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Player's Please! (1935)

Whatever you think of the cigarette, it was always an icon of modernism, a case of light up and face the future. The Victorians chuffed away on massive cigars and pipes, basically smoking the equivalent of walnut sideboards, while Millennial types of all ages stand outside pubs sucking up the blue light of metal e-cigs, which look like tiny piccolos or digital downloads of actual fags.

The last century, on the other hand, was all about the packet of twenty, as churned out by Player’s in factories like the one in this advertising sketch from a 1935 issue of the Nottingham Journal – streamlined minimalist white paper tubes filled with tobacco, sold in packets decorated with hard-edged colour graphics that might as well have been designed at the Bauhaus.

“In this sunny modern factory thousands of Nottingham men and women take pride in making millions of smokers say PLAYER’S PLEASE every day”, runs the company tagline. The picture of the building with its clean design, tree-lined street and billowing cloud in a clear sky must have seemed like a vision of utopia in a city that, at the time it was printed, was still clogged with soot-belching chimneys and blackened brickwork.

Back then, even Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit was known to visit the pub for a smoke, so it’s impossible to imagine Arthur Seaton as a health fanatic, Humphrey Bogart sharing a puff on an e-cig with Lauren Bacall or bebop and Beat Poetry emerging from clubs that smelled of cheap aftershave and farts instead of fags and bourbon. Player’s products, like its customers, probably won’t last much longer – but before our own age of health scares and micro-management, the modernist aura of the humble Notts-made fag had cast its spell.

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Henry Farmer Ltd: Feeling Groovy? (1967)

It doesn’t matter what age you are, there will
always be someone about to let you know that everything was better in their day. Exactly the same kind of people, who now go on endlessly about the fifties as if it were a Golden Age, can be found in every issue of any magazine ever published in the actual fifties, moaning about the country going to the dogs. If there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that even when Stonehenge was still being built there were a bunch of cave folk leaning on a fence, looking down their noses at it and complaining that they liked the place much better when it was all swamp.

So what does any of this have to do with Henry Farmer’s 1967 advert for transistorised electric (and – yes – slightly unfortunately-named) Thomas Organs, with their exclusive built-in ‘Color- Glo’ self-teaching system as standard, to help you play along with the hits of the day in your own home? Only seeing it reminded me of my grandparents’ habit of telling us kids how in their day they didn’t have the telly and had to make their own entertainment – which was usually something to do with having a sing-song round a piano.

Henry Farmer’s presence on Long Row, boasting no less than twelve phone lines to take orders, suggests that, in 1967, someone out there was buying their up-to-the-minute home entertainment systems and going to the trouble of learning to play them. Perhaps the siren call of Saturday night ITV really did wipe out an entire era of home musicianship, the likes of which we’ll never see again. But I’m also fairly certain no Thomas Organ ever crossed the threshold of my grandparents’ small terrace – and if my grandma was once capable of knocking out Tijuana Taxi in the style of The Incredible Jimmy Smith, I can only regret that I never saw her doing it.

Wayne Burrows on Wordpress