As you probably know, BBC local radio is currently engaged in rapid strategic contraction in an attempt to save money. Dozens of much-loved programmes are being withdrawn, especially those broadcast in the evenings and at weekends, in favour of syndicated regional content covering a much broader area. Why deliver locally-focused favourites to an ageing audience when that money could instead be used to create digital content hardly any young people will notice?
Now the same argument is coming to the blogosphere - reducing choice at off-peak times to focus effort where it's most needed. From this weekend all bloggers will take Sunday off and instead publish one national syndicated post designed to be engaging, bland and locally irrelevant. Rest assured that the weekday posts you know and love will remain unaffected and that Saturdays are not yet in danger. But on Sundays, thanks to top-down austerity, the nationwide debate will contract to a single point of interest of no material consequence. Make yourself a cuppa, make it a date and join us every Sunday for The Big Conversation.
The Big Conversation
Why aren't cheese and onion crisp packets green?
It's nuts isn't it?
Everybody knows that crisp packets are meant to be a particular colour according to what flavour they are. It's the way of things, it's how it's always been. And yet somehow a dark force has succeeded in infiltrating the packaging of Britain's favourite bagged snack and these long-established colour rules have been ripped up. Why are cheese and onion crisp packets no longer green?
They always used to be green. If you saw a green packet you knew the crisps inside would have that cheesy oniony tang you totally loved. Maybe green with a splash of yellow, because yellow obviously means cheese in the wider scheme of things. But green all the same, never red, never blue, always definitely green.
And yet if you head to your local supermarket today you won't find cheese and onion in the green packets, oh no, you'll find salt and vinegar. And you won't find salt and vinegar in the blue packets, heaven forfend, because that's what cheese and onion is now. This is definitely how it always is in shops these days, my individual experience confirms this. Because at some point in living history, unbidden and unwanted, the devil swapped the colours round.
If you ask the British public what colour packet cheese and onion crisps should be in, they know what the answer is. They also know what colour packet ready salted crisps should be in, which is red, which is what 72% of the public said the last time this important topic was surveyed. Red has been the colour of salty potato since time immemorial, or at least since the salt came in a blue bag and the packet was plainly white.
As for salt and vinegar far more of the populace think proper blue rather than upstart green, almost 50% of them, with second place green trailing far behind with 32%. You can't argue with a margin like that and you can't argue with YouGov, even if the survey's from 2016. Admittedly vinegar is usually brown but that would be a ghastly shade marketingwise, so it's just as well that when combined with salt the inevitable outcome is the colour blue.
YouGov's landmark survey also delivered a verdict on cheese and onion and confirmed the natural pre-eminence of the traditional green. The percentage was a little lower this time at just 44%, but blue trailed even further behind with 30% so that's blue trashed. In this case another colour cut through with 10% of the public vote and that was yellow, but yellow was never the important tint on the packet, the crucial hue was good old green.
It's all Gary Lineker's fault. His favourite Walkers crisps currently dominate the crisp market and they're the company who stupidly decided cheese and onion should be blue. Likewise they chose to make salt and vinegar green, essentially because there was nobody around in the East Midlands to stop them, and it's their regionally-blinkered quest for world domination which has foisted this unnatural colour shift on a gullible nation.
Let's talk history. Cheese and onion crisps were launched upon an unsuspecting British public by Golden Wonder in 1962. They were an immediate hit, a monster munch, and were obviously produced in green packets. When market leader Smith's fought back they did so with a new flavour of their own, namely salt and vinegar, which came in bright blue packets and proved almost as big a hit. So were the original colours originally set.
All those of us of a certain age remember Smith's and Golden Wonder crisps from our childhoods, likely as the very foundation of our snack-based memories. A few pence at the corner shop brought us crunchy heaven in a plastic wrapper, with some of us plumping for salt and vinegar - Team Blue - and some for cheese and onion - Team Green. Amid the relentless pressure cooker of youthful impressionism, these colours were indelibly imprinted.
But if Mrs Thatcher taught us anything it's that the free market always wins out, and so it proved. The much-loved Smith's brand was sold first to General Mills, then to Associated Biscuits and ultimately to Nabisco, bringing both Smith's and Walkers under the same umbrella. But it was only after a further sale to PepsiCo in 1989 that hard-nosed managers cruelly decided to phase out the Smith's name in favour of Walkers for all their mainstream crisp products.
Suddenly the upstart Midlands brand had the upper hand and all was lost, almost overnight, as one colour usurped another. It meant that salt and vinegar was now jarringly green and cheese and onion ridiculously blue, and all because some crisp factory in Leicester said so. Admittedly if your childhood took place in the Midlands you'll always have thought these were the colours, but these are the views of a backward minority and you'd be wrong.
It's also the case that young people won't remember Smith's making proper crisps, only selling fripperies like Frazzles, Chipsticks or Scampi Fries, so will always wrongly associate cheese and onion with blue. But young people don't read blogs, or indeed listen to local radio, so we can ignore their opinions and state categorically that ready salted should be red, salt and vinegar ought to be blue and cheese and onion must be green.
It is a national scandal that the colours of crisp packets have evolved so incorrectly over the years. But change is inevitable and nostalgia isn't what it used to be and why can't everything be the way it used to be when everything was better? Do share with us your memories and opinions of the colours crisp packets no longer are but should be, and join us again next Sunday for another Big Discussion on a crunch topic of national importance.
