Things are getting heated
They should find some way to cool things down.
Blackburn ain't big enough for the both of us: Mr Creamy and Mr Whippy at the centre of new ice-cream war
Behold, the Great British summer. Lawnmowers, jet engines and the faint tinkling of "Yankee Doodle" on the breeze. Drugs? Frozen treats? Either way, the pitter-patter of tiny feet follows. A shadow hangs over the UK's ice-cream van industry. In the east end of Glasgow, Scotland, during the '80s, peddlers had a notorious side …
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Friday 5th July 2019 16:10 GMT JimboSmith
You beat me to it that's an epic film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxGfGZZ2Q7U. From the same stable as the also excellent Local Hero. I used to have the van jingle complete with Hello Folks as my new email alert. Think that's going to become a ringtone shortly.
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Sunday 7th July 2019 08:03 GMT STOP_FORTH
Film and TV crews often film very early in the morning during the summer when in towns and cities. This keeps traffic to a minimum and you don't have to cope with memblics wandering around. You might notice long shadows as a giveaway, I haven't seen this film in a long time, so I don't know if they are obvious.
If you look at the old Monty Python film sketches there is no traffic on those, I would guess they are filmed very early as well. The odd thing, though, is there are no cars parked on every available inch of kerb. It looks quite odd because London doesn't look like that today. (Mind you we were too poor to 'ave cars in the Seventies.)
And cue the Four Yorkshiremen again.
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Friday 5th July 2019 15:15 GMT TRT
So they have to keep 100 yards apart? Mark out the distance using cones.
Anyway, it's good that they removed the sound from the chase video. I don't think I could have taken the mixing of "Greensleeves" and "Popeye The Sailor Man" at 30mph with all the Doppler effects and so on... that would definitely have pushed me over the edge.
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Monday 8th July 2019 20:47 GMT cream wobbly
Re: 30 mph?
Thing is, they don't use English measures en angleterre, they use Imperial. Americans use English units. This is why Americans have pint sized gallons, although interestingly a floz is near enough that baking recipes don't care. Both use the French billion - although they were exported at different points in history so they're off by a millionth of a milliard.
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Friday 5th July 2019 16:14 GMT hardboiledphil
Can't believe nobody has brought up Peter Kay's The Icecream Man Cometh - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0720300/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_29
It's even based in the same county.
Includes the best line ever - "Crunchies, Crunchies, how'm I supposed to make 99's with f**king Crunchies" (might need translation for non-UK readers)
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Friday 5th July 2019 21:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: See you see me?
'I have been told that some ice-cream vans in Glasgow still sell "additional items"...'
Can't comment on Glasgow, but here in the town of the Psycho Swan, while it isn't as bad as it once was, it is still not uncommon, in the dark, cold depths of midwinter, to hear the dulcet chimes announcing the unseasonable presence of one of these purveyors of the finest comestibles somewhere on the scheme (these days, there's only one van brave enough to chance it, either that or it's 'protected', I'll leave that for you to figure out).
In the summer, you'd expect it to show up when the sun is splitting the sky, but no, when it does appear, just as it does so in the winter, it's always after dark.
It'll usually park up in an obscure(ish) spot, well away from where you'd normally expect it to park for maximum 'footfall custom', but, happily, a spot with a good view of the only road in to our bit of the scheme...a couple of shufflers will appear, buy whatever, shuffle off, and the van will once again disappear into the night...
You never see any children go to it.
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Monday 8th July 2019 12:49 GMT hoola
Ahh, Mr Whippy
However you look at it, the ice cream is pretty rubbish but it is the concept, a towering spiral of cold white stuff with a flake in the side (if you can afford it!). Now they do actually taste different and my preference is for Mr Whippy but all of the squirty machines have the advantage that in really hot weather it can be a challenge to eat it before you end up wearing it.
Add in small children and a passing rainstorm to clean up the resulting mess works wonders.
"Hold it up or the ice cream will fall off"
"Eat it before it melts"
"Why did you have to bite the bottom of the cone off" (every bloody time aged 4)
"Get that away from me (or stray passers by)"
"No, you cannot go on the roller coaster with an ice cream"
And so it goes on, those were the days.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
