When I look back on our lives as they were forty years ago I can’t help smiling. Whilst one is impacted by fashions that were too unfortunate to be revived – those collars we thought so groovy – other things haven’t changed at all. I don’t think sailing shoes or jean jackets have ever been out of circulation.
In July 1973 Claude Whatham, pictured above in his Levis, had my sisters and I in a series of three Weetabix commercials that depicted life in 1933, forty years before, when the Great British breakfast cereal was first launched on the market. There seemed to have been a wider difference between the thirties and children’s lives in the seventies than in the last forty years. But am I right?
Whilst we had never seen stocks of corn until we went on the set especially constructed for the advertisement, Percy Baxter had made them himself back in 1933 when he lived and worked on the Cotswold hills.
The Land Rover in this behind-the-scenes shot could the same vehicle used on a film set today.
Meanwhile, my mother was presenting her afternoon television programme for HTV West called ‘Women Only’ – dressed in her Donny Osmond hat. I would happily wear her suede coat today and can often be seen in the hat. The lace-up boots looked good recently with a Wonder Woman fancy dress outfit but were terribly uncomfortable. My sister still hasn’t forgiven me for giving them away.
As always, well made things of quality have endured, and those faithful goods from Land Rovers to Levi jeans, Puffin Books and Weetabix are, thankfully, still being produced.
for more photographs of making the Weetabix commercial click here
Sophie Neville 
I remember corn stocks (or stewks, as they were named to me) as a little boy, just! Huge agricultural machinery had yet to come then, in the early 1950s.