Ford Cortina Buyers Portrayed by Comedian Dick Emery

Something we wouldn't see today, Ford's ad agency created a commercial poking fun at itself and its buyers with the help of a famous comedian in the UK, Dick Emery. Emery's humor might be seen as offensive now but it is interesting to see a gay buyer, cross dresser and blue collar bruiser being portrayed in the same spot. While performing for the RAF during WWII he created created Vera Thin (the Forces' Sweetheart), loosely based on Vera Lynn, later saying, "I was better in drag than combat gear." Her created a number of the characters we see in this film for his long running BBC show that involved Emery dressing up as various characters, "a flamboyant cast of comic grotesques". These included the buck-toothed Church of England vicar, sex-starved, menopausal, man-eating spinster Hetty, and Clarence, an outrageously camp man who coined the catchphrase "Hello Honky Tonks". Other roles were gormless denim-clad bovver boy Gaylord (in a double act with his long suffering father, played by several actors including Roy Kinnear) where, each week, he would mess up and utter the catchphrase "Dad, I fink I got it wrong again", the crusty pensioner James Maynard Kitchener Lampwick, College (a genteel tramp whose real name was Lancelot Orpington Penrose) and Mandy, a busty peroxide blonde whose catchphrase, "Ooh, you are awful ... but I like you! It's unlikely we'll see an American auto company turn to humor like this in the future. For availability and licensing inquiries, please contact: https://www.globalimageworks.com/contact Ref: S607