missing – the closure of Hovis’ Yorkshire factory, with the consequent loss of jobs. Were some of these that of the friendly Yorkshire narrator and the accompanying Brass Band from the earlier era?
On December 20th 2009 the advert, <iHovis – Go On Lad/i> was top in the viewers poll for the ‘Ad of the Decade’ presented on the UK ITV1 television channel. Predictably the accompanying ‘talking heads’ had nothing to say about the ideological project of this short film. The closest they got was in using the word ‘traditional’.
itp Global Film 