Hello gorgeous friends. I couldn’t tell you why, but there’s something I just can’t get out of my head. A family business. An advertisement. A man. At first dated and ridiculous, but the more I think about it the more I realise it might be supremely relevant.
š Off their heads: the
shockingreturn of the rave: With clubs shut, thousands of young people are breaking the Covid-19 rules to attend parties organised on social media. Let me just say there’s nothing shocking about this. Long-standing readers might remember me pointing this out last August. I spent a whole afternoon perfecting that GIF, and I’m glad of it.āļø Scale model of a Boeing 777 made entirely from manila folders: Luca Iaconi-Stewart’s obsessive project is quite, quite wonderful.
šŗ EXP TV is a live TV channel broadcasting an endless stream of video ephemera. The daytime programmingāVideo Breaksāis a video collage series featuring wild, rare, unpredictable, and ever-changing archival clips touching on every subject imaginable. Similar to how golden-era MTV played music videos all day, daytime EXP TV streams non-stop, deep-cut video clips.
š The #Vanlife Business Is Booming: The pandemic is a distant memory while zipping around in a several-hundred-thousand-dollar custom camper-van on the open road. Hint hint.
šāāļø Canadian scuba diver in Mexico accidentally discovers vast, prehistoric industrial complex: After a vast underwater prehistoric mine was accidentally discovered in Mexico, a university professor who studies the flooded caves of the Yucatan went in to map it and collect samples that demonstrate these ancient people had massive industrial capacity in mining ochre, a paint that plays a central role in the evolution of human beings.
š„¤ When India Kicked Out Coca-Cola, Local Sodas Thrived: In societies where capitalism loses favour, the symbolic American drink is often replaced with a palatable local alternative. Yet when the Berlin Wall fell, East Germans ditched their Vita-Cola for Coca-Cola. Poland’s Polo-Cockta and the Czech Kofola both faded away, only to be later revived out of nostalgia. But in India, two underdog sodas that flourished during the country’s stint of economic isolation have remained solidly shelved next to Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
A customer atmosphere congenial to all
Off the west coast of Normandy in the English Channel, Jersey and the other Channel Islands have a TV channel all their own. Owned by ITV these days, Channel Television used to be more distinct. Like its location, modest in scale but nevertheless independent. If you visited before 2013 you might have caught sight of Oscar Puffin sending birthday greetings.
But there’s another presence in Channel Island broadcasting history so distinctive and incongruous as to seem almost fictional.
Major Stewart Nicolle Benest took over ownership of the small shop founded by his grandfather and turned the business into two early supermarkets. Benest’s of Millbrook and its sister store Fineprice are engrained in the consciousness of Jersey residents and visitors alike, not least for their TV adverts, produced at Channel Television written and voiced by the Major himself. His undulating delivery and turns of phase are unlike anything else you’ve heard.
If the staff at Channel Television tried to dissuade Major Benest from recording voiceovers himself, he was insistent. Despite low production values, his distinctive style made for memorable adverts. And although recording dozens, the Major appeared on screen only once in this 1977 advert for Benest’s chipsteaksāa Jersey barbecue staple.
But there’s more to Major Benest than quirkiness of style. As expressed in this short documentary about these distinctive voiceover recordings, the Major was a scrupulous, honest man who believed in high standards of service. In his words: “the quality of a food store is the sum of the services it offers”.
After his death, Major Benest’s son finally sold the business to a rival operator, ending 115 years in family ownership. Benest’s of Millbrook is now a Morrisons and Fineprice is a Marks & Spencer. This seems a shame, somehow. Contemporary brands like these do backflips to persuade us they are committed to service: they’d do well to think about the standards Stewart Benest set for himself.
Remember the names!