I heard this week that PG Tips teabags are no longer going to be advertised on British television by Chimpanzees.
If you're Amercian you may not have seen this, but for as long as I can remember, there have been these really bad advertisments featuring a family of chimps dressed up like people, living in a small suburban house. They have driving lessons and watch the football, but somehow always manage to steer the conversation around to tea.
Now, apparently, PG wants to target a younger market and somehow make tea drinking cooler.
I'm not sure how this can achieved. I've never seen someone drinking tea and thought 'wow, they look cool'. There's no cachet attached to tea drinking. It's just something you have, because you like it, isn't it?
There was this white rasta who used to come into The Sunrooms (a bar in Southend), go behind the bar, put the kettle on and make himself a pint of black tea. Once I sat there all afternoon and watched him drink about 8 pints of the stuff.
The only other adverts for tea, that I can remember were for Tetley teabags. They were advertised by little cartoon men, a bit like the seven dwarves only they were from up north, and had flat caps and big noses. One of them was a bit simple; i think that his name was Sidney. It's a bit worrying that I remember all this. The last advert I saw for Tetley tea was for round teabags and featured a bastardised cover version of 'I get around,' by The Beach Boys. After that the tiny Northern men disappeared. They were quite small. Perhaps they got into a fight with some borrowers and died or something.
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