UP IN SMOKE
Cigarette advertising was banned on British TV in 1965, but cigarette manufacturers W.D. & H.O. Wills probably wished it had been much earlier. In 1959, a period in British history where you were in a minority if you didn’t smoke, they launched a new brand, called Strand. The campaign centred on a costly TV advert that, to this day, still stands out for its artistry. It had a dishy protagonist, known in the script as The Lonely Man and in reality played by actor Terence Brook, a dead ringer for Sinatra. Wandering the empty streets of London at night, he stops to light a cigarette under a streetlamp. ‘You’re never alone with a Strand’ ran the tagline over a cool, downbeat theme jazz riff. It’s not clear why he’s mooching around in a trench coat in the early hours, but he looks good doing it. If you smoked Strand, the ad wanted you to know, you would reek of cool. The advert certainly struck a note with the public and brand recognition was extremely high. But something stank about Strand. Sales were a disaster. Most people who saw the ad translated its message into something akin to: ‘Smoke Strand and you too can be a depressed, friendless loser.’ The ad’s soundtrack, called ‘The Lonely Man Theme’, was recorded by the Cliff Adams Orchestra and reached number 38 in the hit parade.
THIS DEAL SUCKS
When a company synonymous with vacuum cleaners decided to branch out as a travel agent, the result was an unmitigated disaster. Britons were swept up in Hoover’s too-good-to-be-true special offer – and resorted both to hijacking and to Trojan horses to get their money back. Even the Queen was sufficiently miffed to whip back her Royal Seal of approval.
In 1992, the British division of Hoover had a surfeit of white goods, which they were desperate to shift. So they came up with the bright idea of offering two, free, round-trip airline tickets with every purchase of a Hoover product over £100. While the promotion was good only for trips inside Europe, canny customers realised they could make savings on flights.
Hoover didn’t have their eye on the ball, though, and leapt from misguided to moronic by extending the offer to US destinations. In 1992 a one-way ticket to the USA averaged £200, but Hoover were offering a pair of returns for £100. That made no business sense whatsoever. Their adverts acknowledged as much, running with a tagline that chuckled, ‘Two return seats: Unbelievable.’ Unusually for advertising, this boast turned out to be completely true – just not for the right reasons. More than 200,000 people bought Hoovers they didn’t really want.
Hoover’s European sales increased dramatically; their bottom line did not. Realising too late the calamity of the offer, Hoover refused to honour it. This incensed the public. In Cumbria, a Mr Dixon hijacked a Hoover branded van when a repairman from the company called to fix the dishwasher he had bought to fund a family holiday to the USA. Dixon refused to hand back the van until he got his tickets – and became a national hero overnight. BBC consumer rights show Watchdog became obsessed with the story and sent in undercover reporters to Hoover HQ. A grass-roots consumer group called the Hoover Holidays Pressure Group was formed and bought enough shares in Hoover’s parent company to attend shareholder meetings and pressure them to pay up.
When that failed, the group took the company to the courts, making headlines throughout Europe and the United States. The court cases went on for five more years, costing Hoover £50 million and such a devastating drop in reputation that their owners, Maytag, were forced to sell off the company to an Italian competitor, Candy.
AT THE PICTURES: THE STORIES BEHIND THE SCENES
BISH! BASH! BOSCH!
Nestled in the Chiltern Hills, Turville is a tiny hamlet boasting the sort of chocolate box looks that have film location scouts swooning. To that end, its sixteenth-century stone cottages have been the backdrop to scores of TV dramas and feature films such as I Capture the Castle and The Vicar of Dibley (its church, Saint Barnabus, is actually Turville’s St Mary the Virgin). The hamlet is cinematic shorthand for idyllic, pastoral England; a place where nothing changes, where time appears to have slowed. An inspired choice, then, for the location of the most shocking British film of the Second World War, a film intended as a rude wake-up for the nation.
Went the Day Well? was a British box office hit, released late in 1942. By the standards of the time, it was an extraordinarily graphic depiction of what might happen following a Nazi invasion of Britain. Some scenes – including a housewife attacking a man with an axe – still pack a punch today. Ealing Films, more famous for their comedies, produced the film and shot it on location at Turville, renamed as Bramley End.
The film tells the story of how a platoon of Nazi paratroopers is sent to soften things up ahead of a full-scale invasion of the UK. In June 1940, Germany really had drawn up plans to invade Britain, codenamed Operation Sea Lion. Went the Day Well? was deliberately intended to warn the UK populace that an invasion remained a possibility and that they must stay forever vigilant. It managed to deliver its warning positively and without scaremongering.
In the film, the invasion advance guard arrive mob-handed at Bramley End, disguised as British soldiers. Stationing themselves in the village, they’re warmly greeted by the unwitting locals (mainly women and children). The soldiers are especially welcomed, and aided, by the local squire – a Nazi insider who knows their real identity. Soon, however, the women of the village begin to note that all is not as it seems about these Tommies. A blink or you’ll miss it clue is the way that some of the squaddies write their numbers – in the Continental way, with a cross through the stem of a 7. Later, one of the soldiers publicly manhandles one of the kids. But what actually betrays the platoon is, of all things, a bar of chocolate.
‘Schokolade? Funny sort of way to spell chocolate,’ says a village boy on inspecting the legend stamped into the unwrapped bar. ‘Yes,’ chuckles his mother, ‘that’s the German spelling of…’ The camera holds on her face as the penny slowly drops.
Die katze is now out of the bag, so the Nazis must now brutally suppress the villagers before anyone can escape and warn the real British army based some miles away. The women, children and pensioners of the village manage to mobilise and fight back, the action concluding at the manor house with a horrific shoot-out that could go either way.
Throughout the conflict, the Nazis remain in British khaki uniforms. Had the events depicted really have taken place, the soldiers would have been contravening both the Hague Regulations and the Geneva Conventions. Both state that it’s legal for soldiers to be disguised in their enemy’s uniform, but add that it’s a war crime to go into combat without first removing that uniform and replacing it with their own.
Some in authority worried that the film would cause panic – especially as Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti drew on his background in documentary filmmaking to give parts of the film an almost fly-on-the-wall edge. Still, with average weekly cinema audiences of 19 million in 1939 – growing to more than 30 million by 1945 – that was a lot of civilians being alerted to the fact that any moment they might be called on to fight German soldiers, tooth and claw, outside Lyon’s Corner House on the High Street.
As it turned out, the message of Went the Day Well? – to practice vigilance at all times – fell by the wayside. The threat of Operation Sea Lion had significantly waned by the time the film was released. Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union – starting with Operation Barbarossa – took precedence and was proving to be a costly mistake.
The film, though, remains a fascinating document of the times, and still has the power to shock. It was to prove the catalyst for many British films and books that dealt with the question of what would happen if the Nazis had invaded.
Bedknobs and Broomsticks did it with songs in 1971 (see page 64), but the1976 blockbuster The Eagle Has Landed is, to all intents and purposes, a remake of Went the Day Well? with a bigger budget and a couple of plot differences. Filmed at the beautiful village of Mapledurham in Oxfordshire, it’s the story of German soldiers, led by Michael Caine, who are not an invasion force but