The Hovis Delusion

[steepholm]

Those of us of a certain age will remember Ridley Scott's famous Hovis ad, which shows a flat-capped baker's boy pushing his bicycle up a steep hill to the accompaniment of a brass band playing the New World symphony, while the voice of the (now grown) boy reminisces fondly about the old days. But where is the ad set?

I've always mentally put it up north somewhere, and I'm not alone. In this article, written in 2006 to mark the ad's being chosen "the nation's favourite", the writer places it in "a northern town". And this evening, one of the pundits on Radio 4's Powers of Persuasion twice mentioned the north in general, as well as Yorkshire in particular.

I'd read somewhere that the ad was actually filmed in Shaftesbury, Dorset, but I never wavered from my belief that the fictional setting was the north. [EDIT: As Kalimac points out below, even the website for the hill in Shaftesbury where it was made mentions that the setting is "a northern industrial town".] After all, there's that brass band, and the voiceover is in a Yorkshire accent.

Except - it isn't. It's a West Country accent - quite possibly a Shaftesbury one. Listen for yourself:

"Hovis 'Bike' advert 1973 (Britain's favourite TV ad)" (Watch on YouTube)

I was only ten when the advert aired, and until they played it on the radio for the documentary this evening, I hadn't seen or heard it for years. Somehow, in the interim I grafted a northern accent onto my memory of it. That's a little odd, but what's more extraordinary is that the entire nation seems to have done the same thing. Even tonight, experts on the advert were talking about its northern setting, despite just having heard it.

Why? Is it the flat cap? (But people wore those in the south, too!) The brass band? That must have a lot to do with it.

Perhaps too there's a sense that a certain style of working-class nostalgia belongs properly to the north of England - or even that there is no southern working class at all?

Comments

[steepholm]

I was struck by that accent, too - but yes, pretty standard RP for 1973, I think.

I'm pretty sure that the Hovis Delusion was well established long before Ridley Scott became a household name. Perhaps more relevant is that Hovis is a northern brand (though not Yorkshire).

[calimac]

If Hovis is a northern brand, and not something you'd ordinarily get in Dorset or other West Country parts, then yes, that would explain it. (I'd never heard of Hovis till reading this very post.) The Wikipedia article for Hovis suggests that this advert is what made it nationally famous, so perhaps the delusion was not the result of a pre-existing association, though.

That my tourist impression is to associate both brass band arrangements of mournful classical music and really steep cobblestone streets with Yorkshire is probably not very significant. I've seen hilly town streets in southern England, but not as steep or as frequently as in Yorkshire, and the fact that this street has its own tourist website does suggest it's a bit unusual.

As for Ridley Scott, is he likely to have been well-known as a director before Alien (1979)?

[steepholm]

Hovis was a national brand, in the sense that you could buy it anywhere - but the company was based in Cheshire. But I think you're right - this advert really made its name. Ditto with Ridley Scott: outside the advertising industry, I doubt anyone had heard of him in 1973.

[calimac]

Now that raises another interesting point, which is, is Cheshire northern? The people I knew in Cheshire (from the City of Chester) definitely considered themselves midlanders rather than northerners. But they were also Tories, which may have had something to do with it.

[steepholm]

It's a fair question. For me, the North begins at the Staff-Cheshire border, but opinions no doubt differ.