Mike Humble

Celebrity endorsements eh? I just wonder how many people actually thought the likes of Barry Sheene and (our) `enry Cooper drowned themselves with the great smell of Brut before nipping down the working mens club for a few sherberts and a game of fives and threes. After all, most men who dashed themselves with Faberge’s famous cut price totty lotion usually did. That said, marketing back then was very much done off the back of T.V or sporting celebrities. The sort of men and women our mums and dads trusted and respected – you know the sort, like Nanette Newman extolling the skin care virtues of (nice green) Fairy Liquid. If it was good enough for her to remove cremated Yorkshire pudding from a tray, then it surely must be okay for our parents eh?

With cars, back then, it was very much a man’s world. I’m not being sexist it’s just how we rolled, most men were the driver in the household and indeed the breadwinner – another time another era. I have touched on horrendous TV car adverts before with Petula Clark twittering away telling us to put a Chrysler Sunbeam in our lives, the song being a rework of one of her lesser hits – ‘Put a Little Sunbeam in Your Life’. Petula in the late `70s was on a wane and hardly gave the Sunbeam the zizz or sex appeal the car so badly needed. All this was at a time when the company’s fortunes were almost as knackered as British Leyland. Chrysler refused to give in though, so when the Avenger was on life support, they brought in the big guns from the world of telly.

“Where the Petula Clark Sunbeam advert was about as good an idea as Ian Huntley endorsing bubble bath, at least the Brucie Avenger advert puts a huge grin on your face”

Enter a certain Bruce Joseph Forsyth – Johnson to sprinkle some badly needed showbiz glitter over the ageing Chrysler Avenger. Brucie left the BBC in 1977 after six years of the Generation Game and signed a lucrative contract with ITV, namely London Weekend Television (LWT). Now free from the shackles of the no advertising beeb, and being very much one of THE biggest TV stars of the time, Bruce was adored by the public and no doubt viewed as a ‘dead cert’ with the ad men. Chrysler snapped up his talents for an advert for the 1980 Avenger playing the part of an over-eager salesman in a showroom giving it the showbiz treatment. There’s big smiles, a mincing walk, eyes and teeth – pure Brucie.

The advert itself today is utterly horrendous of course, but in one of those ‘so bloody awful it’s brilliant’ kind of ways. Where the Petula Clark Sunbeam advert was about as good an idea as Ian Huntley endorsing bubble bath, at least the Brucie Avenger advert puts a huge grin on your face. As far as I can recall, this is the only car advert ever featuring Bruce and barely a year later, the Avenger was killed off and the Renfrewshire plant in Linwood that built it was closed.

Enjoy this half minute snapshot of Brucie doing his stuff – Good Game Good Game!

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