Tubular sells: the familiar marque o’ Polo (1948) and Polo Fruits (1953).

POLO

You always hear about the nylons and the chewing gum. And the first tantalising glimpses of an aspirational, can-do lifestyle hitherto alien to these islands. And shagging round the back of the NAAFI wagon. But what did those American GIs really do for us? They brought us the Polo. It was properly called the Lifesaver, but during the war Rowntree were granted the licence from their manufacturer to make them over here especially for homesick Yanks. After VE Day, a canny bit of tweaking resulted in Rowntree’s own version, initially called Pax but soon renamed Polo Digestive Mints. It wasn’t an easy start. The ‘digestive’ moniker was hastily withdrawn when Rowntree were challenged to prove the sweet’s medicinal credentials. Then they had to see off a number of copycat rivals like Swizzels’ Navy Mints. But by the ‘50s the Polo had established itself as one of the top ‘motoring mints’ in town, thanks to its resilient constitution and that hole, which maximised the surface area through which the sucker’s tongue could extract mintiness.

When you’ve got the perfect formula, what else to do but muck about with it? Typically for Americans, Life Savers came in all sorts of cockamamie flavours from violet to malted milk. Things were more restrained over here. Plans were made for barley sugar Polos, and a Glacier Mint-baiting crystal clear variety, but nothing came of them. Polo Fruits, however, did trundle shelfwards in 1953, the familiar foil tube replaced by waxed paper, within which hard, semi-opaque and very, very sticky fruit sweets clung together as if for dear life. Such tactics were futile: if you couldn’t prise a group of three apart, you did the honourable thing and downed it in one. (Later variants, like lemon and the short-lived strawberries and cream flavour, stuck to the non-stick format of the originals.)

Despite ‘the Mint with the Hole’s reputation as a Sunday driver’s companion (Rowntree offered free holiday route maps in one giveaway), two-thirds of consumers were women. Predictably, this led to a scare about the mint somehow cancelling out the effects of the Pill. Nothing, though, could sway it from its steady-as-she-goes residency at the top of the minted pops: least of all half-arsed 1981 rival Meltis Mints, a Trebor clone whose centre dissolved faster in the mouth than the rest, turning it into a Polo clone mid-suck. No takers. Meanwhile, a series of wry minimalist ads voiced by Peter Sallis (a pair of sturdy driving gloves in audio form) kept the Polo firmly within the Zeitgeist, and that little well next to the gear stick, without actually changing a thing.

Nobody does it better. TV advertising, that is, circa 1986.