Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 3 November 2016

The advertising supremos of the Sixties were paid exorbitant amounts  of money to get us hooked on sugar and salt

issue 05 November 2016

‘Look at them, they’re all fat,’ he said. I’d slowed the car to allow four children to cross the zebra crossing. One of them secretly signalled thanks on behalf of them all as they trooped across. Polite. But they were all indeed a little on the plump side. ‘Even in France they’re getting fat now,’ he lamented, leaving unsaid the conclusion that if the French were getting fat, then that’s that, game over. ‘Of course it’s the working classes who get fat first,’ he explained. ‘Eating all that sugar and salt.’ I thought I detected blame and took exception. ‘Well, if anyone is to blame,’ I said, ‘it’s you.’

In the early Sixties some of the most highly educated minds of that rising British generation went into advertising and made an absolute packet. He was one of them.

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