Creature Comforts

Good, but not a patch on the original.

The tortoise became a national icon and featured in the advert that everyone thought was for British Gas but wasn't. (General Electric?)

The polar bear in the original was excellent too; far, far funnier than any of the ones I saw tonight, although in fairness I did only catch the second one.

A real strong point of the first series was the heavy reliance on regional accents - scouse, brum, estuary, etc - and there seemed to be little of that this time round.

Couldn't work out whether the two monkeys were a couple of homos, though.

well i seem to remember the adverts were shown post-regional electric company privatisation with slogans such as HEAT ELECTRIC, COOK ELECTRIC - so i always imagined they were for some kind of electricity industry marketing board

There was a shot of the tortoise in the ITV promo, so he may appear later on in the series, perhaps in the Christmas special.

8.4 million watched last nights CC.

I bet ITV are pleased with that!

I thought Creature Comforts was very good. I like these short comedy programmes ITV put on (like 2DTV).

What I think they could do, to keep viewers during adverts, is having ten seconds of a creature comfort before the adverts, then another ten at the end.

Or have a short CC in the middle of an ad break.

I liked the cow

I thought it was hilarious, I only saw it this week, or is this the first airing of CC ?

Hmm...I always thought it was for Seeboard, as when I was young I was given some badges by the people at my local Seeboard shop and they had all of the creature comforts creatures on (the penguin, the tortoise etc).

And on a (slightly) off topic point, what happened to all of the British Gas and Seeboard shops? They all seem to have closed down?!

at the time the font used for the *HEAT ELECTRIC* (etc.) had a remarkable similarity to the MEB logo, so i always imagined there was a connection - but i'd stick my money on it being an industry wide campaign. "for all your creature comforts, cook electric" and so on.

MEB shops (and several other eleccy board's shops ... i think SWEB were involved ) were merged to become powerhouse ... which survived as an independent entity until it went bump this summer, donno if seeboard were involved in that.

british gas shops seemed to have just vanished post-centrica ownership and i think BT shops are disappearing too.

British Gas announced a couple of years ago that they were shutting down all of their shops, as I think about it, I think it was in 2000 or so. I have a Shower Electric ad somewhere, without the animals, which promotes Manweb (Merseyside And North Wales Elecricity Board) so I assume this was general. As for BT shops, I think they are all now O2 shops, as they started selling mobiles when BT Cellnet was still around then evolved into O2 and took the shops with them.

The Creature Comforts ads were regionally branded for each Electricity Board (remember them?!) though the 'catchphrase' and voiceover was the same for every variation:
"For All Your Creature Comforts, Cook/Shower/Heat etc. Electric"

Having grown up in Staffordshire, I remember the MEB branded ones though I have since seen other variations. There's an OU programme about English Language and Advertising that features the making of these ads, which is quite interesting. Not sure it's shown anymore on BBC TWO though.

The voiceover was of course done by Johnny Morris of Animal Magic fame.

Slightly OT; but you can get all of the "Whatever" Electric adverts on DVD, it's called Aardman Classics, plus it also has the Oscar Award Winning episode of Creature Comforts from Channel 4 back in 1989, but if you watch them all you forget how good they are.