Carol and Bev on sweets from the 80s

(Carol and Bev are characters from two books by Bev Spicer:  'One Summer in France' and 'Bunny on a Bike' both available as ebooks on Amazon and soon to be in paperback).

Carol:  Bev Spicer, polyblonde and crazy retro tart, what is our specialist subject on this fine but rather dreary Wednesday afternoon?

Bev:     Today we shall be talking about sweeties from the 80s my little Devonshire divvy.

Carol: Fart a dart!  That's not a bag of samples is it?

Bev:     Hands off!  This is realia.

Carol:  What?

Bev:     It's a teaching term, for when items can be brought into the classroom to demonstrate a point, or make a lesson more interesting, more real.

Carol:  I'd like to see you take a bag of sweeties and chocolate into any classroom these days and come out unharmed.  What've you got?

(Bev tips out the sweets onto a table.)

Carol:  No way!  Bar Six!  It still looks the same - orange paper over silver, Cadbury gold.  Let me just run my fingernail along one of its runnels...

Bev:     Couldn't stand it!  My auntie always brought it for a treat and I had to get rid of it without her noticing.  Tried to flush it down the toilet once, but Mr. Cadbury must have thought of that - bloody wafer wouldn't sink, had to fish it out again and shove it into the rubber plant.  Yuk!

Carol: Most wafer biscuits are just made of polystyrene, I reckon. So, one for me.  What else is there?

Bev:     This one was my favourite for a while.  Caramac.  I liked to press a square of it up onto the roof of my mouth and let it melt whilst pretending it wasn't there at all.  Made talking kind of interesting.  In the end, it went into a kind of fecal sludge and I pressed it through my teeth.  Drove my sister up the wall.

Carol:  Happy days!  I did the same with Dairylea - everyone did.  Remember blue smarties?

Bev:     Shame!

Carol:  Yeah. Ridiculous overreaction.  Embarrassing.  Still get them in Russia, I'm told.

Bev:     You'd think a bit of blue dye would be all right.  I mean how many would you have to eat?

Carol:  Blue gobs are a thing of the past.  Sadness and woe.

Bev:     What about these?

Carol:  Milk Tray!  My mum loved those.  Specially the coffee ones.  She used to watch that bloke dressed in a black woolly, diving off cliffs, swimming through shark infested waters to deliver them, miraculously bone dry, to some fairly old bird with a frilly-cuffed blouse.

Bev:     Did you see that the shark had no teeth?

Carol: Swiz!  Gummed to death!  That reminds me of the Flake ad.

Bev:    Which one?

Carol:  The only one! Girl in a field of sunflowers, gypsy dress, caravan.  Looks like she's giving it a bloody good blow-

Bev:     Okay!  No need to spell it out.  Anyway, there was a worse one than that later - in the bath, overflowing, naturally.  Much more indiscreet.  Rick loved it.

Carol:  Ah, but you're forgetting about the millisecond flash.  My boyfriend at the time told me about it.  Got banned pretty quickly.  Tried Googling it not long ago because I was suspicious of the way the breakfast news presenters were looking at each other.  Far too steamy.  Bound to be something fishy going on, I thought.  Anyway, I did a search and guess what?  Nothing.  Nada. Not a mention.

Bev:     Never heard of it.

Carol:  Widely used in the 80s, my lovely trollop,  lots of filthy images too quick to see, but registered by the hungry old crocodile brain and used to work the audience into a frenzy.  Christ knows how many Flakes I got through in those days!

Bev:     Enough!

Carol:  Obviously affected you badly.  Not a Flake type of girl?

Bev:     Finished?

Carol: Give me that dipped one and I'll show you how it's done.

Bev:     One end each?

Carol: You're on, you dirty bugger.  Bath?

Bev:     Rather have these?

Carol: Poppets!  Mint flavoured!  Now you're talking!