At Home with Joy Shelton

1955
Sound
25m

Wipe your feet and enter the home of actress Joy Shelton in this early 'ad mag'.

Welcome home. Or rather welcome home shopping. The 'ad mag' was a feature of commercial TV in Britain from 1955 to 1963, when it was axed for blurring the divide between programming and advertising. Actress Joy Shelton offers you a tour of her G Plan furniture range, after which the taste of Doris' American doughnuts is perfect to take away the sour note of salesmanship.

Joy had appeared in films like Millions Like Us (1943) but was better known on radio. She is the perfect host here, bringing glamour to domesticity. Director Quentin Lawrence went on to direct British B movies like The Trollenberg Terror (1958) - aka The Crawling Eye - and The Secret of Blood Island (1964).

The Art of Advertising

There's an art to selling, as any ad man or woman will tell you. And Britain's screen advertising has been among the most artistically ambitious of all.

This collection highlights the evolution of an extraordinarily dynamic industry, from its first faltering steps in the earliest days of film, to the highly sophisticated mini-masterpieces of the television age. It showcases the astonishing variety of approaches, strategies and tricks advertisers have used to part us with our money - entertaining us even as they subtly manipulate us with promises of a new, tastier, brighter, cleaner, healthier and better life.