More About The Weetabix ("OK?!")

Time warpin' back to 1982... Remember Dunk, Crunch, Bixie, Brian and Brains?

"OK?!" squawks Brian, whilst Dunk glowers...

Brains and Bixie are horrified by a "titchy" breakfast...

One of the fondest remembered TV ad campaigns of the 1980s has to be the Weetabix bovver... er... bix, railing against "tichy" breakfasts and telling us in no uncertain terms that you make it "neet wheat, mate!" Well, if you know what's good for you, you do...

These memorable characters, created by Trevor Beattie (now also known for fcuck, amongst other things), stomped into our lives via the "goggle box" (telly!) in March 1982, and the ads then swept through the rest of the 1980s, finally ceasing in November 1989.

I became aware of them when my little sister became a fan. When she was ill in 1984, I wrote to the "Weetabix gang" at Weetabix HQ for her, and the company sent her a huge package of Weetabix gang posters, felt tips, pictures to colour and other goodies - all free, gratis and for nothing.

It was a much appreciated act of kindness on the part of the company - my sister was quite seriously unwell at the time, and anything that brought a smile to her face was very welcome indeed.

And soon little sis was happily enrolled in the Weetabix Club!

"Computers are OK once you show them who's BOSS!" I never thought that computers would be a part of my life back in the 1980s - although the home computer era was beginning, I preferred Stella Artois and plenty of Nite Spots.

The ad on the right reflects the roller disco fad of the 1980s...

Crocodile Dunkdee... love it! And Choose Your Own Adventure books - popular with many 1980s children. Notice the kids fleeing from the dragon in the illustration are riding BMX bikes!

A word about the WeetOlympix stickers on the right... these have a copyright year of 1984, but this does not refer to the actual year of the stickers themselves - or perhaps they were issued twice! I have reason to remember that they were issued in the run-up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics simply because me and a group of friends, sharing a flat from 1987-1988, collected the stickers and stuck them to the inside of the food cupboard door. We had terrible trouble completing the collection - Bixie was simply not to be found for ages!

Two of the WeetOlympix stickers - Brains Throwing A Mile and Dunk Clearing The Stadium Wall.

More fun and games...

"Are you Robin Hood?" "No, I'm Robbin' your Breakfast!" Brilliant! And energy for BMX riding comes from a WBX start!

Many thanks to Peter Gray's Cartoons And Comics blog for providing the comic ads!

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 2010. UPDATED MARCH 2013.

Access - Your Flexible Friend

A newspaper advertisement for Bejam, December 1981. Nobody in my very working class neighbourhood even owned a freezer in 1981. Seems incredible now.

From the Sunday People, April 1985.

Here's Access and Money in another advertisement featured in the Radio Times, May 1985.

The blurb went: 

Go shopping without leaving home.

Nowadays you can pick up a phone and a bargain from the comfort of your own armchair. And using Access makes it even easier.Book your holiday over the phone with Access. Everything from rail and air tickets, to hotel bookings and car hire.

Many theatres, cinemas, pop concerts and sporting events accept Access over the phone, too - quote your name, number and address and that's it. What could be simpler? Or more convenient.

Credit cards seemed like something from the Planet Zog to me and my pals and family back then. You paid cash or bought from a mail order catalogue. There was no other way in our world.

I used to feel sorry for Money in the ads - he always seemed to end up flustered and out of sorts - he had an irritating voice, too.

Poor little git.

I never even used a cash point machine until some time after the UK's first debit card, Barclays Connect, was issued on June 3 1987. That sparked a revolution. Suddenly, plastic money and cash point machines were not just for those well off enough to own a credit card. Within nine months, Barclays was issuing its one millionth Connect Card.

I was a Barclays Connect man from around 1988 onwards.

Sorry, Access.

1984 Kit Kat Ad: "Alien Invasion, What On Earth Are We Going to Do?"

This brilliant Kit-Kat chocolate bar TV ad is entitled "Pop Band" and dates from 1984. I love it. I actually like the tune as well! Gets me tapping my feet! Similarly, I liked the sound of Not The Nine O'Clock News' 1982 ditty Nice Video, Shame About The Song ("Let's spend our honeymoon in East Berlin...") - and could quite happily have bopped around the dancefloor if a full-length version had ever reached my local nite spot!

Back to the ad: "You can't sing, you can't play, you look awful. You'll go a long way..." Sounds like me in the '80s.

Apart from the last bit (sigh).

UPDATE 21/5/12

Thanks to my readers who have provided further information about this ad. It was filmed at Wembley in 1984, the band member on the far left has "1984" emblazoned on his T-shirt, and the agent is played by actor Gavin Richards, who has featured in many television productions over the years, including EastEnders (as Terry Raymond) and 'Allo 'Allo as  Captain Alberto Bertorelli. Carol Smillie also features (second left).

The ad was beautifully done. Just look at the band: by 1984, the New Romantic scene was just about dead, although it had left its influence. The guy on the far left in the band has a modest version of the A Flock Of Seagulls quiff, with the uplifts at the side; in 1983 and 1984 Bananarama were big news and the two girls are 'nana clones, obviously happily embracing the brave new worlds of hair gel and mousse; the guy on the right is your typical trendy dude, whilst the dapper agent with the pink tie... well, need I say more? 1984 lives!

Tasty, Tasty, Very Very Tasty Bran Flakes, Kellogg's Super Noodles And More...

Two ads from 1982 - "Tasty, Tasty, Very Tasty" Bran Flakes and "make mealtimes really new" with Super Noodles.

We've already written about the changing eating habits of the UK public in the 1980s elsewhere on this blog (here). We've examined the wonders of the F-Plan Diet, pasta as an exciting range of dishes, bottled water, courgettes, peppers, the thrill of fancy fillings in baked spuds, star fruits, savoury rice and turkey sausages. We've "humphed" impatiently at nouvelle cuisine and giggled afresh at the Weetabix skinheads. We loved our '80s grub - particularly in the mid-to-late decade when so much changed. And, of course, the 1980s were the era of the foodie!

Memory often plays food writers tricks. 1960s innovations the prawn cocktail and Black Forest gateau only reached the humblest of the humble working class folks in the 1980s. It was around the early 1980s (once more, I won't rely on the Web) that prawn flavoured cocktail crisps were launched and, although I couldn't abide the dish they were based on, I couldn't get enough of the crisps!

The '80s also gave us those lovely Hob Nob biscuits, and the early part of the decade saw Pot Noodles in the ascendancy. Not sure of a UK launch year for these, and won't rely on the web, but I do know they were becoming all the rage and bombarding us with lovely new flavours in the early-to-mid 1980s. And, of course, there quickly followed the imitators (remember Snack Pot? "We put the Snack before the pot"? We do!).

Pot Noodles were becoming the thing to snack on by 1981. We were no stranger to food we needed to re-hydrate, but the idea of re-hydrating then eating straight from the pot - no need for washing up - appealed to many of us and seemed very revolutionary indeed.

This leads me to a personal recollection of mine concerning a school mate (let's call him Steve). Steve had a big fat belly, and used to chortle and say:"That's my beer belly!" Macho nonsense of course - he didn't drink alcohol. He seemed happy being a big lad, until 1981 when, with leaving school staring him in the face, he suddenly decided to become "fancyable". The opposite sex had been steering well clear up to now, and so Steve launched a strict diet to reduce his wobble factor.

One lunchtime, I went to Steve's house to eat my paste sandwiches and have a cuppa with him. He lived just a couple of streets away from our school, so always went home to lunch. It was the time when the Rubik's Cube and illegal CB radio were the big fads (CB was due to be legalised in November '81, but a slackening of controls in the run-up saw the illegal craze running wild) and we discussed these, and then, having reached his house, Steve introduced me to his latest ally in his own personal inch war - a Pot Noodle. This was his lunch, he told me proudly. Zilch calories compared to his usual midday four paste sandwiches and bowl of soup nosh-up.

He prepared his Noodle, I munched glumly on my paste sandwiches. And then it happened. Steve fetched a tub of marge from the fridge, and began to ransack a previously unopened loaf of white bread which had been sitting innocently on the dining table. As if in a trance, he dunked slice after slice of bread and marge in his Noodle, in between slurping it down, and by the time he'd finished there were two slices of bread left in the packet (I checked).

"STEVE!" I gasped. "You're doin' your diet no good at all, mate!"

"'Course I am, Andy," Steve chortled. "Pot Noodle 'n' a couple of slices of bread for lunch... What's wrong with that?"

On the way back to school, he bought himself a Marathon - "That Pot Noodle ain't quite fillin' the gap. One bar won't hurt!"

By altering his usual lunchtime food intake as part of his stomach-reducing diet, Steve had ended up eating loads more than he usually did. I gave up.

The '80s changed my diet tremendously, and there's no doubt I began eating a lot better. Those courgettes, those peppers, those fancy baked potatoes, that carrot cake were delicious!

The supermarkets suddenly seemed to erupt with affordable goodies.

But, of course, whilst scoffing up the carrot cake, meeting real sausages for the first time, indulging in all those fancy salad dressings, and experimenting like crazy with veg and pasta, being a young man about town there were many times when I desired the quick and simple solution to what to have for dinner.

Matthew's turkey sausages, savoury rice and tinned green beans were a mainstay, as were those scrummy mini-pizzas from Bejam. And Bejam did small cube sized blocks of bubble and squeak! Heaven!

"Make Meal Times Really New", said the Kellogg's 1982 Super Noodles ad featured at the top of this post, and I adored them, once more with sausages and green beans. If you overcooked the noodles slightly, you could let them cool a bit then have them in a sandwich. Delicious!

Last week, my wife and I went to our local supermarket thinking about the Big Hair decade. The pasta ranges seemed vastly smaller compared to the mid-to-late 1980s when doing things with pasta was so new and exciting in this country, and we couldn't find a single packet of wholemeal pasta which, in the era 1986-1989, would have been cause for outrage.

A Tesco magazine advertisement from December 1984. Pasta was just becoming exciting in the UK.

We spotted some Super Noodles, tucked away, and suddenly decided we'd have an '80s convenience meal. Sausages and green beans went into our trolley and, that night, we tucked in. Lovely! And so nostalgic...

After the meal, instead of me dashing around showering and gelling my hair and getting myself done up like a dog's dinner for a night out, as I had back in the '80s, I sat in my armchair, with my middle aged spread, and gently drifted off to sleep - which is the norm nowadays.

It all seemed a bit sad. 21st Century Andy can revive '80s food, but 21st Century Andy is not '80s Andy - with all his youthful vigour and dodgy fashion sense - and '80s Andy is not coming back...

Never mind. The memories are very sweet. We'll definitely be having Super Noodles again.

It's A Lot Less Bother Than A Hover Causes Bovver...

One of my favourite TV ad slogans of the 1980s was "It's a lot less bovver than a hover" - from the Qualcast lawn mower ads. It seemed like a bit of fun to me as a viewer who didn't even own a lawnmower, but was apparently causing no end of angst for the folks at Flymo, who made the hover mowers. The article below, from the Sun, April 29, 1983, reveals that the Flymo workers were taking their concerns to the House of Commons.

One Flymo employee said: "There is no bother with our hover - and we have two Queen's Awards to Industry in the past year to prove it."

1980-2010: 30th Anniversary Of The Shake 'n' Vac TV Ad....

1980 - Jenny Logan provided a memorable introduction to Shake 'n' Vac!

I was very pleased, as chief cook and bottle washer at '80s Actual, to receive an invitation to an event celebrating the 30th anniversary of the excellent Glade Shake 'n' Vac television ad.

Remember the wonderful Jenny Logan?

"It's all you have to do!
Do the Shake 'n' Vac and put the freshness back
Do the Shake 'n' Vac and put the freshness back
When your carpet smells fresh, your room does too
Every time you vacuum, remember what to do..."

The jingle took off, and soon we were all singing it, and trying to imitate Jenny's dance!

Sadly, I'm not able to make it to the 30th anniversary event, but I have such fond memories of the ad that I simply couldn't let the birthday pass unnoticed!

And did I ever use Shake 'n' Vac myself?

Well, in 1983, I moved into a furnished flat and the carpets were a little old and a little... well... "niffy".

So my girlfriend bought some Shake 'n' Vac and, although I'm not into advertising, I must say it lifted the frankly rather pongy atmosphere more than a little.

And, best of all, we did the Shake 'n' Vac and sang the song as we sprinkled it around!

Happy, happy memories!

The Weetabix Gang: "If You Know What's Good For You!"

They look like proper little skinheads, don't they? An incredibly quirky marketing idea.

No breakfasts fit for sparrows here.

"You make it neat wheat, mate!"

"If you know what's good for you, you do!"

Dunk, Crunch, Brains, Brian and Bixie, AKA the Weetabix bovver boys and girl, were determined to stamp out "titchy breakfasts". The brainchild of one Trevor Beattie, they starred in a long series of TV ads from March 1982 until November 1989.

The Weetabix had a couple of catchphrases which were pretty popular: Brian's was "OK!", spoken in a parrot-like voice. Dunk contributed "If you know what's good for you!"

This sounded menacing, but actually referred to the health-giving properties of the product.

Crunch is featured testing his strength at the fairground on this 1983 "Weeta-Card"..

Seaside fun - "OK"?!

Crazy golf frolics...

Part of a set of free-inside Neet Weet Beet band stickers...

A set of sew-on patches featuring some of our cereal characters. Weetabix Crew merchandise is becoming increasingly collectable.

Did YOU join the Weetabix Club? The Club was established in 1983, but disbanded before the end of the decade. The daughter of a friend of mine wrote requesting to join the Club in late 1988, but was told it was no more. The news was sweetened by the assurance that she could still see the characters on Weetabix boxes, on TV, and in advertisements in comics, etc.

Even Weetabix were breakdancing in 1984.

Here's parrot-voiced hero Brian, starring on his own badge. "Boxer Weetabix"? Nice one!

Free Top Trax cassettes and pop postcards featuring the likes of Tears for Tears and Bananarama in 1985.

-

The Weetabix Pop Quiz - 1987 - "JUST DO IT!" Other Weeta merchandise included cuddly toys and a computer game, which featured the crew taking on the "Titchies".

Collect the cut-outs and make your own Crew. Note the sell-by date - August '87 and the Sainsbury's price ticket - 56p!

Here's the whole gang...

Print this out, then cut out and assemble for rare Weetabix nostalgia straight from 1987!



The very first TV ad featuring the Weetabix characters. Created in 1982, they appeared on-screen until 1989.

Rowan Atkinson and Nokia Cityman Star in TV Ad

This ad for Eagle Star investment plans dates from 1988 and starred Rowan Atkinson - old Blackadder himself, as Captain Kidd, the pirate. It also starred that technological marvel of 1987 - the Nokia Cityman mobile phone!

The voice-over explained:

This man made a lot of money, travelled the world...

... became a huge success by persuading complete strangers to give him their valuables.

Unfortunately for Captain Kidd, Eagle Star weren't around at the time, so he put his money into an obscure off-shore tax haven. And when he came back, he found he'd lost the lot.

[Andy explains: Captain Kidd's men buried it on this beach, and when Captain Kidd later came back for it, he couldn't find it!].

Take care of your treasure - ask your financial advisor about Eagle Star's investment plans. Because with Eagle Star you can face the future with confidence.

And here's the Nokia Cityman - with skull and crossbones flag for an aerial.

How outlandish mobile phones seemed back then...

---------------------------------------------