This gets a little technical, but bear with us, there is a point to it all somewhere. Dating decades by the film or video stock they’re most often recorded on isn’t an exact science, but it’s a fair rule of thumb that if it fuzzes with not-quite-there-yet video brightness, the programme you’re watching is from the ’80s, when video cameras first stalked the land outdoors as well as in. Likewise, if it’s not in black-and-white, your ’60s or ’50s film will most likely be shot in the elaborate and much-mourned Technicolor process, producing those hot pinks and azure blues that make everything look like an all-American advert for the latest ‘frigidaire’, even if the subject is just Cliff and Hank Marvin trying to chat up Una Stubbs on the first bus out of Borehamwood.

But in between – what, exactly? Think of ’70s films, those murky browns and very deep greens, grainy shots of traffic, skies that look overcast even when the sun’s out. That’s Eastmancolor, Kodak’s cheaper rival to the elaborately processed, lighting-hungry methods of the Technicolor boys, which had all but ousted its rival by the end of the 1960s, bringing costs down, and the colour palette with it. Purists moaned their usual low moans of aesthetic doom, but look at it this way – is there a more honest way to depict those times? Grainy, brown-tinged, and seemingly half faded away even when the film’s just come back from the chemist’s – well, those are our memories of the 1970s, at least. (Except when we went indoors, of course, when everything suddenly became really bright and colourful, and in front of a studio audience. But that’s another story.)

Every ten years or so, energy secretaries feel the need to roll out an energy saving initiative of their own devising, backed by a high visibility media campaign. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Posters, booklets and TV ads featuring Delia Smith urged the populace to Save It! in 1976, with a memorable rubber stamped logo (albeit one easily confused with the Yeoman gristle guarantee stamp). Fine. Ten years later they tried something similar, but got a bit too clever by branding it ‘Monergy’. ‘Get more for your money! More out of energy! More for your Monergy!’ was the clumsy explanation. This time the populace just shrugged a collective ‘eh?’ and went off to run a very deep bath for one.

Package holidays notwithstanding, the ’70s was for most one big long decade of holidays that began and ended with mammoth five hour-plus drives from one end of Britain to the other, with breakdowns, spam sandwiches in foil on the back seat, and at least one refill on the way. Petrol stations, eying up the family traffic through their forecourts, wondered how to get the non-driving contingent, bored and queasy from petrol fumes, on side. Many little promotions sprang up over the years, from National Garages’ little model Smurf athletes for the Moscow Olympics to the mighty ‘Let’s Go to the Shop (Shell Station)’. But none can hold a candle to the original, which got it as right as could be first time round – the Esso World Cup Coin Collection.

The endeavour was, of course, a no-brainer in 1970. Cast the complete squad of defending champions in bronze – oh, all right, some kind of tin or something – and offer them free to purchasers of a full tank of the erstwhile Standard Oil’s finest two star or above. The coins were odd things indeed – depicting each player’s head three-quarters on, they gave them all the sort of heroically stern countenance normally favoured by Soviet propagandist statuary, along with rather terrifying sightless eyes, a bit like those of Marc Harrison’s weirdo alien Sky. Imposing and impressive they may have been, but going on the evidence of the coins alone, you wouldn’t want to be facing these men across the desks on A Question of Sport. Thank God Jimmy Hill was out of the game before all this kicked off.

Of course, each coin was offered sight unseen in a sealed pouch, which meant that, while collecting at the start was a breeze, the more team members you accumulated, the more likely you were to get duplicates, and the more those unfilled holes in the royal blue cardboard mount gaped with forlorn emptiness. Kids at the end of their tethers, if not their collections, were often ‘helped out’ by kindly forecourt attendants, who’d offer to break open a couple of packets and get them their longed-for Peter Bonetti to finish the job off. This kindly magnanimity was, in fact, Esso company policy – provided, of course, there was visual evidence that the child in question had already suffered the tribulations of a triple run of Emlyn Hugheses.

Inevitably, the lads’ work on the field didn’t quite match their efforts in the recording studio performing Back Home, and the fad faded out. A revival occurred, somewhat opportunistically, when the 1990 tournament brought the beautiful game back under the radar of the executive classes, and Platty and co were granted their shot at faux-silver immortality. Sadly, these didn’t have quite the forbidding power of the originals – the sculpting was more cartoony, and some of them were even smiling! Those weird sightless eyes remained, though, now looking as if they’d been gouged out in some terrifying tunnel altercation. All wrong the new lot may have been, but they did well enough, attesting to the soundness of the original idea as much as the nostalgic power of those early sets – after all, who these days sheds a tear in fond memory of the Texaco Great British Regiments promotion?

Burly agricultural lummox Ted Moult became a minor celebrity after being crowned Brain of Britain, but it’s for his double-glazing commercials that he’s best remembered. Ted would go to fantastical lengths to demonstrate the effectiveness of ‘You only fit double glazing once, so fit the best’ Everest, fluttering a feather in front of his windows to exhibit the lack of draughtiness, before beckoning a noisy helicopter into his back garden to display their soundproofing qualities, and even swinging a demolition ball at them to illustrate their toughness. If all that didn’t get you on the trimphone to ask the operator for ‘Freefone Everest’ and installing some ‘Insulation for the Nation’, then nothing else could.