Skip to main content

My parents - Mr and Mrs W Snr - have recently bought a small 1970s house in the London suburbs. They removed the old gas fire which dated from the original build, as it was an aesthetic nightmare and most probably some kind of potential carbon monoxide risk too. The previous owner had, however, very kindly left some leaflets about the product, which is called the New World Highspeed G740. I naively assumed these might be instructions, but they're actually marketing blurb.

After telling us about the heater's high-performance duplex burner and its 'warm comforting glow', the copywriter very quickly starts to lose his grip on reality.

'The Highspeed G740 looks good, too,' he writes. 'It has a mellow teak veneered case, beautifully styled by the designers of G-Plan furniture, with a gently curving front and rounded corners. Its good looks make it the focal point of any room.'

Now, I know the 70s were a bleak period. We had the four-day week and re-runs of It's a Knockout on the telly. All the same, I think even Rigsby from Rising Damp would have questioned the radiator becoming the centre piece of the front room.

Gotta love the mood shot on the leaflet though, eh? Look at the table in the foreground. The open packet of Benson & Hedges alongside a gold lighter. The chic grey and brown coffee cup. Some strange cuboid radio alarm clock. Over on the right, we see the hi-fi turntable, no doubt connected to speakers producing stereo sound. Is that Gladys Knight & The Pips I can hear?

Comments

  1. Back in the 1970s, Phil, watching the Highspeed G740 was the highlight of our day. Made a change from all those editions of 'It's A Knockout'. Mind you, I'm not sure what was 'new world' about it. Not the sort of thing you tend to see in many American homes.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's no surprise the previous occupants proudly passed on the blurb to your folks, Phil.

    That's no ordinary wall mounted gas fire, my friend. That's a been styled by the designers of G-Plan and if those folks can do a dining suite you can be confident in their abilities when it comes to styling a teak veneered case for a fire place, and no mistake.

    Just look at those lines. Especially that big thick one along the bottom.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Fawlty Towers script? Si, senor!

Ok, so I gave ChatGPT the following scenario: "Imagine a theatrical script for a situation comedy set in a hotel in Torquay, England. The proprietor is called Basil, an eccentric man who believes the calibre of guests to be low. His wife, Sybil, is often frustrated by Basil's incompetence. They employ a Spanish waiter called Manuel, who struggles to understand English. Basil suspects that two guests, who claim to be married, may be lying." Here's what our favourite AI came up with: Scene: The hotel lobby in Torquay, England. Basil is standing behind the reception desk, looking at a piece of paper. Sybil is standing next to him, looking annoyed. Manuel is hovering nearby, trying to look busy. Basil: (to Sybil) I don't know why we get such low-calibre guests at this hotel. Look at these two - Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They claim to be married, but I suspect they might be lying. Sybil: (sighing) Basil, it's not our job to judge the marital status of our guests. Just m

It's been a tough year. Let's give ourselves a clap.

If something didn’t smell right about the UK handling of the pandemic, the British public was never going to notice. But they knew that if they couldn’t smell something, they really ought to get a Covid test sent to them in the post. There has been something incredibly British about the DIY swabs and their delivery via the gig-economy workers of Amazon, hasn’t there? Touch of corona? I’ll pop something in the post to you. Should be with you tomorrow. I suppose it was inevitable that we’d need some new kind of system. After all, the coronavirus outbreak was the first thing in the history of the NHS that couldn’t be cured by paracetamol, rest and plenty of fluids. This understandably left GPs flummoxed and anxious. The UK decided pretty early on that if you were ill with a novel pathogen – which proved deadly in maybe 1% of cases – you really shouldn’t go to the doctor. You should STAY AT HOME and spread it quickly to your flatmates or family members. And because they were now at

The race for bogus Olympic stats

Of all the dubious statistics thrown around in relation to the London Olympics, the claim that there are '47 tube journeys in central London that can easily be walked' is surely one of the most misleading. I suspect it is based on the relative proximity of one station to an adjacent one. Embankment is walking distance from Temple. Charing Cross is a stone's throw from Leicester Square. But what exactly is a 'tube journey'? As I've understood it - and I'm only going on three decades' experience of using the network - it is a journey that takes you from any one place with a tube station to another. My journey from Leicester Square might take me to Charing Cross, but it might also lead me up the line to Camden Town or down south to Morden. In fact, from any one tube station - thanks to the wonders of interconnections - there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of options available to me. Now, I don't claim to have a PhD in mathematics, but the number of p