For Pete's Sake

London: N.p. [Associated-Rediffusion], 1958. 16 mimeographed pp., secured with staple to top left. A little edgeworn and dusty, pencilled notes to some pages. Last pages beginning to detach from staple. First edition. CO-WRITER DICK VOSBURGH'S CAMERA COPY, WITH HIS PENCILLED ANNOTATIONS. An interesting example of the 1950s phenomenon of Ad-Mags. With the arrival of commercial television in the UK in 1955, regulations were put in place to keep any advertising content separate from the programmes themselves. An exception was made for so-called 'shopping guides', US-style promotional shows where, instead of being advertised in commercial breaks, products were integrated into the fabric of a show where their benefits, availability and price were discussed by the cast. An extreme form of product placement, they usually ran for fifteen minutes, and gave the audience the feeling they were flipping through a mail-order catalogue. The most popular Ad-Mag show was Jim's Inn, starring Jimmy Hanley as the landlord of a village pub, who would serve up pints while a regular cast discussed a wide variety of household gadgets over a packet of pork scratchings. (Counter-intuitively, this is probably a much more realistic slice-of-pub-life than, say, the one served up in Eastenders or Coronation Street, where the locals never discuss soap operas). The Pilkington Report on British Broadcasting, published in 1962, condemned Ad-Mags for blurring the distinction between television characters and TV personalities when looking to sell goods to their audience, and television companies began dropping the shows even before they were outlawed by Parliament. For Pete's Sake ran for 15 episodes in 1957-8, and starred husband-and-wife team Peter Butterworth and Janet Brown. Each fortnight they would parody a well-known film, cramming puff pieces for a variety of products into the action. This episode, transmitted on 28 January 1958, presented a courtroom drama while singing the glories of, among others, the Fridor Stitchmaster, Christie's Liquid Lanoline, and Player's Cigarettes ('I always say 'please' to Player's'). No recordings of For Pete's Sake have survived. An extremely scarce relic from a long-dead TV format.