Always partial to the odd gin and tonic or two I was drawn to two bus stops in Vigo in north-west Spain. Beefeater, as you can see from the photos, was promoting their gin by conjuring up images of Britain.
One was dominated by a male, the other by a female. As in all advertising, neither looked much like us. When did you last see a man wearing a bowler hat and mustard trousers with a union jack tee shirt. Or a women wearing a crown, carrying a sceptre and sporting gold lame leggings? All right I am being facetious because this is just some advertising agencies’ eye-catcher to attract passers-by. But even then, look at the pictures and see what has been included and ask yourself what resemblance this has to any of our countries.
Spanish visitors are in for a shock if they think we are remotely like these images. But then we don’t have biplanes or horse and carts either. The figures look modernistic so I can only assume this is Beefeater trying to portray Britain both in the past, at a time when Beefeater first started being distilled, and now. The iconic Routemaster double decker bus is in one ad; a telephone box in another. Apart from the gin appearing in both ads the only other common thing are the Houses of Parliament.
Do we really do some strange sort of dance in the streets, ride motor scooters and talk to each other via megaphones? Do soldiers guard telephone boxes? Do we even have many telephone boxes any more or are they pieces of public sculpture or just plain vandalised wrecks since no-one uses them much anymore?
What we really might have in our streets are confused Spanish visitors!