It’s amazing sometimes how memories of the most mundane things can stay with you for years after the fact. One particularly odd memory that I’ve had recently is of the South of Scotland Electricity Board adverts that used to infest the TV when I was young. Even more specifically than that however is the fact that the jingle from them has reached out across time and space and got stuck in my head on more than one occasion.
I’ve got no idea what sets it off as the SSEB was privatised in 1991, and nobody has ever replicated their campaign. I can only assume that I saw it in one of those “Hundred Greatest Advert” shows that they sometimes pollute the schedules with late on Saturday nights.
Finally though, I have a way to deal with the jingle if it gets stuck in my head as some kind soul has posted one of the adverts on Youtube. The advert is from 1987 when I would only be eight, and it bears all the hallmarks of an Eighties Scottish television production. Everyone speaks in an infuriatingly over pronounced K-HELVEN-sayeed accent, they don’t have a single word of real Scots thrown in and everyone is a yuppie even though real yuppies never came within a hundred miles of Scotland.
Without further ado: BEHOLD THE TWEE!