There’s a new Hovis advert on TV at the moment thats the last 120 years of British history via the medium of a small boy and a loaf of bread.

It’s Hovis’ new bread advert, and it’s quite a nice little 120 seconds of soft bread soft sell. The reason I’m mentioning it on a website called Liverpool Culture Blog is that the ad .

Costing £15m and running fro 122 seconds – one for every year of Hovis’ bready existence – the ad was filmed at a variety of locations around the city

The young lad with the bread encounters suffragettes, runs past a poster of the Titanic, salutes WW1 soldiers, watches a Spitfire fly over bombed-out housing, the Coronation, 1966 World Cup win and finds himself in the middle of a confrontation between miners and police.

There are a couple of other more generic periods thrown in for good measure, most of which place the lad in a kind of fantasy generic Northern town.

But eagle-eyed ad watchers will spot a few roads in Garston, at Wallasey Town Hall and the Castle Street area, in addition to more obvious locations such as the streets around Catherine Street, the Mersey waterfront and Princes Dock.

One thing that several years writing about Liverpool has taught me is that Liverpool is – supposedly – the second-most filmed city in the UK.

There’s an article on Black+White about this, and I don’t know whether it’s true anymore but the city’s versatility has always made it popular with directors. It’s just a pity that the talent always locally-sourced and locally-based, as Alex Cox noted, again in B+W.

Anyway, there’s a good set of photos on Flickr of Falkner Street transformed that is worth a look.

Otherwise there’s the full Hovis advert below, and one for Foxy Bingo below that, just ‘cos it was filmed around the corner from me on Lark Lane. It’s vulgar, trashy and possibly evil but every time it’s on telly I can say “Look, I live there!”.

2008 Hovis Advert

Foxy Bingo Advert