Classic TV ads that kept it human Part 2 – Shake n Vac

Another blast from my televisual past is the holy grail of advert addiction ‘Shake n Vac’. My Nans house used to smell of three things when I was a kid, Nina Ricci L’air du Temps perfume, home-made toffee and the citrusy top notes of Glade Shake n Vac.

My Grandmother was a Shake n Vac aficionado and used it on a daily basis to combat any perceived odours from her immaculately groomed blue blond Skye terrier Pepe who I never once saw roll in anything unsightly or jump in a river.

You see Nanny Eileen is the type of woman who paints the kitchen ceiling in a silk shirt whilst making Sunday dinner for six. Now in her early seventies and still extremely sprightly twenty years ago she was a very young active Nan who would take us crabbing on holiday in Cornwall and bowling on the beach.

Anyway back to Shake n Vac and why I love it as a brand. My Nan to this very day (so this has lasted 26 years) still likes to break out the Shake n Vac and do a little dance around the house whilst vacuuming – now that’s an advert that’s tapped into a very strange side of the human psyche!

Chatting to my Nan a few years ago we started laughing about how she would always sing the Shake n Vac song and now I was living with my first dog I had bought some to freshen up the carpets and had actually marvelled at how fresh and clean everything felt afterwards.

My Nan commented that using Shake n Vac actually put the fun factor into doing some cleaning and how the nice smell afterwards was almost like a little reward for making the effort.

It made perfect sense to me that the enjoyment element of using Shake n Vac was linked into a catchy upbeat song and dance that could help eliminate the misery of the one thing as humans we all hate doing – cleaning the house. You are also following up something that needs hoovering so it’s instantly visual.

I have to listen to music when I am cleaning which is as little as possible I hasten to add. I come from the school of Quentin Crisp housework rules ‘After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.’ But embarrassment normally wears me down after a few weeks so I spend half a Sunday hoovering, dusting, sorting out washing, you know the general dirge everyone detests.

So to stop the tasks becoming soul shatteringly awful I stick my ipod in my jeans, pop the headphones in and dance around to something suitably eighties to while away the hours.

Now for the past couple of years I have lived somewhere with wooden floors and tiling throughout so the need for Shake n Vac has been eliminated. However just this week in an effort to warm up the living room and bedrooms my housemate has taken some very nice full room rugs out of storage which means getting the hoover out will take on a whole new meaning.

I haven’t told her yet about my Shake n Vac addiction but I’m hoping once I play her the original video below with Jenny Logan then we will be dancing along merrily in careless scented abandon. Besides which she must have seen it before as it’s consistently voted one of the most loved adverts in UK television history so perhaps we can forgive the 2010 Jedward reincarnation of it just about.