Originally Posted by
rosensfole
Heh. I remember that I couldn't put the ticket booklet down upon receipt of my first one. I absorbed every last detail from it. It might still be printed on my retina to this day ��
One better. I still have my first one, somewhere up in the attic. Hand written but the same format. Cambrian Airways CS513 Liverpool to Isle of Man in 1966. Three pounds 18 shillings. It was not produced by the airline but hand written by the local travel agent (who in subsequent years I used to pester for their out-of-date ABC World timetables).
I'm surprised that nobody has come up with a little PC App that you can enter your flight details into and it produces the pages of the old type tickets, cover with the airline logo and everything, for you to print, cut up, and staple into an old-style ticket if you wish.
I used to look forward to the Pearl & Dean ad break. Oh, and whatever happened to the Lyons Maid ice-cream intermission?
One of the guys in the office has it as the ringtone on his phone, so I still hear it every day. It's called "Asteroid". I think the only time you will have heard it in the USA was when Monty Python took the mickey out of it, more than once.
When I first went to the cinema in the US (and a mainstream one in LA of all places) I was surprised at how simplistic it was. Just lights down, start, finish.
No preceding short film (such as "Look at Life" in Rank cinemas, who would do subjects like Heathrow airport, a couple linked to back in this thread). No bored 16 year old "usherette" waving her torch vaguely in the direction of empty seats (and no people coming in halfway through). Although we now have trailers for forthcoming films (which have nowadays become ludicrously long, over half an hour). No ice cream vendor. And if you went to the big cinema in the city, the 40-something lady with the ludicrously large blonde hairdo (probably a wig) playing the organ at the front, who at the end got picked out by a spotlight, did a bow, and got some desultory applause, plus maybe a few jeers. And if the cinema was both really REALLY posh, and old-fashioned, the National Anthem played at the end.
And no ads, topped and tailed by that music from Pearl & Dean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_%26_Dean , effectively a monopoly advertising contractor based in the heart of the film commercial world in Soho, London. The classic was a longstanding one. Initial film of an elegant restaurant with half a dozen professional waiters. The professional voiceover "For the finest of food, the best of service, and the greatest atmosphere, visit ...". Then an amateurish stills card would come up "The Flying Banana Restaurant. 276 High Street. Next to the bus station.Two minutes from this cinema". And the projectionist would be announcing the same words, in decidedly unprofessional accent.
Keith Waterhouse in his autobiography "City Lights" describes it all brilliantly and humorously.