DESCRIPTION:
A wallow in smokey nostalgia, with the King Of The Jingles - but for how long?

The thing is - if you hit "Consulate" on YouTube's search engine (which hasn't been firing on all cylinders for some time now) you get a number of recommendations - "Consulate cigarettes", "Consulate advert", "Consulate cigarette advert" and "Consulate cool as a mountain stream" - but when you click on them - there's NOTHING THERE!

This piqued my curiosity. Could the anti-smoking hysteria be to blame? Seemingly not - there are plenty of vintage fag ads on YT.

How about Consulate - are they still trading? Well, apparently so - although today, 20 Consulates cost over SEVEN QUID in Britain (a few years ago, you could buy a full-price ALBUM for that - thankgawd I escaped the country a decade ago!)

But further exploration revealed that MOST of the ciggy ads on YT relate to brands of smokes that are still available.

What about Johnny Johnston? Could HE be responsible for all traces of his work being taken down? Unlikely - he died in '98.

So it beats me.

There are four parts to this piece (1) the "a" side of a 1968 promotional disc, with one of Johnny's arrangements of the theme (2) a mid-Sixties radio spot, with the theme (3) the "b" side of the first disc - with an alternative arrangement and (4) a VERY poor quality recording I made 45 YEARS ago - of the ORIGINAL cinema ad - voiced-over by John Carson - whose natural voice was a dead ringer for that of James Mason (which got him a LOT of work!)

But how long will this piece remain? Well - that depends on what happened to all of those OTHER pieces...