A nation long reconciled to spending just as many hours in the kitchen preparing pudding as the main course (it’s Thursday, so it must be jam roly-poly) was always going to need something immediately comprehensible to shake it out of its sweetmeat servitude. Bird’s Angel Delight was just the thing, and moreover offered an additional boon by using up those half-bottles of milk leftover from breakfast. It debuted in supermarkets in 1967 promising the taste of strawberries and cream from colourful pouches of microdust. The fact this luminous powder had to be vigorously whipped together with milk was the cue for dad to ‘take a turn’ with the mixing bowl, thereby proving that no-one could ever say he didn’t ‘do his bit around here’. While a panoply of flavours and spin-offs, including birthday-party favourite the milkshake and the sadly over-ambitious home-made ice lolly, ensured the brand lined your ‘afters’ cupboard through the 1970s, its ultra-functionalism lost favour in the fussy Ice Magic-ed 1980s.
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Trad Jazz Britannia
Friday, 21.00, BBC4It always amuses us when we see clips of Double Your Money and notice the category board includes both “jazz (traditional)” and “jazz (modern)”, though it is true that at that point trad really was big news, the nascent Pick of the Pops spinning off from Trad Tavern being just one example of its hold on the nation’s teens in the early sixties, despite it being influenced by music some forty years old at the time.
Angel Delight’s nemesis was surely Instant Whip (Cadbury’s). I always preferred the AD as Instant Whip had a glutenous texture to it that I really wasn’t keen on. Of course, both were always served in plastic Tupperware (TM) pudding bowls, which probably accounted for 99% of the British population in the Seventies.
My Mum always seem to get the Tangerine one, & was once miffed that she couldn’t find it at the shops. I joked that we had probably drained the world’s supply by having it so often.