The real pearl of cinema ads (BBC news online)

April 23rd, 2010

In the 70s and 80s no trip to the pictures was complete without an advertisement for the curry house next door. Production values for such local adverts were “amateurish”. And that’s being kind.

But the recent sale of loss-making cinema advertising firm Pearl & Dean for £1, has highlighted the demise of a very British tradition, whose glory days are now remembered with great affection. The cinema has always been bound up with nostalgia and a sense of ritual. But one essential part of going to the movies has almost vanished – the banal local advert.

On a Saturday in ABCs up and down the country, people would wait expectantly in their red velvet seats for the big blockbuster to start. But before James Bond, Star Wars or Gandhi could transport us to new exotic worlds, we had to deal with something closer to home – badly produced sales pitches for double glazing stores, gentlemen’s outfitters and, most memorably, the local curry house.

Once upon a time there were two giants of local cinema advertising – Rank and Pearl & Dean. Today it is just the latter and they are struggling, having just been sold by the Scottish media group, STV, for £1. This was after being trapped in a loss-making deal with Vue Cinemas. Peter Seabrook-Harris, regional sales director at Pearl & Dean, started working in cinema advertising for Rank in the 1970s, when local commercials were a mainstay of the business. “Advertising is a fantastic social history of the time,” he says. “In the 70s and 80s a typical cinema ad really reflected the high street – the butcher, the baker, the florist.”

People say two things when he tells them who he works for. The first is the unmistakably jaunty theme tune, known as the “Pa Pa Pa Pa Pa Pa Pa music” but officially entitled Asteroid. Surprisingly, the company receives frequent requests to have its music played at funerals, he says. “It’s the final curtain and puts a smile on people’s faces,” says Mr Seabrook-Harris.

“The other question I get is ‘d’you still run those awful curry ads?’ The truth of the matter is we don’t. “The high street is all chop and change, all mobile phone shops and chains who have national advertising. So most of our local work now is corporate – colleges, health authorities and councils.” Business has to move with the times, but culturally it’s a sad loss. For all their amateurism they represented ordinary British life, he says.

“At multiplexes now everything is very Hollywood and slick, whereas before you had this essential Britishness and we’ve seen a big part of that cultural life disappear.”
The adverts may now seem ridiculously amateurish, with their garish pictures, muffled voiceovers and banal local geography. But they were also rather ingenious, using a national template that allowed a message for a local business to be spliced on at the end, says Mr Seabrook-Harris.

“What used to happen in the old days is we’d shoot a library commercial. A couple enjoying a sumptuous Indian meal feast, accompanied by very bad sitar music. The voiceover would ask ‘d’you want a taste of the Orient?’ Then a totally different voice stuck on at the end says ‘Number one Taj Mahal in Stoke’.”

As this was before the computer age sheets of dry transferable lettering, often referred to by the brand name Letraset, were used. “It was all done by eye, which is fine on A4, but when you put it on a huge screen the letters would jump all over the place,” says Mr Seabrook-Harris.

But one man’s amateurishness is another’s exoticism. The film critic Andrew Collins grew up in Northampton and looks back with unbridled affection for this dying art form.
“The local ads contained within the vertigo-inducing Pearl & Dean idents were totally glamorous,” he says. “I’d never been to a restaurant, had certainly never tasted Indian food and was too young to care about local garages.”

And now decades on, he can appreciate the craft that went into the genre, which has led to so much unintended amusement over the years. “It’s only in retrospect that I admire the cut from all-purpose, generic footage or stills of a friendly Indian waiter, possibly in a turban, smiling as he dished up brightly coloured gravy, against a flock wallpaper background, to a hastily Letraset-applied title card with the name of a Taj Mahal 100 yards from this cinema.”

Rory Sutherland, president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), is also a fan. He says there’s a simple reason why they command so much amusement:
“The production values of most cinema films and advertising were so lavish and then in between you’ve got this static photo with washed out colour, so degraded that you can almost see the flies on the print. It’s the contrast of ‘Welcome to Jamaica, Mr Bond’ and the advert for the local business that ends with ‘we’re just past the bus stop’. It’s pure bathos.”

The genuine local ads had a “sweet amateurishness” and touching “self aggrandisement” after the slick national advertisements, he says. And for all their crudeness there was a certain logic to them, especially when it came to curry. “After the film you might want to go for something to eat. It doesn’t take much to make me want to eat Indian food and in those days it was either that or the chippy.”

The bad local cinema ad became such a staple of British life that Heineken even made a spoof commercial about it, he says. It began with the Pearl & Dean music but the film projection goes haywire, it appears to jam and burst into flames and the music slows. Suddenly the ad turns into an Indian restaurant voiceover: “Only Heineken refreshes the Pa Pa Pa Pa Pa Pa Pa parts other beers cannot reach.”

But while these advertisements have disappeared, Mr Seabrook-Harris is hopefully they may return.” A growing number of screens are going over to digital projection, so we may see local advertising houses using broadcast quality digital cameras. I can see a renaissance taking place,” he says.

A FILM BUFF’S MEMORIES
Multiplexes are brilliant… but there’s something about cinemas with only one screen, where the floor was sticky with sweets, the stairs of the cinema were so high it made my legs ache and those local adverts. So when you go to the cinema now there’s a pang of regret you don’t get that. You want to hear the Pearl & Dean sting, watch 20 minutes of terrible adverts, then you want some fantastic trailers before a great film
Ian Freer, Assistant editor at Empire magazine

Entry Filed under: Culture