Lego Masters was the perfect antidote to the moral vacuum, contrived melodrama and icky bedhopping sleaze of Married at First Sight; wholesome entertainment for the whole family that set free everyone’s inner child and brought precious misty memories tumbling back through time.
The show pitted everyone from DJs to engineers, to students, to a grandmother and grandson in mind-bogglingly complex Lego-building contests from a stockpile of 2.5 million pieces for a $100,000 grand prize
Halfway through the first episode, suddenly I was five or six years old again, sitting on the carpet making “mobile buildings” out of Lego with my dad.
The memory was so powerful it packed a gut-punch; I could hear the Clancy Brothers, an American-Irish folk band in vogue at the time, playing on the rosewood Philips Radiogram, punctuated by the clicking of bricks, the crackle of vinyl and the clatter of platters dropping from the stereo’s spindle as my cheeks were suddenly damp with tears.
Why the buildings had to be mobile I have no idea, but it probably made sense at the time. They were towering, unsteady improvised structures that just had to have wheels, to be manoeuvred around the carpet until the inevitable crash and running repairs.
Nostalgia is big business all right. Lego Masters smashed all in its path in the ratings war, going to No 1 and at its peak sucking in close to two million viewers.
“It’s a palate cleanser,” Nine’s program director Hamish Turner told The New Daily. “It’s all about the power of imagination. Everyone’s tapping into the new nostalgia where you have those experiences with your kids that you had growing up, so it’s a really easy show to access.”
Nothing showcased the power of nostalgia in advertising better than one of the seminal scenes of Mad Men, the HBO series that bottled the sozzled magic of 1950s Madison Avenue, with all of its glinting decanters and clinking of glasses and cigarette-fugged three-martini lunches, its sinuous cars and magnificent cantilevered bosoms, its backslapping, bottom-pinching casual sexism.
Don Draper has been charged with leading a pitch for a nifty new Kodak gizmo referred to as the wheel or the doughnut, allowing the multiple showing of slides, setting up a moment that immediately resonates with anyone of my vintage, where family slide nights were the stuff of much groaning and protests and secret joy.
As the Kodak big wigs settle around the Sterling Cooper conference room, the mysterious, suave and impossibly handsome Draper (played by hitherto unknown Jon Hamm in one of the greatest coups in casting) turns on the projector and flicks through grainy, sun-drenched shots of his family.
“In Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound’. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone,” he begins.
“This isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called ‘The Wheel. It’s called ‘The Carousel’. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around and back home again. A place where you know that you’re loved.”
At Sterling Cooper and in all of our homes, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Needless to say, Don wins the account.
At the last Super Bowl — the grand final of old-school advertising and branding — you could cut the nostalgia with a knife, from Coke’s “The Wonder of Us”, a thinly veiled tribute to its classic 1970s “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” spot, to Pepsi’s stars of commercials past, Kia’s time-travelling rocker (Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler) and even Australia tapping into the rebooted Crocodile Dundee.
My favourite is probably the Canadian Club campaign from a decade or so ago that managed to combine malt with schmaltz in a new and cheeky way. Under the rubric “Damn right your dad drank it”, simple print ads of faded photos of lumberjack types informed us “Your mom wasn’t your dad’s first”, “Your dad was not a metrosexual” and “Your dad had a van for a reason”.
Nostalgia will continue to be big business and madeleines will keep selling like hot cakes as long as we long for a remembrance of things past.
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Nostalgia has been big business since — oh, I can’t remember when. Seriously, though, the new nostalgia is so hot now, as evidenced by everything from the most recent crop of Super Bowl ads to the surprise success of Nine Network’s Lego Masters.