Today’s UWTV entry is about a surreal advert for breakfast cereal that was on UK TV in the 90s. From my recollection it was mid-to-late 90s, I think some time between 1994-98, but I can’t recall the exact year. Nor do I recall what cereal it was for but I’m fairly sure it was an ‘obscure’ cereal as opposed to the more well-known ones like Corn Flakes, All-Bran, Shredded Wheat etc. This advert was rather weird and (to me at least) perhaps unintentionally disturbing, so here goes…
The advert featured a comedic woman who was rather bumbling and silly, in a kitchen/dining room making a bowl of breakfast cereal for herself. (From memory the lady had quite long, thick hair, I think either blonde or possibly a reddish colour.) From my recollection there was a male voiceover and the lady didn’t say anything, it was more like a silent comedy thing, with her making the bowl of cereal. At the end of the advert, the lady sat down at the table to eat the cereal – and then, the room turned itself upside down, and the woman screamed as she and everything in the room fell crashing to the ‘floor’ (i.e. the ceiling that was now the floor). The advert ended with a shot of the cereal packet landing upright in front of the camera, and I think a male voiceover advertizing the cereal.
I recall seeing this advert quite a few times; I think it ran fairly regularly over a short period of time, but I cannot recall the exact year. Personally this advert always bugged me, because although it was obviously meant to be silly and comedic, it looked like a pretty nasty accident the woman was subjected to at the end, and what made it seem particularly unpleasant was the woman’s scream – if she’d let out a comical, light-hearted scream it probably would not have bugged me so much, but as she fell to the ‘floor/ceiling’, the woman let out a proper shrill, terrified scream that would rival that of Janet Leigh in Psycho – no way could I see this advert as being funny at all!
My search for this advert has brought me, naturally, to the Cereals & Other Ads channel on YouTube; I emailed the channel’s owner, but unfortunately he is not familiar with this advert, despite being a big collector of UK breakfast cereal commercials. If the advert managed to elude him I wonder if it may have been a regional advert rather than a national one (I live in the Northwest).
Of course there are hundreds if not thousands of commercial breaks from the 90s on YouTube, so I’m hoping this advert may be on one of them somewhere, but if so I have yet to come across it.
So it seems this elusive advert is deserving of a UWTV entry – does anyone recall this advert at all, know what it was for or know where we can find it? If so, please comment here or drop us an email!
UPDATE 30/03/23 – Thanks to one of our Twitter followers, @Carrigpudding, it seems this UWTV item has been found!
The advert is for Shredded Wheat, and can be viewed at the end of this ad break, at 3:20:
So it seems the advert was from earlier than believed, as this ad break is from November 1988. It’s possible the ad may have been repeated in the 90s, or it could just be a classic case of memory being unreliable. It’s also possible that a different ad reused the same idea in the 90s, but I see no real reason this particular advert isn’t the one I remembered.
And it’s yet another instance of childhood memory making an ad out to be more disturbing than it really was – as you can see from the video, the woman’s scream at the end is pretty comedic after all, and definitely not the ‘nasty accident’ I perceived it as when seeing it at a very young age!
Huge thanks to @Carrigpudding on Twitter for solving this mystery for us, and should anyone have any further info on similar adverts, don’t hesitate to contact us via the comments, Twitter or email!
So this one isn’t unidentified, but it seems worth doing a UWTV entry for anyway, since it was for a long time unidentified – and though it’s now been found, there exists at least one other advert in the same series which we’d love to get hold of.
For many years I was well and truly perplexed by a weird series of adverts I had seen on TV around the mid-80s. Being only about 4 or 5 at the time I couldn’t remember a great deal about them or what they had been for, but my recollection of them had me totally lost as to what they might have been for, and completely confused the hell out of anyone I asked about them. I spent over a decade searching for these adverts on various TV forums online, and this was my description of them:
“I remember a series of particularly dark and weird adverts that showed on TV for a while in the mid-80s (circa 85-86). Each of these commercials featured a pitch black screen and there would be the sound of mumbling, echoed voices and whispers as well as random things/people appearing on the screen and changing or transforming in some way… I remember a man in a shirt changing into a werewolf-like creature – if I remember correctly he appeared as the werewolf first then as himself, then later in the same advert there was the sound of a scared little girl’s voice and a man’s voice answering “Oh, sorry Laura”… Another of these adverts began with a little boy pulsating with some kind of energy, then an old woman came over to him and touched him, and immediately after touching him she turned into stone… I haven’t the faintest clue what they were advertizing…“
Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, wherever I asked about the above, I was met with responses of “Where do you buy your weed”, “Don’t eat cheese before bedtime”, “What the hell are you smoking”, etc etc… and no one ever had any idea what these commercials might have been for. After a decade of searching, I had pretty much given up hope of ever finding these, thought I may as well make a post about them here just for a laugh, but didn’t expect to ever identify or find them.
Then, one day in June 2021 I was just browsing 80s ad breaks on YouTube, and was absolutely gobsmacked to come across one featuring the very advert I’d been looking for…
Completely at random, I had stumbled across the exact advert I had looked for for so long, well after I’d given up hope of actually finding it. I was so taken aback at finding it out of the blue, that I had to lie down for about 15 minutes after watching it, to process it all! And it turned out to be for TDK Video Tapes, something I would never have suspected… and with this video having been uploaded way back in 2008, it turned out it had been online the whole time I’d been looking. I’d probably even skimmed past it on YouTube searches in the past – just goes to show, we should never give up hope of finding these weird TV memories of ours, they can pop up in the most random and unlikely places.
Watching the advert and reading my description above, it’s perhaps easy to see why my memory didn’t jog anyone else’s recollections of this advert. It wasn’t exactly an accurate description, and while the advert is definitely weird, it’s clear that my toddler mind actually twisted it to make it seem even weirder and darker than it was, into something more like some experimental short arthouse film than a light-hearted TV commercial. And this is pretty much the case with the majority of my childhood memories of weird TV; however weird or dark the actual production, it is never quite as disturbing or twisted as my young mind’s recollection – something about a child’s naivete, selective memory and lack of solid understanding of the adult world is capable of twisting things to make them seem even more messed-up and surreal than they actually are.
Nonetheless, this particular advert is definitely a solid example of 80s commercial directors getting creative with arthouse weirdness, and deserves a firm place in the archives of The Haunted Generation.
And another reason for this blog post is, that there is at least one more advert in the same series…
As you can see in my description above, I recall another advert in the series that had “a little boy pulsating with some kind of energy, then an old woman came over to him and touched him, and immediately after touching him she turned into stone…“
I can still very much recall this other ad in the series. I can recall the little boy, seemingly pulsating with energy, or being bathed in white light, in a similar manner to the bloke at 0:09, and from recollection, an old lady entered the frame, said something and touched him, and she immediately turned, slowly, into a stone statue.
There may have been other ads in the series too, but there was definitely at least one more besides the main one… if you have any recollection of the aforementioned missing TDK advert in this series, or any others, please comment below or send us an email!
This latest search is for an advert that several of our readers have recalled, apparently from the mid-80s, for some sort of confectionery – either sweets, chocolate or bubblegum though we’re not certain which. The advert has been described as follows:
“The advert had some finger-wagging old bat scolding some little kid… she took a bite out of this confectionery that the kid had on him, whereupon its magical powers of zaniness sped up the old bat’s voice, lifted her into the air and hauled her off, still finger-wagging and screeching, into the wild blue yonder, and the kid grinned to the camera.”
Although a UK reader first brought this ad to our attention, a US-based visitor to the blog claimed to have seen this advert as well – it was not often that commercials were screened on both sides of the Atlantic, although it’s not out of the question that similar commercials may have been made in both countries, perhaps for an international product.
It is not certain as yet what type of confectionery the advert was for – Hubba Bubba was suggested, though a YouTube search has revealed no adverts matching this description yet. Refreshers is also a candidate, given the similarities to this animated Refreshers ad from the early 80s:
While the advert our readers recall was live action rather than animated, it’s quite possible it could have been a live action ad building on the earlier animated commercial for the same product.
Does anyone have any recollection of this advert, or know where we can find it? If so, please post in the comments below or email us to solve the mystery!
This UWTV blog entry comes from one of our followers on Twitter, Emma Graney (@emmagraney). Emma recalls a strange advert from the 90s that could have been for Orange mobile, but she’s not certain… if anyone can help Emma identify this memory, please comment here or drop us an email!
Over to Emma…:
A lot of years ago, around the time of when Orange mobile started, they had a big ad campaign launch with a baby floating in it and clocks ticking down – I think this was around 1995… But before this launch there was, say, a 10 second advert that was shown of an eye blinking, with weird music to accompany it – a bit like those jewellery boxes that play a tune. I still know the tune it played.
I always thought it was an Orange advert and I have convinced myself it was. I can find NOTHING about it. This had led me down the paths of subliminal advertising, making it up and even thinking I had dreamt it. I didn’t! It was on the ad breaks…
And it had something to do with Orange (or did it?) But, there is nothing anywhere about it. Does anybody remember this? It was around 1995-1996. I know it’s true as my brother saw it as well and we both watched the same advert. You are my only hope Unidentified Weird Tv!
If Emma’s memory rings a bell for you, or you can help her identify it, please comment or email us!
Today’s UWTV memory is a guest blog post by our reader Stephanie Owens. If anyone can help Stephanie identify or find this TV advert, comment here or drop us an email!
Over to Stephanie…:
There was an advert when I was very young that terrified me. So much so, that I would scream and cry when it came on. I think in part it was the music, but the imagery as well was horrific for me as a child.
I can remember the music clearly, but that doesn’t help in a blog! The advert – as far as I can tell – was for bread. It went like this:
It started with an empty basket on a plain background. I recall it being quite pale, cream/light brown in colour, and the basket started to fill up with baked goods. Bread rolls, loaves of various kinds and there was a baguette there too. Then (and this was the bit the scared me the most), it turned upside down to show a face! Kind of like a scarecrow. The basket was a hat, rolls were the eyes, the baguette was the long nose, I think some more bread made a bow tie.
The thought of it still creeps me out and gives me shivers to this day. But I’ve not been able to find it. You would think it would be pretty distinctive and easy to find but no combination of words (bread face, baguette nose, etc) has found it.
I have known a couple people to remember it. I have been convinced it was for Hovis, as has a friend of mine who recalls this advert, but adding “Hovis” into the search still doesn’t find anything. I can’t even seem to find a mention of it on forums. The only adverts linked to Hovis is the classic boy with bike on a hill one.
My mum remembers it due to my reaction to it! She wondered if it was for a supermarket or something, due to the variety of breads it showed. Again, this doesn’t seem to show anything like it.
So many people say it sounds “vaguely familiar”, but no one recalls what the advert was for exactly.
I wondered if it might have been regional. I grew up in the West Country, and this advert would have been shown around 1989 – 1991.
I have looked on YouTube, I have looked on HATADS. I have a fixation with 80s and 90s advertising anyway, so the amount I have watched, you’d think I’d have come across it again. But no. Can anyone help?!?
UPDATE, 05/06/21 – Thanks to one of our readers, Jack Mortimer, we have FOUND this advert!
Turns out it is for Granary Malted Bread, shown between 1988-89, and here it is on the History of Advertising Trust website:
I used to watch TV-AM regularly as a small toddler – just about every morning I’d be up early before my parents had got up, and would be sat in front of the TV enjoying TV-AM. Being so young of course I rarely actually understood what I was watching, but something about the bright colours and the cheery atmosphere appealed to me, along with the wide array of presenters I quickly became familiar with. It seemed like a nice bright start to each day, and I must have watched nearly every broadcast for a good few years as a kid. But amidst all the cheery brightness, there was one particularly bizarre and disturbing clip I saw on a TV-AM broadcast in the mid-80s (detective work suggests 1986, but I wouldn’t rule out it could have been ’85 – my memories start to become clearer around that time…) which still disturbs me to this day. I have been trying to find this thing online for years but to this date it remains unidentified. But it is the perfect example of twisted, disturbing TV of the Haunted Generation – and of just how damned surreal 80s TV could be. So it most certainly deserves a post here, in the hope of finally solving the mystery…
I can’t remember the exact feature on TV-AM that it was part of – it was part of some feature on Good Morning Britain, I think an interview but can’t be sure. Anyway, the clip was as follows:
The clip featured a bird’s-eye view of a busy outdoor swimming pool on a hot summer’s day. My memory for detail must have been pretty sharp as a kid because I remember random minute details, such as there being a step ladder on the bottom left corner of the pool. Anyway, on the far left of the screen there was a mother sat on one of the chairs surrounding the pool, and a little boy was stood in front of her, whose shirt buttons she was unfastening. From memory, the mother had short black hair and was wearing a black top and black trousers. The boy was a typical-looking toddler with short light brown or blond hair, wearing a shirt and shorts. As mentioned, the mother was unfastening the boy’s shirt buttons, and she was talking to him as she did so (the boy didn’t say a word – it was just a long monologue by the mother). Seemed normal enough at first.
However, after a moment or so, the mother suddenly changed her voice mid-speech to a funny, comical voice. It was a proper silly, daft cartoon voice – a sharp voice right in the back of the throat. The change seemed undramatic – she just changed to the funny voice mid-sentence, and the boy didn’t react to this. She kept on unfastening (possibly buttoning back up?) the boy’s shirt, while talking to him in the funny voice, albeit with serious tones. Then after another moment or so the mother was lifted by nothing out of her chair, rose diagonally forward into mid-air, hung suspended in mid-air for a few seconds still in a sitting position – then fell into the pool with an enormous splash, while emitting a bizarre scream, still in the funny voice but sounding terrified. Absolutely no-one reacted to this – the camera hung on the scene a few seconds after the mother had fallen in, and the many swimmers in the pool didn’t react at all, while even the boy didn’t react – just kept staring straight ahead at the empty chair as if the mother was still there.
Cut back to the TV-AM studio. I’m pretty sure the late Mike Morris was among the presenters, possibly Anne Diamond as well, but childhood memories can never be 100% reliable. I seem to recall Mike Morris saying “Well that was…” and an air of bewilderment among the presenters, but no more specific details, much as I didn’t take in anything the mother had actually said in the monologue (well other than her bizarre funny-voiced scream of “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA–A!”) despite registering numerous other details.
Still of the TV-AM Studio from a broadcast c.1987. L-R: Mike Morris, Anne Diamond, Richard Keys. The television monitor between them was used to show clips and I seem to recall this particular clip showing on this screen.
Naturally, being just about 4 at the time, this clip disturbed me massively. It was presented in such a matter-of-fact manner as if it was a mundane everyday situation – it got me thinking, could anything like that happen to my mum, and if it did, other people would react wouldn’t they? Possibly the thing that disturbed me most about it was the fact the little boy didn’t react, you’d think it’d be the most traumatic thing ever for a small child to see something like that happening to their mother, but this sadistic little sicko didn’t seem to care at all. You see now that even as a kid I probably looked way too deep into this, but show something like that to an autistic 4-year-old and it’s bound to freak them out… and got me thinking well into adulthood, what the hell was that thing, and what was it doing being screened on TV-AM of all shows???
So cometh the age of the internet, I have enquired in multiple places about this clip for just over a decade now… I’ve tried the BFI but they weren’t familiar with it, tried the AP Archive which houses the TV-AM archive as well, but they can only search the archive for business purposes. But while these enquiries haven’t led anywhere, I have not met with complete zero luck… for I have had a few responses on the various forums I’ve asked about it on, from people who are pretty sure they remember it; only problem is their memories are vague and they can’t clearly recall what it was. The one consistency is that most of them seem to recall it being an advert, i.e. shown during commercial breaks, and most think it was a Public Information Film (PIF). One person said she seemed to remember it being a PIF about sunburn and the dangers of skin cancer, and something about the shirt being buttoned back up, i.e. stay safe/keep covered up in the sun. Another also said they were sure it was a PIF of some sort, something about taking care when swimming or looking after kids at the beach. Another person who said she vaguely remembered this thing said she seemed to recollect it being part of a series of adverts – apparently “several silly adverts with different things happening” and she recalled them being rather silly and comedic. If this is the case I haven’t come across any more from the same series, but again she was pretty sure they were about safety and were PIFs of some sort.
Now the PIF theory is the one that makes the most sense to me – for one, that explains why they allowed something so disturbing to be shown on TV-AM, as they did occasionally screen PIFs on TV-AM – it was considered quite acceptable to traumatize kids and the general public if it involved some kind of safety warning and was supposedly for the greater good! And the PIF theory seems to explain all the bizarre oddities about this clip – most prominently, the whole idea of no-one reacting to the mother’s bizarre fate; i.e. take care at swimming pools because if you get into danger it’s likely no-one will notice. We see newspaper stories all the time about kids drowning in pools while no-one notices, even their own parents – indeed, here is a PSA from the US about this very subject:
Could the clip on TV-AM have been a PIF on the same subject, warning parents to look after their kids at a swimming pool, by reversing the parent/child role? These news stories about such situations have always been so common that I’m amazed I haven’t seen any other British PIFs on the subject – so it makes sense that this clip could have been a PIF covering that exact subject. Even the mother’s funny voice could be explained by the PIF theory – one person suggested to me that it could have been some sort of gargling water effect, to simulate the sound of a person drowning or a child hearing their mother’s voice from above the pool or something. Put the various factors together and you seem to have the perfect PIF on the subject – keep children covered up in the sun to avoid sunburn, and keep your eye on them at the pool and don’t be one of the careless parents who fails to notice when their child drowns. The PIF theory just seems to make too much sense to be wrong.
Then again, I may be way off and it might have been a clip from a TV show or something, there were definitely a lot of weird TV shows in the 80s with some outright bizarre scenarios… one person who remembered it vaguely said they think it was an ad for Irn-Bru or Tizer or something, though I find this less plausible and having viewed plenty of ads for those products on YouTube, I really can’t see this fitting alongside them. And of course, childhood memories are notoriously unreliable, so it may well be there is something I am misremembering, or the clip may well have been less disturbing than my memory recalls.
Either way, while certain details may be off, there’s no questioning that this bizarre recollection from my childhood, which one person suggested might have been a “mumps fever dream” was real, so somewhere in the country a public swimming pool was hired out to film this thing, with camera crew, directors, extras playing the swimmers, and of course an actress playing the mother herself (very curious as to who she was and if she might have been known for anything else) and a kid playing her static little boy – and the kid must be about my age now and must surely remember taking part in this thing. Someone is out there who knows for sure what this clip was, and someone is out there who starred in it or was involved in some way. And that broadcast of TV-AM went out to thousands, possibly millions of households across the country, to countless viewers, many of who must have remembered it, and many kids who may well have been traumatized by it. Let’s hope this blog post manages to reach some of these people!
So here is an appeal to identify this bizarre clip once and for all – feel free to share this blog post far and wide, share it across social media, ask people you know, and hopefully eventually it will reach someone who can solve the mystery.
And if you know the answer yourself – please get in touch by commenting here or sending us an email. You’ll be laying a 35-year-old mystery to rest!
UPDATE, 09/04/22 – There has been a lot of interest to find this clip, and lots of very helpful people on Reddit and Discord who have taken the time to search for this thing – I’m very grateful indeed for all your help! While we’re still nowhere nearer identifying it, we do have a possible lead in this advert for Smiths Square Crisps from 1982, which features Lenny Henry putting on a funny voice and walking on a swimming pool before falling in:
While the clip I remember could still be something completely different, it’s interesting to note the parallels – particularly the way that no one else really reacts to Lenny’s walking on water and falling into the pool. So while I don’t personally think there’s any connection, we can’t completely rule out that the clip I remember may be an advert in the same series, or at least something very similar. We also have a recollection of a commercial featuring a boy being scolded by a finger-wagging granny who, after taking a bite of some confectionery the boy had, had her voice speeded up and was lifted into the air and carried off into the blue yonder while still finger-wagging – possibly an advert in the same series? We have a separate post about this advert in its own right.
Also, on the suggestion of another member of the Discord server discussing this, I have put together a rough mock-up of the scene to show what it looked like, using an image of Faversham Swimming Pool with TV presenter Zoe Ball in the role of the mother, and a stock image of a generic little boy for the boy. (Note that the mother in the clip looked nothing like Zoe Ball – as stated above the mother had short black hair and was wearing all black, I’ve just been unable to find an image of anyone who looks like the mother in a sitting position, so I’ve used the still of Zoe instead!) While not 100% accurate (in the actual clip the mother and boy were a few more metres from the side of the pool, so the mother fell in at the far left side rather than in the middle) – this gives a fairly close depiction of what the clip looked like:
A mock-up of the pool clip with Zoe Ball in place of the mother – does the above ring any bells for you?
Of course, until we get a more solid lead we can only speculate, and many people still think the clip was more likely from a film or TV show than an advert or PIF… either way, there are a whole load of us searching for this piece of lost media, so if you have any more solid recollections, please feel free to respond here or email us to help us solve the mystery!
One thing that kids of The Haunted Generation era are all agreed on is that TV adverts were often terrifying or plain creepy – even when advertizing the most mundane kinds of products. The particularly eerie adverts for Castrol Oil are a firm case in point.
But there’s one advert for one such product that completely scared the bejeezus out of me as a young child, that I have yet to hear anyone else recollect when unprompted by me, and which does not seem to have resurfaced online. This advert was for a product called IMPACT.
I can’t remember exactly what kind of product Impact was, other than that it was a completely mundane household product of some sort, probably a cleaning product. But the TV advert (which I think ran around 1984-85 or so) was well and truly terrifying.
For some reason, the bottle for the Impact product had a close-up of a scary-looking Great White Shark’s face on the label. The advert ended with a close-up of the bottle – IIRC it kind of shot towards the screen, with the shark staring right at the viewer through the screen… and if this wasn’t disturbing enough, it was accompanied by a particularly threatening-sounding voiceover man saying “Impact – puts you right in there, and Won’t Let You Go.”
My toddler mind could not quite fathom that this ‘Impact’ was merely a harmless household product, and interpreted it as some kind of warning that the shark was out there, and was coming to get me – or that the product would unleash the shark on me, or something. Either way, I remember being truly petrified every time the advert came on and that shark stared right through the screen at me, accompanied by the chilling words of the voiceover man.
I have asked about this ad on the Weird British TV Memories (70s-90s) group on Facebook, and one other group member recollected it, agreeing it was horrific. But other than that, this advert remains elusive. A search on the History of Advertising Trust website has revealed the following adverts that may be related:
These commercials seem to indicate that Impact may have been a fungicide, but either way they’re mild and completely unscary compared to the advert that traumatized my young mind.
So here’s an appeal to anyone who may have any recollection of the Impact commercial, or better still have a copy of it – if you recall this advert or are able to make it available for viewing again, please comment here or email us!
Unidentified Weird TV 