Its Own Nutty Taste: Channel Four (Scottish) adverts, 1986

Second commercial break from that episode of Avengers in Scotlandshire in 1986. We start in medias res in the middle of that "futuristic" Bristol & West advert with the exciting line graphs and such. Get used to it, because this advert showed up during The Avengers repeats a lot. STV, or rather Scottish, might have been by and large rich enough to usually navigate the old buying-adverts-for-two-channels system with a minimum of "Follows Shortly" slides, but there's more than one way to cut corners. The second most popular - after those slides but before resorting to PIFs - was to sell multiple slots in bulk to the same advert or company, which in certain regions during the first few years of Channel Four led to dizzying and ultimately numbing cases wherein every commercial break was almost identical. There are uploads from the very, very early days (ie late 1982) which depict a constant advertorial Groundhog Day, prolonged exposure to which could cause you to start questioning your actual sanity.

Then: cereals! Look how slowly adverts used to work. Not actually slowly, of course, but compared to now it's practically ambient music. A split second pause at the end, a half-second fade to black, and then another split second of empty silence to compensate for potentially clumsy editing. Now everything's digital and capable of being timed down to the nanosecond, removing any need to worry on that score. Which is just as well because no-one can afford to leave the consumer unstimulated for a full second anymore. Besides, if you gather all those miniscule particles of dead air together you can squeeze in a whole other advert and make even more money.

Anyway, cereals. In a highly literal sense, because this is Kellogg's All-Bran. The most hardcore of the health-conscious breakfasts, All-Bran was created to throw Bran Flakes into sharp relief. Although it's existed for over a hundred years now, it really came into its own here in the age of the F-Plan. With "fibre" currently the big weightloss watchword, it was finally possible to give All-Bran some kind of halfway desirable spin. Hence the bespoke "Can You Feel It" and Green Lizzie exercise spiel on the soundtrack. This is the most exciting this product had, and indeed has, ever looked. Good.

Next: the AA. Apparently not doing very well for themselves at this point, if this shoddy local-furniture-shop styles is all they can manage by way of advertising. At least they'd had Patrick Allen three years earlier.

Now we're motoring! What's your price for flight? Oh, it's just Austin Rover, the limping, underfed, skeletal remains of the British automobile industry in general and British Leyland in particular. This is, of course, a Quantel-powered spot for a local dealership - a chain of them in fact - in the Glasgow-Uddington-Greenock metropolis. Including a rather sad and apologetic still photo of five of the cars you might could buy, if you had no other choice, from your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Austin Rover dealer.

More local Quantel! It's Summer Sale time at Sterling, who get a couple of brownie points for actually employing the pound sign - Sterling, get it? - as an L rather than an E. Nothing wrong with using it as an E whatsoever, but it's nice to see someone using it as the letter it was originally adapted from. (L for libra, as in pound, you see.) Anyway, these people appear to sell furniture and carpets "at even lower prices", although they won't say than what. Sterling, near Stirling. DO YOU SEE.

More repetition as St Ivel keep it Real again. Finally, "The Good Olde Days", which apparently means the Regency, incongrously soundtracked by a rewritten version of Joe Fagin's secondary theme for Auf Wiedersehen Pet., apparently performed by Fagin and the Wurzels. Two unfortunate servants have misery and humiliation piled upon them by their Lord and master until they finally get sick of him, bugger off to drink cider with some wenches, and eventually become highwaymen and slaughter him. Presumably. Old English Strong Cyder: it's spelt with a "y" so you'll think it's somehow better.