Over the summer of 1985, with Timmy Mallett still yet to be enlisted for a daily round of exhorting word-associating youngsters to look at each other and say bleurgh, the latter part of the early part of the summer mornings was given over by TV-am to The Official Worldwide Roland Rat Appreciation Society – ‘or OWRASS for short’ – which it has to be said bore a very definite air of ‘do we have to?’ ahead of Roland’s impending and controversial defection to the BBC; which, incidentally, you can find much more about here. In a manner that would be considered unthinkable only a couple of years later, and which would probably be very much thinkable again now if ITV actually bothered with anything resembling programmes for younger viewers instead of three year old repeats of celebrities showing other celebrities around their favourite interchangeable ‘garden walks’, holiday morning children’s programming was consistently punctuated with adverts for Quirks, Micro Machines – which of course ‘come in collections of five’ – and a certain reprehensible tabloid newspaper which appeared to consider the most vital and critical news stories of a week in which the HMS Ark Royal returned to Portsmouth after its maiden voyage, British Rail announced a scheme intended to elevate its in-service food to a level that could be legally decreed ‘edible’ and construction workers at Wembley Stadium began slotting together the stage that in a matter of days would house Live Aid to be the facts as related by Jim Davidson as a sort of bing0-toting carnival barker that Sylvester Stallone had a new film coming out called Rambo – presumably the : First Blood, Part II would have wasted precious headline space – that Wham! were ‘hiding’ a ‘secret heartache’ that was inevitably nothing of the sort but nonetheless the paper still felt the need to go ‘inside’ it and that Samantha Fox had breasts, culminating in the nonsensical exclamation ‘Wham! Ram! Thank you, Sam!’. If ever the literacy of anyone who would voluntarily elect to read that heap of slurry in newsprint form should have been called into question, it was then.

Also vying with Jem, Zoids, Robot Anti-Terror Squad (R.A.T.S.!) and those ones where their heads turned round or something for juvenile purchase power attention during those ad breaks were, perhaps inevitably, Lyons Maid and Wall’s, both of them banking on the hope that their emulsifier-addicted audience might have been shaken awake by such unprecedented early morning thrills and would forsake the pleasure of the BBC ‘s umpteenth repeat runs of The Adventures And Huckleberry Finn And His Friends and The Red Hand Gang – or alternately banking on the certainty that the inert nothingness of CP And Qwikstitch would compel viewers not just to abandon their morning’s viewing but to divest themselves entirely of all notions of reality full stop; and if you think that’s an exaggeration you might want to have a read of this here – and head on up to the newsagents’ to satiate their moderately warm weather-fuelled craving for freezer-bound sugary wares. While Lyons Maid were apparently reliant on Su Pollard somewhat over-evidently asserting that their ice creams and ice lollies were ‘frozen on a stick’, the ever-more fashionable and cartoonish Wall’s opted instead for a sort of sub-Denice Williams rapid-fire funk-soul workout declaring their efforts a treat that can’t be beat; and it’s there that we join them in the summer of 1985 – coincidentally while Marvel UK was issuing their own reprint of the original Secret Wars – continuing our quest to determine which was best out of The Marvel And DC Of Ice Cream at the behest of an omniscient Ice Cream Beyonder with a look at some of those mid-eighties freezer side-punted purportedly unbeatable treats…

Front and centre as always is Wall’s conical figurehead slash emulsified battering ram Cornetto, the vanilla and chocolate dream that was also available in the less Renato Pagliari-serenaded mint and chocolate dream, vanilla and strawberry dream and by now discontinued nobody’s dream run and raisin variants, which did not so much see off the challenge of King Cone as send it packing back to J. Lyons And Co. with a sign hung round its neck reading ‘Cornish Maid Can F- Off’. Here however the delicious ice cream from Italy is joined by its newly introduced decidedly more lavish and correspondingly more expensive variant Choco Rico, a cone of such Mr. Dennis-infuriating elaborateness that you would surely have had to be some sort of wild and crazy lah di dah billionaire to afford it. Originally promoted by an imaginative spin on the original Cornetto advert, featuring a gondolier belting out O Sole Mio as his romantic punting efforts are almost trounced by Brookside‘s idea of an ‘Italian’ character and his motorised seaborne ice cream van before some deft Cornetto-skewed swerving saves the seductive day, Choco Rico was originally part of a ‘Super Cones’ initiative alongside a similarly opulent Tutti Frutti, presumably not included here on account of the fact that it was not really worth wasting valuable advertising space on two products that nobody could really afford. Presumably this understandable resolute failure to fly out of newsagents’ freezers was what led to them being reconstituted in family-size tub form not long afterwards as the Gino Ginelli range, as memorably promoted by a not remotely patronising or stereotype-fuelled advert that was roundly adjudged to be ‘allowed’ on account of the fact that you knew the words to it.

Whilst the ‘Super’ Cones may have been at the very least a partial attempt by Wall’s to reposition themselves in alignment with the eighties obsession with all matters ‘designer’, the similarly newly introduced MegaBytes – available in evidently wildly divergent Toffee’n’Choc and Banana’n’Choc varieties – could not have been more blatant an attempt to jump on the microchip revolution System Bus and hook in a few punters dazzled by the exciting new world of home computing, with any actual understanding or awareness of RAM capacity considered very much secondary to the fact that it presented an invaluable opportunity for a pun on both ‘mega’ and ‘bite’. Unfortunately, they never really seemed to court very much attention outside of those random panels in the news pages of the likes of Popular Computing Weekly where they shoehorned in a story about how Electric Dreams was set to be the comedy hit of the year or Dave Greenfield from The Stranglers using a ZX81 to tabulate his residuals so that it wasn’t just all wall-to-wall affirmations that Bugaboo The Flea continued to be commercially available, and they very quickly went sort of black and then beige and their space on the freezer-side label was replaced with text reading ‘© 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd.’. More successful, albeit after a fashion, was mind-and-tastebud bending strawberry, pineapple and lime confection Tongue Twister, originally issued in the early eighties as Tangle Twister to the delight of extreme flavour-seeking daredevils and pretty much nobody else until they swapped the flavour hierarchy around and gave it an ironically less tongue-twisting name, later still scaled back to just Twister under which banner it still thrives to this day albeit bearing slightly reduced dimensions.

For those given to pleading to be allowed to ‘stay up’ long past ice lolly melting hours of the afternoon in the hope of seeing Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing shouting ‘back – BACK I say!’ in variously studioed low budgeted late sixties hokum punted out in their local ITV region’s ‘Terrifying Tales Of Terror’ slot, a looming ice-sculpted Dracula was available in blood-red strawberry as if unwittingly uncovered by arctic ‘workmen’ expressing concern that there’s something different about this ice, sir in an unmade early seventies Whither Hammer? reboot attempting to reposition the franchise with a polar exploration twist. Presenting the canonically-troubling conundrum of him technically already having been staked through the heart by the stick, Dracula was in fact a more Mary Whitehouse-palatable – hopefully literally; after all, she probably deserved an ice lolly after a hard day’s kicking up a stink about precisely fuck all – replacement for the earlier Count Dracula’s Deadly Secret, a ‘midnight black’ – currant – lolly where debate still rages as to whether the ‘secret’ in question was the Fake Rod Hull-disgruntling surprise interior layer of red jelly or the sticks apparently bearing cryptic runic carvings that when collected and arranged formed a handy stencil of The Count himself, as famously featured in all of his films. As to exactly why the fabled Walpurgis Night wanderer was considered so eminently suitable for rendition in comestible form, you can find further ruminations on that bewildering phenomenon here.

Elsewhere it was deceptively business as usual; deceptively in that even Wall’s most straightforward and steadfast options still came accompanied by a degree of razzle-dazzle that made even the average ‘Your Saturday evening… on ITV!’ trailer look restrained and understated, and which Lyons Maid’s sensible and proportionate thrills could ever fully hope to compete with. The ever dependable Strawberry Split, which despite rumours to the contrary appears to have been the only citrus hue ever deemed split-worthy, and the similarly naranjally-locked Orange Fruitie are clearly delineated as ‘still’ costing twenty five pence, as though their value was set to skyrocket at any second, while the faintly fizzy Lemonade, Orangeade and Cola Sparkles shamelessly flaunted their perennial status as the embitteredly-consumed budget option by proudly signposting their cost of ‘just’ ten pence. Displaying equal pride in its aversion to artificial sweeteners, Mini Milk continues to masquerade as the ‘healthy’ option in both of its ring-through-nose cow-punted plain and strawberry varieties, although mercifully there is no sign of Mini Juice, the mono-flavoured frozen water variant promoted by the world’s smuggest orange reclining on a stile with all the conviction of a Conservative MP hoisting up a ‘pint’ for the cameras. Now bewildering seemingly in possession of absolutely no digital footprint whatsoever, the once ubiquitous 2 Ball Screwball – essentially a livid wodge of raspberry ripple concealing dual servings of bubble gum forcefully shunted into a plastic cone bearing an uncanny resemblance to a sixties toy manufacturer’s idea of an upended Dalek – relied entirely on its erstwhile familiarity and indeed its ‘value’, with an apparent additional levy of one pence per ‘screwball’, while the choc ice options left it to such robust and oddly Noddy Holder-scoffage suggesting as names Nutty, Double Choc and Golden Vanilla to do the tantalising for them. Admit it, you actually want one of them right now, don’t you?

Where Wall’s scored highest and they knew it, however, was with Big Feast; later stripped of its adjectival adjunct in a futile bid to counter not entirely unfounded objections that it no longer measured up to its dimensional claims, but at that time essentially equivalent to the entire contents of a newsagents’ freezer condensed into a single robust sugary block that attained unquestioning approval from the entire family. Composed of a rock solid slab of chocolate so utterly assured in its perfection that it declined to assume an actual tangible shape, surrounded by restaurant dessert-rich chocolate ice cream and surrounded in turn by a crisp chocolate exterior liberally decorated with crushed hazelnuts of grandparental pebble-dash severity, it represented a stick-mounted challenge that not even Lyons Maid’s contemporaneous bid for cross-generational consumer base infiltration Favourite Centres – initially comprising Choc Mint, Coconut Flake, Toffee Crumble and the suspiciously Feast-infringing Triple Choc – could ever hope to meet. It’s almost like setting The Wasp against Bumblebee. Or even Hawkeye against Green Arrow. They truly are The Marvel And DC Of Ice Cream. Everyone has their favourite. Everyone also knows which one is best.

So pausing only to afford an honourable mention to some notable absentees from this mid-eighties best served chilled roll-call – unapologetic Fab clone Winner, enduring comedy-averse podiatric assembly of foamy strawberry non-milk dairy fat which again demonstrably used to be bigger Funny Feet, it’s rude to point-baiting iced strawberry fist with jabbing digit The Finger which looked less like an ice lolly than it did a rejected cover for a Garry Bushell-sponsored ‘OI!’ compilation and oversized probably misses his old glasses-evoking ice cream spectacles with chocolate button ‘eyes’ Goggles – it’s time to slam the newsagents’ freezer lid shut and power it Fab-flounderingly down. After all, they need that floorspace for the selection boxes…

Buy A Book!

There’s lots more about the perpetually chronologically expanding and contracting conflation of tedium and thrills that made up the school summer holidays and indeed the school summer holiday television schedules 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. That entirely real and authentic ‘Italian’ Gino Ginelli didn’t see fit to burden himself with a cappuccino flavour, did he?

Further Reading

You can find the first part of The Marvel And DC Of Ice Cream, looking at the literally Fab world of Lyons Maid – but is it Fab enough? – in There’s A Thousand Ways Of Having Fun With Lyons Maid Ice Cream here.

Further Listening

Treat yourself to 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.

© Tim Worthington.
Please don’t copy this only with more italics and exclamation marks.