WELL BRED AD BACK

The makers of Hovis bread are bringing back their iconic 1973 TV ad, 46 years after it was first screened and after it won the recent Kantar poll for the most iconic ever.

The ad, directed by Sir Ridley Scott six years before his rather different Alien shocker, has the heart-warming image of a young boy pushing his bicycle up a seriously steep hill, its front basket loaded with Hovis loaves, to the strains of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Also in the top five were Cadbury’s “gorilla” drumming along to “In the Air Tonight” from 2007, Yellow Pages J.R.Hartley looking for his own book from 1983, John Lewis Always a Woman from 2010 and predating the Hovis ad by two years the Coca-Cola choir from 1971, teaching the world to sing.

The hill on which the Hovis ad was shot is Gold Hill, Shaftesbury, Dorset, which has a gradient of around 1 in 6 – it rises 1 foot for every 6 travelled. This it shares with Steep Hill in Lincoln, and Blake Street and Old Wyche Road in Sheffield. Britains steepest street however is Vale Street in Bristol at just a tad gentler than 1 in 5.

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