Why the umbrella: ITV Central adverts, 18th January 1987

The last set of adverts from James Smith's recording of Coal Miner's Daughter opens with a deeply troubling advert for cigars. Not Hamlet, for a change, but Castella. A typical Ron Cook-sized criminal type, with requisite cockney accent, is horrified at the news that the Government have somehow (voodoo, cloning, cybernetics, whatever) revived a notoriously cruel Judge from the 17th Century who would hang you for sneezing and not saying "bless me". Fortunately, tobacco has made great advances in the four hundred years since he last lived, and Castella cigars soothe his crippling nicotine addiction to the extent that the law can just about go fuck itself as long as he has a fat one twixt his fingers. Enjoy it while it lasts, because cigar advertising only has a couple of years to live, and even now in 1987 it's illegal to show someone actually smoking one, which is why hizzoner is only seen raising it to his lips or exhaling a plume of smoke, but never inhaling and never both in the same shot.
Next: shoulder pads, modernist architecture and completely pointless palm leaves waving about for no reason outside an excessively large house meet colour coded interior design that stretches to the costumes, elaborate formalism in the camerwork. the word "ciao", and stylish murderous intrigue thwarted by consumer products (specifically Pirelli Tyres). Essentially the essence of 1987 in absolute chemical purity. I'm prepared to bet this whole rigamarole is all just the foreplay part of these two's elaborate sex games.
Later tonight: a chocolate teacup for Sherlock Holmes. There may be some greater context that makes this make some kind of sense. Let me look something up....Nope, Granada's Sherlock, Jeremy Brett, last appeared in August and wasn't due to come back again until Christmas (he just had a breakdown that put him on lithium). So I have no idea what this is.
Then: the solution for the whole Big Ben problem that our politicians and the Daily Mail are fretting over and no-one else gives a shit about. Just give the fucker Contac! It turned this unfortunate cuckoo clock into a pretty close impressionist of the bongs, so imagine what it'll do for the real thing? If the box is at all accurate, it's a heavy-duty looking bastard, to the point of being a little bit scary, especially as the late Peter Sallis doesn't explain what's actually in it. Paracetamol? Ibuprofen? Asprin? Codeine? Methadone? What? The picture on the box suggests all of these in a plastic capsule. Kill or cure, I guess.
An audience with Dame Edna! Actually it's more annoying than that, because it's really an advert for the Thomson Directory, the largely superfluous poor man's Yellow Pages (which they used to publish until British Telecom were sold off and took it over' hence launching their own alternative). Both are now obsolete, of course, at least on paper: Thomson gave up, unnoticed, last year and the Yellow Pages just announced the other day that the next set of doorstoppers will be the last. Both still have websites, of course, which is what people use these days instead of musty dead trees. Thomson's traditional mascot is a cat; these days it's a blue-tinted live action Gobbolino, but the initial version was an annoying pun-spouting animated ginger tom interacting with celebrities.
Next: this man is perfectly fit, and extremely smug about it to boot, but he's having regular medical checkups anyway because it's always a good idea and he's in the upper percentile of British income, so he can afford to sign up with Bupa and bypass the Thatcher government actively kicking the NHS to death. They failed, but the current set of Tories might not. Depends on how long it takes for this semi-improvised minority Government to fall. "Most people obtain their private medical care through Bupa", says Robert Powell in an impressive use of weasel words. By leaving out the qualifier "who use private medical care at all", they can make it seem as if they're more popular than the NHS.
Finally: the secret origin of Legal and General's logo, which endures to this day, identical right down to the font, completely untouched by thirty years of design trends. Ask your financial adviser or broker just what it is they actually do. Money stuff.