The sweet, sweet taste of industrial action – take a trip back in time to the 1970s with Spangles (er, 1948).
The sweet, sweet taste of industrial action – take a trip back in time to the 1970s with Spangles (er, 1948).
The year is 1948, and the world is rebuilding itself from the most catastrophic conflict of modern times, filling the void of civilisation with equal amounts of optimism and despair. In the latter camp, George Orwell writes 1984, a nightmare vision of an omnipotent totalitarian regime. On a lighter note, Mars’s Slough factories thrum to the production of new ‘luscious assorted crystal fruits’: Spangles. Little does either party know how culturally ingrained both items would become.
Just as ‘It’s like 1984’ has become a cliché when talking about institutional repression, ‘Remember Spangles?’ is the nationally recognised catchphrase of corny nostalgia. Why this particular, innocuous rectangle of boiled sugar, moulded with fingertip-friendly indentations (‘the dimple in the Spangle takes your tongue straight to the heart of the flavour!’), should have been singled out is unclear. Two generations of baby boomers happily crunched them without much fuss. They were rather nice boiled sweets, advertised with none-more-whimsical rhymes (‘Farmers love Spangles!/Charmers love Spangles!/Nice little boys in pyjamas love Spangles!’) and that was that.
The thing is, Spangles were nostalgic even back then. Despite those innovative foil tubes, they harked unashamedly back to the pre-war days of the sweet shop staffed by a cheery man in front of an endless array of big glass jars. ‘Enjoy your favourite jar sweets the modern Spangles way!’ The ’50s and ’60s saw a plethora of new varieties: butterscotch, liquorice, glucose barley sugar, golden mint, soft centre ice mint, the infamous herbally infused Old English assortment, and even a ‘mystery flavour’ with a question-mark-studded wrapper. In 1974, when that lost its shine, modernisation was the thing: a groovy bell-bottomed typeface, ‘fizzy’ flavours (lemonade, orangeade and cola) and a Day-Glo TV ad in which a juvenile Nicholas Lyndhurst and pals cavorted in a lido with giant berries. (‘Suck a Spangle – get happy!’)
Ironically, it was this final incarnation that would stick. Never mind the three decades’ worth of post-war sucking, after Mars discontinued the Spangle (spookily enough, in 1984), their final incarnation joined space hoppers and power cuts in the dressing-up box of default 1970s ephemera.
In 1994 Spangle nostalgia ate itself when Woolworth’s assisted in a relaunch of the tangerine, lime, blackcurrant and Old English flavours as a limited edition reminisci-snack, promoted with woolly nostalgia pieces in the popular press, and Honor Blackman draped over the bonnet of an E-Type Jag. The revamp didn’t last, but the cliché did. Eventually the passage of time will see off all surviving Spangle-era veterans, and the topic will be confined to the history books. But if you want a vision of the foreseeable future, imagine a human face going ‘Spangles? What were all that about?!’ forever.