Humor Is a Major Export in British Collection of Ads

So there’s this East Indian guy in native dress doing an Elvis impersonation with a sitar slung across his hips and a trio of bobbing women in saris--a hysterically funny TV commercial for an Indian snack. Or how about the fresh-faced young man calmly watching a customs inspector pluck out a bag of white powder from his luggage--no problem, the stuff is Persil washing powder packed by his mum.

These videos were part of a cavalcade of new British work in advertising, introduced Tuesday night by Edward Booth-Clibborn, chairman of the Designers and Art Directors Assn. of London, in a Festival of Britain-sponsored program at Crystal Cove Auditorium, UC Irvine.

The presentation began with a brief clip from a Soviet TV program of Booth-Clibborn wandering the streets of Moscow and offering opinions on the sorry state of consumer awareness over there. “Russia is very keen to get into advertising,” he told the sparse UCI audience afterward, “but they know nothing about it.”

Britain, on the other hand, got over its growing pains years ago.

As Booth-Clibborn explained, his country was indebted to the United States for inspiration during the 1960s, even slavishly copying American colloquialisms.

But during the ‘70s, advertising began to capitalize on British values and verbal quirks. Combined with the national emphasis on the honing of specialized crafts--notably typography--the industry shot ahead.

Examples of catalogues and record covers by two young firms with names that sound like rock groups--Why Not Associates and the Thunder Jockeys--are rife with letters and words that spew across the page like champagne froth.

Images are forced to undergo fragmentation, overlay, dissolve and other tricks that aim to turn the static page into a somersaulting assault on the senses.

Such work may be design fallout from the British punk movement (Booth-Clibborn, who had little to say about why he selected particular examples, was mum on the subject).

In any case, the more memorable ads he showed exploited more traditional facets of the British character--such as understated humor and a love of eccentricity for its own sake--in amusing or startling new ways.

Posters for a new banking system with no branches that won 100,000 new accounts (in a country where, Booth-Clibborn said, people rarely change banks) got viewers’ attention by means of utterly banal and irrelevant photographs, such as a pair of rubber boots drying by a radiator or a faucet and bar of used soap at the edge of a bathtub.

In an amusing parody of consumer choice, viewers of a TV commercial for the bank were asked to select an “optimistic” or “pessimistic” version of the ad by staying tuned or switching to the other British commercial station for the other point of view.

Other commercials showed people talking about the bank--such as the earnest black clergyman sipping tea who said he’d never actually seen the people at First Direct, “but I believe, I believe they exist.”

There’s a commercial that offers an ode in elegant verse to a pea sitting in the center of a china plate (in the end, a fork unceremoniously squashes it; the product is mashed peas). And there’s the tale of the bickering couple and their dotty adult son who lives a 5-year-old’s fantasy life. When he gets his folks out of a jam by dashing off to call the “talking pages” (a telephone yellow pages service), he proudly reminds them--this is the only-in-Britain part--that he is 52 years old and a high court judge.

Not all the good work is humorous.

One public interest commercial shows a young man in a hospital setting, holding onto parallel bars as he musters all his strength to try to move his body a tiny distance. The struggle continues for an almost unendurable length of time while a woman’s voice constantly murmurs encouragement. At last a sentence flashes on the screen: “Drinking and driving wrecks lives.”

Another commercial contrasts images of emaciated black children with actual tapes of rousing debates in Parliament about such issues as maintaining the percentage of water in Scotch and imposing a tax on chocolate biscuits.

The message: “It would only take about a dozen letters to make your MP (Member of Parliament) talk about (the 5 million Third World children who die every year) instead.”

The intelligence and freshness of this work--as well as its more leisurely pace and the emphasis on first-rate black-and-white photography--make it superior to the American product.

In fact, the British examples almost make you wonder if commercials, with their own rules of brevity and immediacy, could possibly provide a model for a new, broadly accessible quick-hit art form that could make you laugh, think, recoil or sympathize in the twinkling of an eye.