The Marvel And DC Of Ice Cream Part One: There’s A Thousand Ways Of Having Fun With Lyons Maid Ice Cream

The newsagent’s freezer. Once as resolute a sign that summer was here as Why Don’t You…?, Fleetway Comics characters disporting with knotted hankies on their heads and stray holiday-straddling one-off hits for the otherwise resolutely non-chart troubling R&B-toting likes of Champaign, Levert and, of course, The Mac Band Featuring The McCampbell Brothers. At the merest suggestion of a hint of a fractional raise in temperature, out it would come, remaining in navigationally confounding residence slap bang in the middle of the right-hand third of the shop floor for the entirely of the school holidays, emanating a barely perceptible yet troublingly persistent hum and decorated with lolly-chronicling labels daring you to slide across the lid that everyone else could slide back across properly bar you. When you ventured to the top of the road to take your lid-sliding chances in that interminable gap between The Adventures Of Bullwinkle And Rocky and The Roman Holidays, though, you had to choose your destination with care depending on your allegiance-dictating tastes in taste sensations. The reason for this was a longstanding rivalry between two equally longstanding purveyors of sugary frozen treats. Was yours a Wall’s or a Lyons Maid newsagent?

To be honest, and largely on account of the storefront signage mounted either on one of those sort of squared-off stepladder contraptions or alternately one of those square frames permitting it to perform approximately forty three percent of a rotation in a stiff breeze, it wasn’t too difficult to determine. Nor indeed was it difficult to determine your own corresponding aesthetic. Where Wall’s had a funky squiggly signature-esque logo promising fun sugary times for all with optional chilled-out and indeed chilled-out timeless hep cats reclining below it, Lyons Maid persisted with a blunt staid banner and three weird anachronistic youngsters quaintly skipping in a meadow like something from the cover of a storybook you were inexplicably ‘scared’ of but could never quite explain why. Lyons Maid’s branding and design aesthetic always seemed to have the air of one of those shops where a bespectacled shopkeeper in a lab coat would expect you to queue silently as he wrapped your ‘one lolly’ in dense white paper whilst chortling solemnly to himself that it wasn’t so long ago you could only get the one flavour, while Wall’s was akin to go-go dancing girls in psychedelic shift dresses leaping out at you and daring you to try their latest Wonka-esque confection defying all known laws of physics by somehow staying adhered to the stick. They were, as Mitch Benn so memorably put it in Looks Unfamiliar here, ‘the Marvel and DC of Ice Cream’. Yet just as nobody whatever and however strong their allegiance could stay entirely resolute in their single-minded tribal devotion to Wonder Woman or Wonder Man, so frozen flavoured water and emulsifier-seeking youngsters would regularly dip into the ‘other side’ of the newsagents’ freezer in search of a covertly stocked Orangeade Sparkle or Tangle Twister.

Evidently both Wall’s and Lyon’s Maid had more than their fair share of ice cream headache-occasioned adherents, but is there any actual way of determining which was ‘best’? Could Funny Feet successfully tackle Goal!? Was Fab fabber than a Big Feast? Who would ‘win’ out of Haunted House and Magic Monster? There’s only one way to find out, and frankly that’s for you to head up to your local whatever kind of alleged mobile repair shop it has become now and see what takes your fancy out of a Banana-Choc Ice Stix and a Chocolate And Vanilla Minecraft. Even so, it would still be interesting to take a look at and indeed mildly compare their it has to be said significantly more expansive ranges from the days when no parentally thwarted request for ‘an ice cream’ was complete without Radio 1 playing Bits And Pieces in the background, and that is precisely what we are going to be doing here. So choose your side in the Secret Wall’s – or indeed the Crisis On In-Fab-nite Earths – and let’s see if Lyons Maid really does live up to its promise of ‘a million ways of having fun’…

This assortment of Lyons Maid’s wares dates from the summer of 1977, and perhaps unsurprisingly, pride of place amongst the frozen shaped enticements to part with your pence after a repeat of Record Breakers and imported sealion shenanigans Salty went to Jubilee, a Union Jack-hued regal profile card-accompanied ice lolly issued to capitalise on the Summer of street parties and big pencil-winnage celebrating Elizabeth II’s twenty fifth year on the throne to the chagrin of those pesky punk rockers who asserted that you could ‘stuff’ it. Did the punks get their own I’ll Be Seeing You Soon I Hope I’m Not Seeing You Again Split to scoff between exclamations of ‘BARSTARD’, though? No they did not. Fervent royalists however were rewarded with this tri-flavoured Union Jack-hued slab of boredom that was as tepid as Neil Innes’ Silver Jubilee and quite possibly the most joyless ice lolly ever made. It’s a fair bet that all those imperial measurements headbangers probably want it brought back; the fact that they wouldn’t actually purchase it if it was is presumably neither here nor there. Also – and more than a little inconveniently for them – if turned on its side it bears considerably more than a passing resemblance to the Tricolore. Still, if nothing else, giving them one to eat might actually shut them up for a good thirty seconds or so. Hopefully.

A more surprising inclusion here however comes in the form of longstanding availability-averting heftily-priced Swamp Thing to Cornetto’s Man-Thing, King Cone – pictured here alongside its lesser-seen variants King Sandwich and King Stick – which was presumably once freely available through newsagents but is more commonly associated with pre-Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger slash Wombling Free profferage on usherettes’ trays under the bafflingly persistent delusion that any punter at their local ABC would have either the inclination or the available funds to splash out on an oversized legally distinct vanilla and chocolate dream and you can’t prove otherwise. King Cone was at that point, incidentally, being promoted via a post-disco California Fever-adjacent advert in which swimsuited lovelies nibbled suggestively and indeed expensively to the accompaniment of a sleazetastic rewrite of Bend Me, Shape Me as ‘lick me, bite me’ and so forth; having failed to corner the foil-wrapped cone-favouring swingers market, they repositioned their branding in the eighties to a sort of ‘scratch video’ S-S-S-Studioline From L’Oréal-esque montage slash collage incorporating – much to the confusion of a young Garreth Hirons, as you can find out in Looks Unfamiliar here – Judge Dredd, who somewhat uncharacteristically adjudged King Cone to be ‘MEGA’. Not long afterwards, they gave up completely.

As denoted by a suitably Lyons Maid-appropriate traditional ice cream vendor somewhere between Mr. Antonio from Trumpton and a distant relative of that bloke out of The Hives, the traditional, the goody-two-shoes and the unadventurous were more than adequately catered for by straight-up vanilla, available variously in tubs, crammed between two wafers and for the more lah-di-dah amongst them a sort of official-looking wrapper placing particular emphasis on its Cornishness. If anyone of them did feel inclined to live dangerously, however, there was always the hedonistic promise of ‘real fruit’ in the stick-mounted form of Orange Maid – a name that resolutely refuses to make any sense whatever angle you approach it from – and a collection of ‘Mivvis’ done up in Raspberry, Pineapple and ‘Cornish’ Strawberry livery, none of which could ever hope to match the appeal both in terms of their name and their tantalisingly flavour-light wateriness of Walls’ somewhat more to the point and literally in-your-face Strawberry Split. The vanilla-inclined in search of a sheen of sophistication however could always have opted instead for Lyons Maid’s flashily appointed choc ice range, seen here taking the form of Rum And Raisin, Dark Satin – which on first glance looks disturbingly if tautologically like ‘Dark Satan’ – and swankily appointed end-of-level-boss Silky Smooth Vanilla. As opposed to all those sandpaper-textured instances of vanilla ice cream.

Over on the other half of the display board, Bionic Lolly, Space: 1999 and – assuming that it can be taken as some sort of vague allusion to that Parachute Regiment-bankrolled skydiving display team that all boys under the age of sixteen were continually being told that they were interested in no arguments, especially considering that there was also a pretty much identical ‘Red Arrow’ lolly too – Red Devil all essentially adopt the same basic formula of popular licensed property combined with one flavour of frozen water encased in an entirely different flavour of ice cream or indeed vice versa. In the case of Space: 1999 this is inevitably lime – or if you prefer green – because ‘space’, while unless this is very much a misreading of the situation Steve Austin appears to have inspired the gentlemen who have the technology to create a subtle blend of Strawberry and Strawberry But Even More So. None of them, however, would ever prove as enduring and emblematic as the single-mindedly non-branded Haunted House, with its lone gimmick of a Harryhausen-infringing sword and shield-wielding skellington picked out in green on a sheeted spook-resembling white lolly in a sort of Hammer House Of E-Numbers gambit. An unsung icon of classic horror. Speaking of which, there’s a lot more about the odd preponderance of classic horror iconography in seventies television programmes, comics and indeed snacks intended for juvenile consumption here, but for the moment, back to that freezer…

In spite of its ‘NEW’-ness and the wrapper art showing a sort of Charlie Chaplin dog-walker and a jalopy-riding circus employee at severe risk of having his oversized collar felt by Ben Kingsley Clown Union at large amongst an assortment of zanily ‘bendy’ buildings, Gone Bananas was really just, well, banana flavoured, Dinosaurs capitalised on their dramatic Jurassic Park vs. Primeval Smackdown artwork with a sort of lopsided rendition of a melting Moschops, Smashers attempted to somewhat overcompensate for their dual-flavoured ordinariness by incorporating a ‘Quiz Stick’ in lieu of the traditional gag about a Whale-Weigh Station, and outside of propping up Roger Hargreaves’ John Mouse millions, the ‘mixed fruit’ flavour Mr. Men apparently existed primarily to prove that the most ordinary and workaday of products could be lent a sheen of excitement by incorporating licensed branded characters into the packaging; yet we were roundly denied a Queen Caroline off Rubovia ice lolly. Only the Lolly Gobble Choc Bomb, essentially a pared-down Fab with a solid slab of chocolate in the centre, displayed any real hint amongst these shorter stay varieties of Wall’s-level technical ambition and scoff-scientific adventurousness. Speaking of which…

Lyons Maid Fab, as advertised by Lady Penelope and Parker.

Given their dedicated predilection towards unexcitingness, It is perhaps telling that the only two Lyons Maid efforts ever really to achieve any sufficient degree of cultural permeation and commercial longevity to give Feast – big or otherwise – cause for concern were both direct byproducts of the somewhat more dynamic small-screen Supermarionette-wrangling of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Three-stage flavoured retro-retro rocket Zoom was originally launched – presumably vertically and by Robert The Robot – as a Lieutenant Ninety-deficient tie-in with the cosmic thrills of Fireball Xl5, while Fab, that time-honoured confection of strawberry ice lolly, hundreds and thousands and what Mike Smash would later identify as quide liderally vanilla, began as the official frozen merchandise for Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward from Thunderbirds. It was also, as evidenced by the advert reproduced above, originally officially designated ‘the first iced lolly for girls’ and obliged Milady and Parker to make a special trip to purchase it from, of course, the ‘Lyons Maid Shop’. A storyline that would certainly have rendered Parker – Well Done! less exciting. Sadly, the Stingray-bolstering Super Sea Jet and Captain Scarlet’s favoured chocolate and orange respite from knowing The Mysterons’ game and things they plan Orbit were destined to hang around for roughly around as long as The Secret Service.

Lastly, and by several measurable standards leastly, we come to the peculiar feat of non-milk dairy fat interactivity previously identified by Mitch Benn in Looks Unfamiliar here as the Two-Stage Self-Assembly Ice Cream Cone, a thoroughly purpose-defying conceit in which consumers were handed a block of vanilla and a suitably squared-off cornet and expected to do the below the newsagent’s pay grade insertion entirely by themselves and which were, perhaps inevitably, revealed in Ever Decreasing Circles to be Howard and Hilda’s ice cream of choice. According to this particular Lyons Maid promotional gambit, however, they did in fact have an official name – ‘Coola Bars’. Considering that it was only at most partially a bar, and that ‘Coola’ as an apparent contraction of ‘cool’ and ‘cola’ is in fact about as uncool as it’s possible for ice cream to get – and that’s even by Lyons Maid’s already fairly square standards – we can safely assume that this attempt at imbuing it with a more Fonz-aligned sheen of titled-sunglasses allure was abandoned every bit as quickly as it appears to have done. Unless by the late eighties they were still trying to palm them off as C. Thomas Howell Before He Did Soul Man Cones or similar.

Lyons Maid Crime Squad, Freak Out, Brrr Blobs, Star Wars and Goal!.

Just in case you still needed even more than a thousand ways of having fun, it’s only fair to mention a couple of notable Lyons Maid freezer-troublers that didn’t make the cut in 1977, either because they had been discontinued or, erm, didn’t actually exist yet. Crime Squad, apparently based on that bit in every American detective show where careworn superiors turn up at a gangland murder site and insist that it’s ‘gotta be wrapped up’ and the bloke with his surname as the programme’s title doesn’t agree; Freak Out, a vaguely psychedelically streaked the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all effort with very definitely Joe Cocker-adjacent 1969 Rock Festival iconography which was unleashed in the Glamtastic surroundings of 1973; Brrr Blobs, a species of charming edible arctic characters whom TV’s Ricky Hervaid will shortly buy the rights to so he can say ‘ha ha, divvys’ at them and then be surprised when nobody else laughs; Star Wars, the official lolly of the adventures of R5D4 and company and indeed of men who will declare any other ice cream or ice lolly that came after it null and void because they had one once in 1978 and that was that; and Goal!, which impressively managed to incorporate the three classic footballing flavours. Anyway, join us again next time when Funny Face might well have something to say about all of this, and Funny Feet might well have something to, erm, foot about it too…

Buy A Book!

There’s lots more about the chronologically expanding and contracting conflation of tedium and thrills that made up the school summer holidays in Keep Left, Swipe Right, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. Lyons Maid did do a ‘coffee flavoured’ ice lolly in fact. Though I suspect that ‘flavoured’ may have been doing a lot of the heavy lifting there.

Further Listening

Have a rummage around in the Looks Unfamiliar freezer for Steve Berry on Magic Monster here, Bob Fischer and Georgy Jamieson on Funny Feet here and Mitch Benn on Two-Stage Self-Assembly Ice Cream Cones here.