CARAMEL
Cadbury had a big year in 1976. On the downside, there was the Rowntree’s Yorkie. More positively, there was the Montreal Winter Olympics, all over which the Goodies appeared in TV ads urging hungry kids to swap ten Cadbury wrappers (oh, and £3.60) for a transistor radio in exciting blue denim!
Then there was the launch of the Cadbury’s Caramel.
You could tell this was a classy bar. For a start, it was frighteningly expensive, even in those times of vertiginous price rises. It was also very neat, each section being a little sculpted pillow of chocolate, delicately engraved with the Cadbury livery. Let there be no idle talk of ‘chunks’ here. All terribly sophisticated, very grown-up... and a tad dull, to be honest. This product needed sexing up.
Enter five-foot jobbing actress Miriam Margolyes, who took one of the least promising briefs ever (‘Right, so you’re this lazy, but saucy, West Country rabbit with a chocolate obsession...’) and turned in thirty seconds of sub-Bristol vocal smouldering that was destined for immortality. The cartoon blurred the line over who the product was aimed at slightly. Was it responsible to tell children ‘arses are there to be sat on, have some chocolate’, via a buck-toothed erotic trade unionist? Nevertheless, a surprisingly timeless campaign was created.
Cadbury took their own advice and took it easy, letting the anthropomorphic amour carry the weight. The bar’s sales never troubled the top ten, but the ‘exclusive’ price kept it afloat. In 1993, enter the Galaxy Caramel. Panic on the streets of Bournville! Well, okay, a bit of a rebadge and a new recipe. It saw off the competition, but it’s hard not to view this most successful of also-ran bars as a bit too much in temperament like its skiving mascot, and too little like her industrious, if slightly thick, woodland pals.
‘Hey Mr Bee, why are you buzzing around?’ A Baloo-influenced work ethic for the dole age via the Cadbury’s Caramel bunny, circa 1979.
The Eat Generation. Alternative caramel confectionery in the form of Caramac (1959).
Named after Halifax-based toffee tycoon John Mackintosh rather than the American beat poet author of On the Road, Kerouac – no, hang on – Caramac nonetheless seems to have had most in common with the iconoclast, hippie, jazz musings of the latter. First, for an entire decade or more, it defied all marketing logic by continuing to sell without a single commercial spot to its name. (Then 1991 saw a TV relaunch of the ‘I was here all along’ ilk, backed by a pointed, almost sardonic, version of the Tremeloes’ ‘Silence Is Golden’.)
Second, there was something so gritty in the texture, a viscous fudginess in that original recipe which was so very redolent of melting, syrupy brown nuggets of street heroin. Caramac felt like the detritus, sweepings from the post-war factory floor of Rowntree’s production line, scooped up, tipped into a vat and boiled down into something altogether more… well, moreish. But, of course, it wasn’t. Far from a happy accident, it was a careful concoction of sweetened condensed milk, butter, treacle and so on, intended to replicate as closely as possible the experience of chomping through its cocoa-based cousins.
In fact, like the best British home cooking, its appeal was driven by economics, austerity and nostalgia. Caramac was a stodgy Sunday sticky toffee pudding turned into a thin, anaemic bar. A bar that, for all the love and attention lavished on its preparation, could never call itself chocolate. Neither fish nor fowl, Caramac sought mainstream acceptance by arranged marriages to other, more established brands. Hence Carawheat, a Jacob’s biscuit covered in a golden Caramac layer, and a later Breakaway version. Though what really took the biscuit was the cheeky twenty-first-century hook-up with a certain four-fingered wafer snack (presumably because of the pleasing, nursery rhyme result). All together now: Kit Kat Caramac, give the dog a bone…
Hey, have you heard the one about your statutory rights? Rowntree Mackintosh aims for the funny bone in a 1982 comic ad.
Here’s looking at chew, kid. Triumphantly post-imperial Chewits (1965).
In 1965 corporate financier and asset stripper Jimmy Goldsmith, bored with outrageous takeover bids and fending off bankruptcy, boldly chose to move into the confectionery business. He formed Cavenham Foods, named after the family estate, from an amalgamation of the flagging Carsons & Goodies of Bristol, Parkinsons of Doncaster and Hollands of Southport.
This last was at the time best known for its one penny Arrow bar (advertised in the ’70s by a precocious Bonnie Langford, almost certainly giving rise to the phrase ‘she can’t act for toffee’) but a new fondant chew would put the company – not to mention Barrow-in-Furness bus depot – firmly on the map.
Chewits were stickier, more sugary and more solid than their nearest rivals Opal Fruits – so much so that they required special machinery from Germany to manufacture and wrap. A special technique was also necessary to smuggle them into your mouth unseen during double maths lessons. The earliest range offered a choice of strawberry, blackcurrant, orange or banana flavours and were packaged in a mottled camouflage design which made them look a little like military refugees from a particularly effeminate NAAFI. By far their greatest sales boost, however, was delivered in 1976 by the Aardman-animated Godzilla-like star of the ‘Muncher’ adverts.
Alternative muncher monster name suggestions: Chew Hefner, Pepe Le Chew, Nerys Chews, Chiouxsie & The Banshees, Chewy Chase.
In these, a giant Plasticine Pleistocene chewed his way through some b-movie spoofing scenery, before being quelled by the taste of the altogether more satisfying Chewits (wrappers and all), literally off the back of a lorry. Later ads highlighted the creature’s claymation capers at a selection of tasty international landmarks (the aforementioned bus terminus, the Taj Mahal and the Empire State Building) and a raucous rampage through wartime London, much to the chagrin of the local ARP warden.
Chewits were popular with pauper and pregnant princess alike. In 1981 an expectant Diana was caught short of cash at a Gloucestershire sweet shop after unexpected cravings for a pack of the strawberry flavour – a story deemed bafflingly headline-worthy by the Daily Mirror. Meanwhile, the penniless tearaways of Merseyside knew exactly which bins to raid for misshapen and discarded rejects at the rear of the Chewits factory on Virginia Street. Let them eat cack, you might say.
Jimmy Goldsmith became Sir James in 1976. In the midst of issuing writs for defamation against Richard Ingrams’s Private Eye, he moved control of his interests to Paris and privatised the confectionery and bakery businesses. Ironically, the Muncher dinosaur (renamed Chewie the Chewitsaurus by new owners Leaf in 1989) lived to fight another day, long after Cavenham and Hollands themselves became extinct.
