ABSTRACT
During 1994 and 1995 the telephone company, Mercury, ran a series of advertisements for its services which probably affected teachers rather differently than other members of the population. Each advertisement was designed to look like two pages from a book, the right hand page containing a drawn picture and the left hand several lines of text in large bold print. The pictures always featured a family of father, mother, one male and one female child, plus, usually, a dog, engaged in family pursuits such as going for a ride in a car, or picking blackberries. The father always wore a blue pin-striped suit (he was modelled on the comedian Harry Enfield, a regular in Mercury advertisements), the mother a floral print dress. The accompanying text was written in a series of very short sentences, extolling the father’s selection of Mercury as his telephone company, such as ‘Well done, Daddy!’ Underneath the main text, in smaller print, was a series of what were labelled ‘Key words’ which in reality made up an advertising slogan, such as ‘Mercury twenty five per cent less’.
