Atten-SHUN!
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
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Comments and requests from adjoining bloggers gets out the unopened packet of ten Guards. Introduced by Carreras in 1960, this was the pack that started all those headlong rushes into clinical stripes and bland geometrics. But this was a classic. My intact version has the guard (apparently promoted to an officer just after the initial launch) in gold outline, but I seem to remember he was also rendered in blind-embossing. That may have denoted filter tips, more probably this was the guard's new uniform when he first went on parade at the tobacconists. Now of course he'd have to hide under the counter like a commando on a covert mission, planned, we hope, with the help of the indefatigable Player's sailor from HMS Hero. Guards, I recall, were sold to sixties cinema audiences with a superb widescreen commercial that pounced on the ceremonial possibilties. A multiscreen of vertical frames of civilians flipped on a horizontal axis (still with me?) turning them into images of marching guardsmen. All cut, of course, to a rousing drum-beating score of something like The British Grenadier. A caption came up at the end that said "People are changing to Guards". Imagine that. Show it now, in some subversive underground club and it'd be enough to give the Tobacco Police their so longed-for collective heart attack.
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