Advertising: Mugged by a deadly duo
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Your support makes all the difference.Do Trinny and Susannah cohabit? You don't know what to think, do you, with all that studied stuff about their victims' tits and arses and all those faintly dominatrix spreads? I raise this question purely because the new Nescafé commercial will have put it on the nation's lips.
Do Trinny and Susannah cohabit? You don't know what to think, do you, with all that studied stuff about their victims' tits and arses and all those faintly dominatrix spreads? I raise this question purely because the new Nescafé commercial will have put it on the nation's lips.
There's Susannah - the softer, plumper, more rumpled partner - in her pink pyjamas, hair mussed, scratching her bottom as she searches her huge back-lit wardrobe for something nice for a supermarket sweep. And she fixes on something pinkly patterned and ineffably wrong - something definitely not to wear.
And there's Trinny across the room, completely groomed, dressed in the sort of grey suit the elegant long-widowed headmistress of a demanding Swiss finishing school might wear. "Susannah, step away from that outfit and put the kettle on," she commands.
And it brings Susannah to her senses. A big mug full of original Nescafé - soluble solids of pure coffee made by a kind of evaporation and condensation process - and she's choosing the right things, zipping up her long boots and reconfiguring her Chelsea streaks. She's set up for that moment when they're striding off in slo-mo, down a high street, around a shopping mall, somewhere the common people go, to size them up. They're Burke and Hare, they're the undead, it's Interview with the Vampire, ladies' night. Trinny is wearing a curious sort of '30s knitted silver skullcap and a long scarf. Susannah's got a big red bag.
They alight on a startled young median mainstream mum, shorter than them, of course (in the '30s, physiologists used to attribute an average 3 to 5 inches variation in height in men to extreme class differences). They give the bemused creature a big jar of Nescafé. It's the mark of the beast: they're obviously coming back to claim her (with a special jar, you get the chance to win a £10,000 shopping spree with Trinny and Susannah, you lucky people). The idea is that Nescafé pulls you together; it's the quintessential daytime TV product. And the strapline - clunk, click, fmcg - is "start the day with great taste".
Mitfordian scholars will argue for years who is the grander. Insiders say the Constantines are positively ancient. But Trinny's marvellously driven and bossy and it's all a splendid bit of career development. Otherwise these respectable married ladies could be managing little shops somewhere off Sloane Avenue.
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