As seen on TV!



So high-tech it makes your eye balls spin.

My last post was a dissection of a selection of the current major Yuletide ads on the box. But if you're of a certain age the BOOM! BASH! WALLOP! offerings from K-Tel and Ronco announced the approach of Christmas as concretely as the appearance of Selection Boxes on the shelves in Fine Fare. Indeed for me Christmas and K-Ronco (my 70s conflation and the one I'll use here) are inextricably linked. If these names are new to you, you can Tardis yourself back to those crazy days by dint of YouTube where you'll find a wealth of material. I promise you that It's well worth a look. 

The K-Ronco canon was a disparate one.
Vinyl music compilations were a staple and formed the early templates for the Now That's What I Call Music series. My favourites were Souled Out and Super Bad. I played them to death and scratched them to buggery and when they were no longer playable I fashioned them into a fruit bowl by holding the LP over the gas ring, as was the fashion at the time. Kitchen and household appliances offering miraculous escape from and shortcuts to everyday domestic tasks are probably the most memorable for many. Some of the contraptions were useful by degree and others were one-use only before being entombed in their garish boxes and buried in the back of the cupboard never to be seen again until someone died, moved house, had a car-boot sale, filled a bag for charity, or fancied an evening in with the Lambrusco, Abigail's Party and 'that thing of me mam's' as star turn in a pi*s-taking session. Sometimes both ends of the product spectrum collided, the progeny being the fantastically hi-tech Record Selector which was little more than a Rolodex for LPs (admit it...you want one don't you?) and millions of us bought them. And then they gave us the Record Vacuum, so we had to have one of those too. On seeing the pure magic that was the Brush-'O'-Matic, my Gran hot footed it to Woolworths and returned cradling one and it worked – in a fashion – and I remember the ad with its discombobulated hand wielding the same depositing collected cat fur on a black velvet cushion as if I first saw it yesterday.

We decided that we couldn't live without the Veg-O-Matic and pondered how we'd ever managed with only the humble vegetable peeler and that product of thousands of years of R&D: the knife. The model shown below gave way to a plunger-like version you put over your onion or whatever and then bashed with the palm of your hand. Its place in history as the architect of wrist sprains extraordinaire and the arch enemy of A&E departments nationwide is second only to Clackers or Kerbangers, as they were known in the US. They are respectively King and Queen in the that wasn't such a good idea after all Hall of Fame.

 

 

In our comparatively, impossibly futuristic here-and-now, this stuff looks like what most of us who bought it then knew it to be: for the most part a heap of tat. But it was a different world then. The ads were in no way high concept, but boy were they entertaining. They showed you the product, what it did and explained why you needed it. It was refreshing and that's what I remember about K-Ronco, probably more than I remember what they were selling. In times when TV was king – the biggest, most powerful and persuasive medium – K-Ronco packs carried the endorsement 'As Seen On TV' because to be seen on TV was an endorsement indeed. It was a promise. It meant proper stuff made by proper people. It doesn't mean that now, does it? I think that it does. Online is intangible, it's unreal because there's no reality. That's why it was always inevitable that online concerns would move at some point into bricks and mortar. Products on the box sit alongside the people and programmes we trust and they benefit from the halo. That and the common knowledge that in order to have ads on the box you need to have a bit of brass, means you're viable. You're real.

 

When I think about K-Ronco ads I'm reminded of the Dudley Moore film Crazy People in which Dudley plays an Advertising Executive who has a breakdown and revives his fortunes and sanity by creating an agency peopled by crazy people, which tells the truth and what stuff does in a very direct no-frills manner. Over the years K-Ronco has been the stuff of parody on both big and small screens and very funny it's been too. And companies like JML and products such as Cillit Bang have picked up the mantle...but from the wrong end and minus the necessary wit, charm and self-awareness. But I think there's a place for this kind of approach now, since some, naming no names, who have over-sold and under-delivered might benefit from a spot of K-Ronco. As seen on TV!