The Listener’s archive stretches from October 1939 to last week. For decades, issues of the magazine were preserved by being bundled into compendium lots that were then bound as hefty, red-cloth-covered books, the year stamped in gold on the spine. In more recent times, digital preservation has replaced the red books. Physical copies of the magazine are still deposited with the National Library (which recently announced that in partnership with Are Media, this title’s owner, it will add the Listener to its searchable paperspast.co.nz archive) and kept at the magazine’s office for reference. But it’s the shelves of red spines that draw the eye. And just as each book gives a snapshot of what New Zealand was talking about, thinking, watching and reading, it’s also a portal into what we were being sold. Here, Paul Little assesses the marketing in the editions stamped 1974.

Cobb & Co Toiletries

Brand extensions are a funny business, aren’t they? Take an item’s emotional associations and apply them and their logo to other products to make more money for the parent business. The Nike swoosh is taken off the shoe and sexes up the shirt, shorts and a whole bunch of other clobber. And the Cobb & Co stagecoach – already adapted to family restaurant values – apparently makes men smell better.

The once-ubiquitous, eponymous restaurant chain served good solid basics like steak, chicken Maryland and fish and chips. How we got from there to a full range of men’s toiletries is a little hard to see at a distance of 50 years.

Like the restaurants, the bathroom staples presumably did the basics in a relaxed fashion and kept the whole family happy at reasonable prices. Perhaps the connection was the fact that stagecoach drivers were all male and the nature of the job meant they finished their shifts a little on the whiffy side. There’s no knowing if they also had endearing little overbites and pornstaches. But this blindingly binary model is also all male, with his gym bod, flower power Speedos and girlfriend (sister? wife?) standing by on shore ready to wrap him in a towel and prevent hypothermia before he moves on to his next shave.

DB Export beer

Hang on a minute – what’s going on here? This is that rare thing – an R18 ad that can be read only after 10pm. Rich in ambiguity and latent erotic potential, it bears careful deconstruction. As the copy says, life is for sharing with a friend. And for some people, it’s for sharing with a couple of friends, which would seem to be the prospect here.

Readers are encouraged to devise their own explanation. But Matching Tie and Handkerchief’s gaze is fixed on Plaid Jacket, who can’t take his eyes off Maxi Skirt, who is ignoring them to make eye contact with the reader. Perhaps Plaid and Maxi are attempting to check into a hotel, but the receptionist has something a little more adventurous in mind. Is he even the receptionist? Are receptionists allowed to look at guests like that? Perhaps he is nonplussed at having to accommodate the unorthodox but very specific sleeping requirements: “I’ll just see if we have a triple room available, sir.”

It all makes sense of the tag line “DB Export: That’s Life” – a great slogan, even if it lacks the panache of the one that was originally suggested: “DB Export – for when you’re on a promise.”

Revolutionary New Auto-Pour Vacuum Jug

Where to start with the Revolutionary New Auto-Pour Vacuum Jug? Obviously, this is no ordinary Vacuum Jug. It’s not even an ordinary Auto-Pour Vacuum Jug. “Revolutionary” almost undersells its contribution to the history of innovation. Cast your mind back to the early days of jugs – in those days, you had to fill the jug with a liquid, then pick it up by the handle to get the liquid out.

With the Revolutionary New Auto-Pour Vacuum Jug, you fill the jug with liquid, then press a button to get the liquid out. You have to wonder how we managed in the days of manual jug drudgery. It’s packed with features. Note the rotating base, which “swivels the jug in any direction”. Before the RNAPVJ was invented, jugs remained fixed in place and people had to walk around them to fill their glasses and cups. “It’s simple – and it’s fun. Especially for the kids.”

Sad to think that kids today with their iPhones and devices will never know the pleasure of a jug that dispenses liquid at the push of a button. And if you were tired of tepid soups on your “fishing trips or picnics”, here was an appliance that guaranteed to deliver “scalding soups” and send the kids home with a nasty burn.

The Alistair MacLean collection

Why should the toffee-nosed likes of Dickens and Austen get to loll about on sitting-room bookcases with their fancy-schmancy bindings and their high-culture attitude? Why shouldn’t Alistair MacLean get the “leather-grained blue Kidron® with lavish golden tooling” treatment from the tastemakers at Heron Books? This lot specialised in multi-volume sets, starting out with the likes of Somerset Maugham, Dickens and Alexandre Dumas. But somewhere in the depths of its offices lurked a mercenary evil genius who saw the commercial potential in yoking the cachet of “leather-grained blue, etc” with the popular likes of MacLean, Dennis Wheatley and Gladys Mitchell.

An author like MacLean sells himself, really, but that didn’t stop the Heron team’s copywriters gilding the lily as much as they gilded the books’ “leather-grained blue, etc” covers. They didn’t want for attitude, either, as the pugnacious crossheading “Do you think we’re exaggerating?” demonstrates.

Is the reader tough enough to take the challenge of MacLean’s stories that seethe “with bubbling excitement”, racing “forward at a breakneck pace” and carrying them along “like a canoe shooting the rapids”? No wonder the Heron folks were moved to lavish on them “all of our bookbinding skill”, not least the leather-grained blue Kidron® with lavish golden tooling.

John Boulter

Yes, you are seeing what you think you’re seeing. John Boulter was, as the ad doesn’t attempt to hide, one of the stars of The Black & White Minstrel Show, a long-running (1958-78) and indefensible entertainment that seems increasingly preposterous the more one tries to explain it.

But here goes. The BWMS was a British TV variety show that featured men and women performing anodyne versions of hokey old standards and dance routines. The point of difference was that the men were in blackface. All the time. You never saw them without the make-up and no one knew what they really looked like.

Boulter, allegedly “England’s most popular entertainer”, was one of the few stars people could name, although apparently the New Zealand promoters of his tour were not confident enough that people would recognise him without his minstrel mask, so included an inset of him in blackface in their advertising. “Oh – that guy.”

It was possibly also an economical way of advertising the fact that he was available for Matamata RSA or Christchurch social club quiz nights – two examples of occasions that have recently hosted attendees in blackface. Nevertheless, there was no denying his popularity when, as the Wanganui Herald noted, seldom had a performer been given so “attentive a hearing”.

Topaz

She’s dancing like no one’s watching. You can tell she’s dancing like no one is watching because A) she is dancing; and B) no one is watching. No big deal, you say. But what’s really amazing is that this ad is from 1974, and that phrase’s first recorded use was in the song Come from the Heart – in 1987! And people say we haven’t been visited by alien civilisations. How else to explain this apparent tear in the space-time continuum?

But this is just the first of many questions raised by this ad. Why is she the only one dancing? Are the couples pretending they can’t see her? Can’t she get a boyfriend? Was there something in Topaz? How many punchy words – “get”, “wild”, “taste”, “freedom” – completely unrelated to the product, not to mention downright misleading, can you get into one tiny catchphrase?

This is absolutely the wild taste of freedom. Just ask any person who’s ever enjoyed the freedom that comes with a cigarette addiction. And just look at those other smokefree misery gutses being forced to sit around making desultory conversation because they haven’t got a fag in their hands.