Bob the Fish Productions

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Bob the Fish Productions Slightly acclaimed comedy programme The Hard Sell. Handmade, home-made, artisanal documentaries about the past. Semiotics and bum jokes. Other stuff.

27/09/2024

Advertising: the rattling of a stick in a swill-bucket? Welcome to the show where the stick rattles back: The Hard Sell. Adverts from history, treated with the respect they deserve.

This episode: you either love it or hate it, and here's some Marmite too. The famously divisive ye**ty umami bomb of peculiarly British character (despite being German) and how it was sold through the years despite 50% of people finding it disgusting. From health food to family friend to increasingly disturbing obsession with self-image. Take a little trip, take a little trip, take a little trip and see!

patreon.com/applemask
bobthefish.org.uk

30/08/2024

Advertising: the rattling of a stick in a swill-bucket? Welcome to the show where the stick rattles back: The Hard Sell. Adverts from history, treated with the respect they deserve.

This episode: entertainment channels of the ol' West, metaphorically. We're watching Super Channel, the pan-Continental cable network initially launched as ITV Europe, only for ITV to cut ties within a year (except ITN). Seemed like a good idea at the time, probably; it was definitely excited enough to make a fuss about its first commercial break in January 1987! Even though it was just Rover cars, colourless Patrick Nagel pastiches and not Lucozade. Soup air!

patreon.com/applemask
bobthefish.org.uk

02/08/2024

Advertising: the rattling of a stick in a swill-bucket? Welcome to the show where the stick rattles back: The Hard Sell. Adverts from history, treated with the respect they deserve.

This episode: The Olympics! If you thought you could avoid them you're wrong. They're everywhere. In 1988 they were even on ITV *and* Channel Four, which meant they were also covered in the TV Times! So what was advertised in that issue, and how much of it was Olympic-related? And most important of all, will it fill 25 minutes?

patreon.com/applemask
bobthefish.org.uk

05/07/2024

Advertising: the rattling of a stick in a swill-bucket? Welcome to the show where the stick rattles back: The Hard Sell. Adverts from history, treated with the respect they deserve.

This episode: Have a Break travels to one froggy evening in 1995 and the opening day of that perennial also-ran of American television, the WB. There's cars that are more fun to buy than to drive, passive-aggressive french fries, nasal retentive skiing and Nikki Cox's original breasts. And you.

patreon.com/applemask
bobthefish.org.uk

24/05/2024

Advertising: the rattling of a stick in a swill-bucket? Welcome to the show where the stick rattles back: The Hard Sell. Adverts from history, treated with the respect they deserve.

This episode: Have a Break travels back almost thirty years, seriously, to a showing of the only slightly underrated Drop Dead Fred on Channel Four. There it discovers Dali-esque lager, co***ne humour and French cars as far as the eye can see, Papa. As sophisticated as the film isn't.

patreon.com/applemask
bobthefish.org.uk

26/04/2024

Advertising: the rattling of a stick in a swill-bucket? Welcome to the show where the stick rattles back: The Hard Sell. Adverts from history, treated with the respect they deserve.

This episode: Movie Premieres on ITV are Brought To You by humdrum on-set vignettes, genetically engineered adorable couples, mad goldfish, moustachioed t***s and, most memorably, nightmarish mockeries of movie stars talking absolute bo****ks with their mouths full of corn starch. Return to a time when Doritos came in beef flavour for reasons beyond the realm of normal human understanding.

patreon.com/applemask
bobthefish.org.uk

29/03/2024

Advertising: the rattling of a stick in a swill-bucket? Welcome to the show where the stick rattles back: The Hard Sell. Adverts from history, treated with the respect they deserve.

This episode: Easter again! Broadcasting not live from not Bournville, a special episode where most of the products are chocolate and all of them are Cadbury's! Not Cadbury, and certainly not Mondelez, but Cadbury's. Canadian Flakes! Hip Bars of Six! Dried milk for sad people! Quakerism!

patreon.com/applemask
bobthefish.org.uk

15/03/2024

Advertising: the rattling of a stick in a swill-bucket? Welcome to the show where the stick rattles back: The Hard Sell. Adverts from history, treated with the respect they deserve.

This episode: Have a Break travels to November 2nd, 1982, a date of great import for reasons we can't seem to remember right now. Oh, well, maybe it'll be on the News at Ten. Right after we've seen adverts for teeth which are like trees, bread which is like television, lager which is like p**s and cars which are like some terrifying deviant psychosexual fantasy right out of JG Ballard. And a goalkeeper.

patreon.com/applemask
bobthefish.org.uk

15/03/2024

Advertising: the rattling of a stick in a swill-bucket? Welcome to the show where the stick rattles back: The Hard Sell. Adverts from history, treated with the respect they deserve.

This episode: visit Ireland! It's their Saint's day soon, after all, so here's some adverts from RTE2 in early 1985. Legendary lunchbox treats! Free mugs! Celebratory opera! Tautological cakes! The original Cheese and Onion! Giving up and going to France! No snakes, guaranteed!

patreon.com/applemask
bobthefish.org.uk

03/11/2023

Advertising: the rattling of a stick in a swill-bucket? Welcome to the show where the stick rattles back: The Hard Sell. Adverts from history, treated with the respect they deserve.

Yeah! Still! For the completely unspecial 201st episode, a completely random five minutes from the middle of 1978 in the middle of the nation. In which luxury aspirationalism sits uneasily amongst subtle economy drives in anticipation of the looming Winter of Discontent. Cheap biscuits! Cheap furniture! Cheap thrills! Expensive soap?

http://www.bobthefish.org.uk
http://patreon.com/applemask

20/10/2023

Advertising: the rattling of a stick in a swill-bucket? Welcome to the 200th edition of the show where the stick rattles back: The Hard Sell. Adverts from history, treated with the respect they deserve.

That's right, 200 episodes! Exhausting just to think about, and in many ways almost completely inexplicable, but that's how many we've got, and to celebrate, here's a mega-bumper hour-long forensic investigation of the adverts that ran on the first day of doomed breakfast station TV-am. Back when it was host to hour-long expies of Newsnight, uninterrupted interviews with Norman Tebbit, baffling petit-bourgeois live action cartoons and celebrity interviews so unenaging you just needed a glass of dry white wine and suddenly you were at some dull party in North London with a bunch of media types who didn't particularly want to be there any more than you did but at least unlike yourself knew who everyone was and what they were talking about. And for some reason they thought people would want to watch this! (They didn't.) Good etc, Britain!

http://www.bobthefish.org.uk
http://patreon.com/applemask

25/08/2023

Advertising: the rattling of a stick in a swill-bucket? Welcome to the show where the stick rattles back: The Hard Sell. Adverts from history, treated with the respect they deserve.

This episode: great service and certain other benefits too! We travel to the days when it was actually more economical not to own your television, and instead to rent it from pale blob creatures, sitcom barmen, or even Max Headroom.

http://www.bobthefish.org.uk
http://patreon.com/applemask

11/08/2023

Advertising: the rattling of a stick in a swill-bucket? Welcome to the show where the stick rattles back: The Hard Sell. Adverts from history, treated with the respect they deserve.

This episode: with glowing hearts, we visit Canada, the nice North American colonial nation, and unsurprisingly discover a lot of snow. And some eerily anodyne snackfoods. And more snow. But that's Newfoundland for you.

http://www.bobthefish.org.uk
http://patreon.com/applemask

30/06/2023

School days: famously the best days of your life, if you're a psychopath. At least sometimes you got to watch the telly. From programmes teaching basic concepts of the alphabet or numeracy to the white-coated tedium of watching rudimentary chemistry experiments that never went wrong and exploded - none of those shows are examined here. Because this is about the presentation surrounding them. Meaningless pie charts, hypnotic diamonds, ambient submarine dreamscapes and plenty of brushed chrome. Programmes for Schools and Colleges!

http://www.bobthefish.org.uk

19/05/2023

Have you noticed that TV idents have been getting really boring since the turn of the century? ITV apparently did, so they threw their symbol to the young artists of Britain for a year, that became two years, that became three (with some plague-related disruption). Here's the creator of the slightly appreciated ITV in the Face to go through every single one of those things for you.

bobthefish.org.uk
patreon.com/applemask

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