Let the revels commence! Mars’s motley medley (1967)

REVELS

In the confectionery business, you’re onto a winner if you can give the impression of offering more for less, and Mars took that precept to the limit with Revels, which must have been the cheapest product to launch in sweet-making history. After all, Maltesers and Galaxy Counters were already going, and the peanut and toffee varieties would be recycled as Treets a few years later. The only ‘true’ Revels were the coconut and orange (later coffee) cream-centred chocs, which, perhaps tellingly, are the ones that compete for status of ‘most hated flavour’ in folk mythology.

The thriftiness extended to the advertising campaigns, with cheeky newsagents admonishing, ‘You can’t buy a box of chocolates for sixpence, sonny!’ Post-decimalisation, the comparison was eked out in a recession-busting commercial wherein a half-pound bag of Revels was poured into an empty chocolate box, filling it to the brim in a most satisfying way. (The inconvenient truth that boxes of chocolates have always been pretty rotten value for money was tactfully ignored.)

As well as the impression of abundance on the cheap, Revels got into the underage public consciousness via the many opportunities their multifarious nature offered for juvenile mucking about (for kids, food you can fart about with invariably sits higher up the cultural pecking order than food that’s only good for stuffing in your gob). Peanut-allergic comedian Milton Jones reminisced about school bullies forcing him to play Russian roulette with a bag in the playground, a gag which Mars, thrifty to the last, ‘borrowed’ for a Deer Hunter-parodying ad in 2002. You can’t buy an ad campaign for sixpence, sonny...

Bags more for everyone? Bagsy those uneaten chocs, more like. TV ad, circa 1978.