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Land of milk (chocolate) and honey (comb). Cadbury’s Crunchie (1929) is foiled again.

CRUNCHIE

Honeycomb, cinder toffee, call it what you will, it’s as old as the hills. It’s easy to make: get some sugar and corn syrup extremely bloody hot, bung in some baking powder, stand well back, and there you have it. Or rather, there you have irregular lumps of it. It’s how you tame the fragile honeycomb into a sleek polyhedron that’s the tricky part.

Aussie manufacturer Hoadley’s started squaring the brittle in 1918 with the Violet Crumble. The down-under spies at Fry’s reported this back to their Keynsham HQ, and a race was on to replicate it. Early attempts were unreliable, Fry’s having to employ women specially to solder snapped bars back together with bunsen burners, but eventually a nifty system of cutting the slabs with a high-pressure jet of oil solved the problem. Add a distinctive heavy foil wrapper to stop the honeycomb going soft, and it’s Crunchie ahoy.

It was slow to take off, despite some early product placement in horsey kids’ book National Velvet, though after the Second World War it was popular enough for Rowntree to float a short-lived rival, Cracknel Block. The ’60s saw it really embed into the national psyche – by ’68 Observer hacks were writing ‘that’s the way the Crunchie crumbles’ when casting about for a with-it-sounding cliché.

By the ’80s it was everywhere, repackaged in shiny gold and sponsoring Five Star and Billy Ocean. Though what really got it noticed was a strange daily ad campaign in 1987, wherein an automatic wall-calendar sombrely recorded the changing days of the week, as a rather glum voice mused, ‘Not long till Friday.’ Come the weekend, this low-key teaser was revealed as the beginning of the Thank Crunchie It’s Friday campaign, which gave rise to two decades of frenetic fun in the name of burnt sugar. Modern advertising, you see, all very clever. And slightly more appropriate than associating children’s chocolate with the man who sang ‘Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car’.

Long, cool and bubbly. TV’s‘ ‘champagne bar’ campaign, circa 1978.