I've been keeping this leaflet for years waiting for an appropriate thread!
For such a largely forgotten event they actually held quite a big campaign for it which involved several high street shops. Never the less the whole thing was pretty baffling.
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If the above isn't clear it says that there that the promises were to be printed off and bound once there were all collected and then sent to places where they would be put on public display. Presumably they were sent out to libraries and museums or something. Under that are the options that you actually had to pay for, first a "digital display" for £5 where "Your name and promise might be projected onto a statues, reflected in water or seen transformed in a virtual world" whatever that means. For £25 you could have your promise inscribed at a promise site in each region. God knows why anyone would go for any of the three options really! Has anyone actually ever seen any of these supposed public displays? Their descriptions are very vague and I wonder if in the end they could actually justify building whatever these things were.
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One of the three forms you had to fill in, included just for the TV Forum geekery of having the ITV regions listed out with tick boxes by them! Bizarrely giving separate options for LWT and Carlton (London).
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Examples of some of the god-awful promise ideas you could send in as well as a retro Teletext logo.
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And as you can see numerous brands were on board for whatever reason (Metropol geekery: Barclays is the only one with the same logo!). The day of programming is described there as "A unique day of programming that will bring the campaign to a climax and reflect and define the spirit of the time." Ugh. And the writing on there is my mother's for a Richard and Judy competition!
As for the day itself I remember CITV that morning coming from the same studio that the rest of the day came from featured the very first episode of the awful Digimon and then later that night, god knows how I remember this, they aired what I think was the very first Celebrity Millionaire with Carol Vorderman and Kirsty Young. I think the studio was very blue and had a few call centre staff dotted about.
It doesn't half strike me as being utterly pointless. There doesn't seem to be any particularly compelling reason to phone in although I suppose back then you couldn't really leave your mark online as we can today so perhaps the idea of getting something you thought of written down on paper and having it bound and sent to a library where it would sit untouched for 9 years before being disposed of when that library closed might have been quite exciting. No doubt there were a lot of broken promises that night.
I vaguely remember some telethon style begging film about a minibus carting elderly people round so I suppose the idea was to get people interested in volunteering as well as raising awareness for various good causes. Perhaps the only telethon designed to raise absolutely no money?
]. Some viewers didn't get the gist, however, and phoned in to pledge money instead of promises!
