Nigel Slater: Life Is Sweets

All my life, I've been drawn to sweets.

When I wrote my memoir, Toast, the moment I popped a particular toffee in my mouth

was the very moment my childhood came flooding back to me.

The unfurling of the wrapper,

the smooth exterior on my fingertips,

and of course the popping in the mouth.

As I chewed, the slow release of flavour unlocked deeply hidden emotions.

Ever since writing that book, I've always wondered why it is that something as simple as a sweet

can help us time travel so evocatively.

Why is it that something so incidental

in our day-to-day lives can prove to be so utterly fundamental

in revealing who we really are?

This journey isn't simply to the heart of my own sweet childhood,

it's also a bigger journey through the history of confectionary in Britain.

From unadulterated honey, to the boiled sweets of old-fashioned sweet shops.

It's literally like my childhood flashing past me in sugar form.

From their medicinal and religious origins,

through to the advertising jingles that defined eras.

And from the psychology of sweets through to the dangers of overindulgence.

There's no better way to start this story

than in the back of my dad's old car.

I was brought up in the early '60s in this part of the world,

in Wolverhampton, in the Midlands.

It was a big happy family - there was Mum and Dad.

And I was one of three brothers. I'm the youngest.

Dad had a factory. It made metal parts for cars,

it was a big, scary place to little boy like me.

And Mum stayed at home.

This car was a very special place for me.

It is quite a big, smart car to have. Whenever we went out in it,

we always used to have little tins of sweeties.

They would be travel sweets, which you used to get from the chemist.

They came in a metal tin with pictures of fruit on the top.

And they were in little paper bags.

There would be liquorice torpedoes, maybe barley sugars.

And, best of all, Dad's American hard gums.

And they would be hidden. Used to keep them in the glove box, but he thought I didn't know.

And we'd go out for picnics and outings with bottles of dandelion and burdock

or ginger beer, and a big tartan rug.

And there'd be a big tin of toffees. That was the bit I waited for.

Yes, I ate the sandwiches and the fruitcake,

but what I REALLY wanted was that tin of sweets.

All the sweets are like a little road map through my life.

I'm starting my journey at what is reputedly the oldest sweet shop in Britain,

where I'm meeting Tim Richardson, a man who really knows his sweets,

having written perhaps THE definitive history of confectionery.

The simple act of walking through the door is like stepping back in time.

-Good morning.

-Good morning.

-Good morning.

-BELL DINGS

-Welcome to a proper sweet shop.

Pontefract cakes.

'Being surrounded by all the colours and flavours from long ago...'

-Aw.

-Oh!

'..we're both immediately transported back to the days of short trousers and satchels.'

TIM LAUGHS

-Chocolate limes!

-They're anarchists of gastronomy, sweets, I think.

It's like a pure liquorice sort of line going into your taste buds.

Parma Violets smell of my Auntie Fanny's handbag.

This is Auntie Fanny.

'Most sweets are sweet, but some are decidedly not.

'Like these super-sour balls coated in citric acid.'

They are beautiful.

One, two, three, in.

SHOPKEEPER LAUGHS Wow!

-Oh, my God!

-Yeah.

-Goodness me!

-God, what do you get through that? Sugar? Wow!

-Oh!

It's kind of making my shoulders go weird.

We love this!

-I may never recover.

-No, you may not!

-SHE LAUGHS

Coming into the sweet shop was a really important part of my childhood.

Coming here today was like reliving that. Was it the same for you?

Yeah, I think it is for most kids in Britain.

The sweet shop is like our cathedral. That's what Roald Dahl said.

'Susan knows CWS means the sweets that she likes best.

'She gets them at the Co-op store, where pocket money buys you more.'

Sweets are the first things we buy, the first things we give, the first things we trade.

We learn about money,

we learn something about relationships through sweets.

They are very important in the lives of children, sweets,

which is why I always say I think it's a tragedy

that children aren't given more sweets.

They're a big part of a child's world, and we never forget that. We're all grown-up children, really.

Nuttall's Mintoes!

-Sherbet dib-dabs

-Sherbet dib-dabs, yeah. Yeah!

'It's slowly dawning on me that many of the sweets on show here

'are more like museum exhibits than tasty treats.

'Indeed, many sweet shops like this used to be pharmacies.

'A spoonful of sugar really does help the medicine go down.'

These are the original white aniseed balls,

just sugar around a kernel which is of course the aniseed.

-The aniseed.

-And this is a medieval comfit.

But the point about this in the Medieval period was that they were medicines.

These things were imported, often from the Middle East, and sugar is a preservative.

So the sugar was ostensibly being used to preserve the valuable little root inside.

Aniseed is a good diuretic, it's good for stomach disorders and so on.

But these are very interesting. UFOs, or flying saucers.

What these are, historically, are a Victorian way of administering drugs.

They used to use some of the same machinery for making sweets

as they use for making pills, so, press tablets,

things like Refreshers, Parma Violets, that sort of thing,

Love Hearts, these were made using the tablet makers.

And this was a very classic way of administering drugs,

just to put them inside rice paper. This of course isn't a drug to make you better, this is sherbet.

Tell me, what are the medieval origins of my favourite sweet, which is liquorice?

It was one of those crossover sweets between pharmacy and confectionery.

Roman legionaries used to be given liquorice sticks to suck on as they marched,

as a way of staving off dehydration.

To be honest, I was never really fond of liquorice allsorts.

Yeah, well, it is a funny name, isn't it, "liquorice allsorts"?

Well, the story goes that a particular salesman was

carrying his wares, and he got them all muddled up.

And he just offered them anyway, and this was the birth of allsorts.

-Really?

-Yeah, that's the story.

The result, I think, is of one of the great triumphs of sweets design.

-Do you like them all?

-I do like them all. Yeah, I do, I'm afraid!

-That's my problem with sweets. I like them all.

-Now, I love jelly babies.

Tell me about them, where did they come from?

Jellies come from a medieval sweets background, and again, the pharmacy.

I mean, the awful truth about the jelly baby,

is that they weren't called jelly babies originally.

In this wonderful shop here, they've got them with their original name.

-Jelly babies, originally called...

-Oh, don't!

..unclaimed babies.

-That's so sad.

-It is sad.

It's a very Victorian thing. Unbelievably, almost, they were marketed as that,

and these were obviously the babies which were given up to orphanages.

The idea of little orphan jellies,

there's something actually quite sad about that.

I was intrigued when you said you ate them in a particular way. How do you...? Do you start...?

-I go for the head.

-You go for the head?

-Straightaway, off.

-Yeah, I know what you mean.

There aren't many areas in life where you can legitimately bite the head off a baby.

'The jars and shelves of multicoloured confectionery

'generate a myriad of memories, some good and some less so.'

You see, I never knew them as jazzies.

It's a regional variation of the name.

These are the first sweets I bought with my own money,

in a little pink and white striped big.

Floral gums! Goodness, Mum used to buy me those.

Sweet tobacco right in front of us. Sweet tobacco was Saturday mornings.

My father would come back from the shops with sweet tobacco.

It's like all my pocket money's... I'm just watching them all.

It's literally like my childhood flashing past me in sugar form.

And things I truly had forgotten.

It's very interesting.

A lot of these sweets, particularly things like the buttered Brazils

and Clarnico's Mint Creams, these were all my dad's things.

I'm kind of happy and a little bit sad all at once.

I mean, the sweets are like memorials of our innocence.

The remind us of what it was like when we were children. They will bring you back.

The taste of the sweet will transport you back to a very particular moment in your life

in a way that nothing else does.

I'm avoiding the marshmallows. I know you've got marshmallows over there, which I'm avoiding,

cos they're Mum, definitely. They're not me and they're not my dad.

-HE SIGHS

-It is an extraordinary experience being here. It really is.

I've been really looking forward to today.

Finding a proper sweet shop with all the jars and little coloured jewels,

sweets I had forgotten about.

Memories of a life...from long ago.

And this is the strange thing about sweets.

It's not just that little sugar bomb that's in your mouth,

it's everything associated with it and attached to it.

It's all that baggage that goes with it.

It's been a wonderful experience, but extraordinary and strangely more emotional

than I had ever expected it to be. And they're only sweets.

It's pretty clear that sweets have a compelling power to resurrect

old emotions and memories in me, but is this the case for everyone?

I have decided to meet up with my alter ego in the indulgence stakes, Nigella Lawson,

to see if sweets have a similar effect on her.

Almost more than any other thing that I eat,

it's a sweet that will bring back absolutely picture-perfect memories.

I think if you're English,

boiled sweets are what the madeleine was for Proust, really.

I know it sounds really pretentious, but actually,

your whole childhood comes flooding back with every sweet swallowed.

But actually, my mother had quite a childish delight in sweets too,

and she was not very grown-up as a person, so she'd often go and say,

"Let's eat them in the street," which, for her, she was brought up... That was the height of ill breeding.

The thing about sweets is it's that particular thing of choosing

how you would make your pennies stretch, and should you get two of

the rhubarb and custard or two of the monkey nuts and so on.

And I think children take that very seriously, which is right, so,

on the one hand it's indulgent and larky,

but the reality is it feels very serious to you as a child.

I can still remember my older brother's favourite sweets, because

it was very, very important because he was three years older, therefore,

his choices had something grander and more considered about them.

Chocolate limes, he was. But I like the paper bag and everything.

When I get sweets now still, I do love them being in a paper bag.

-It feels right.

-But also, I like a sweetie jar too.

And, in fact, I have one always at home.

And it's quite interesting, because I can always tell the children

who are not allowed to eat sweets, because they steal.

When they think I'm not looking, they just cram their hands in.

'They're already learning to eat sweets like little gentlemen.'

I mean, did you ever steal sweets?

Of course!

I hate to say this, but everyone has done a bit of pick and mix work.

A bit of nick and mix.

But mostly, it wasn't me, cos I was a cowardy custard.

These are sweets that will trigger a bit of memory with you and a few with me. Which are your favourites?

Rhubarb and custard, I don't know how you can ask!

But I do like a soor ploom.

Caramac, so delicious, my sister's favourite.

-Such an exciting colour.

-It's the smell.

Mm, it's the crack cocaine of the sweet world, I think.

-It certainly was.

-I'm going to have another bit. Mm! Mm, monkey nuts.

-Mm.

-These are very good ones.

-Mm!

-They crunch.

I have shattered it already. I put it straight in my mouth, I've got...

That is serious sweetie impatience!

It's increasingly apparent that sweets can remind us of happy AND sad times.

The humble marshmallow will always bring to mind my mother, who died when I was nine.

For me, the marshmallow was the sweet that has, I suppose, so much baggage with it.

And I've steered clear of them for quite a long time.

Do you have a particularly soothing sweet?

No, but funnily enough, since we're doing sweets and death, why not?

My mother, her idea of the greatest treat in the world was a Mars bar,

and she would always keep one in the glove compartment.

And she died young.

And I remember a friend of mine thinking she was doing me a favour

by throwing away my mother's Mars bar.

-Oh-h!

-And it was very traumatic.

-Of course it was.

-Just as well, actually, otherwise I would still have it in its wrapper.

-Well, yes, you would.

But... But I still... If I eat one now, I do think of her,

and also her childish sense that it was just the naughtiest thing you could be eating.

Sweet things have the power to dig really deep emotionally.

But I want to go right back to the very beginning.

To the earliest examples of nature's own confectionary,

and most importantly,

our earliest appetite for all things sweet and sugary.

-NEWSREEL:

-'Oldest sweetener of them all is honey.

'Bees discovered how to make sugar long before man did,

'and up to 500 years ago, honey was the only known sweetener.

'Today, it comes a long way down the list,

'though the bees work as hard as ever.'

It seems our desire to harness sweet things

has been a key part of our evolution.

Dip your finger in there. Just dip your finger in.

It's warm.

-Lovely, isn't it?

-Oh!

-Oh, goodness me!

-Lovely, isn't it?

Absolutely wonderful stuff.

Warm and sticky.

But where does this primal craving for sweetness come from?

I've met up with nutritionist Dr Christie Ferguson,

to find out if the need for sweet things is a vital part of our DNA.

So where would you say our taste for all things sweet comes from?

I mean, is it something that comes from birth?

As babies,

it's bred into us to actually seek out sweet foods.

So first of all it would be the mother's milk.

That's almost to create a close connection with our mum

as we go through our early years.

As we grow up, we associate sweet foods with birthday cakes.

Any kind of celebrations is usually tied around sweet foods,

and so as we grow up, we form very, very strong associations,

and when we're feeling upset, or feeling depressed,

it kind of takes us back, in a sense, to those good times.

'So the fact that things dissolve is very important to you.'

So what actually happens when we eat something sweet?

We get a spike in our blood sugar levels,

so we get this kind of instant high, in a sense,

but in our brain chemistry

what's interesting is that we produce what's called serotonin.

That's a feel-good chemical.

That's why sugar and sweets can become quite addictive,

because you get this instant feeling that drops away,

and then you need the next one to give you that boost again.

Yes, been there.

I've had more than my fair share of honey on toast.

But it wasn't until refined sugar became more readily available

in the 18th century that artisan sweet confectioners

started to produce the boiled sweets we know and love today.

I've come to York, to meet sweet historian Laura Mason,

to understand better the origins of the boiled sweet,

from medieval times, through to the Victorian era.

-Are sweets well documented?

-Yes and no.

There are lots and lots of things I'd love to know about sweets

that aren't documented. Maybe they were trade secrets,

maybe nobody thought to write them down.

Because they would be secrets,

-because you're protecting your livelihood.

-Absolutely.

But also there are books, books like some of these that we have here.

The early cookery books have sweet recipes in,

and there are specific confectionary books,

which really start in the late 16th century in England.

At that time, sweet-making and confectionary-making

was like a kind of hobby.

Like embroidery, a kitchen equivalent of embroidery, a skilled thing.

It was very delicate. You have all these lovely colours, shapes.

The whole art of confectionary, sugar boiling.

Thank goodness that somebody did write these things down.

Things like caraway confits, Nelson's Buttons.

Like peppermint drops, but they're coloured on the top

with rose or Dutch pink.

It's incredible to think that the simple, but magical act

of boiling sugar in water was perhaps the one most important

single development in the birth of the boiled sweet.

So who would have been making the first sweets?

Apothecaries, who were the people who made medicines.

Some people who were better known as alchemists.

What they really wanted to find was a substance you could use

to transmute base metal into gold.

In the course of their experiments, they used all sorts of techniques -

food stuffs, non-food stuffs, metals.

Nostradamus, better known for his prophecies about the world ending,

left us some sugar recipes. He recorded them.

Bless him!

Socially, who would have been eating sweets?

Sweets were still seen as expensive and luxurious

in the 17th and early 18th centuries,

but then the price of sugar gradually started to come down.

West Indian sugar became easily available.

By the 19th century, sugar was very cheap,

and it began to lose its kind of luxurious image a little bit.

So though rich people might still have lovely confectionary and desserts,

the urchins on the street would be buying a pennyworth

of some very luridly coloured sugar sweet,

which probably actually might not be very good for you.

It must have been very special. You can see the attraction for sweets.

It must have been totally magical. The idea of the sweet shop.

Putting your nose up against the glass and looking at these colours and stripes and swirls.

Confectioners' shops would always have a wonderful display.

Clear glass jars, with sweets or syrups in,

and they'd put them in the window

so you could see all these beautiful colours.

Life is rather brown,

and possibly not very clean, and there's this palace

-of sparkling jewellery.

-Treasure trove.

On the corner of the street, yes.

For Laura, the good old-fashioned humbug,

with its hint of mint and ubiquitous stripes,

is the quintessential boiled sweet.

Which is funny. I simply remember nicking them from my dad's pockets!

That's the sweets I remember.

Would you like to try one?

I would love to try one.

It's like being seven again.

50 years on, but it is like being seven again.

And seven was very much the age I was

when my earliest memories of growing up in Wolverhampton

started to take shape.

I've only walked down this road, probably once since the early '60s.

And actually, it hasn't changed that much.

I think some of these houses might be slightly new builds,

but they're exactly the same style.

'Life was very quiet and uneventful for me amongst these streets,

'which is perhaps why my most vivid memories surround

'some of the sharper flavours to be found in my local sweet shop.'

I was never without a Sherbet Fountain, usually one a day.

I was very specific about the way I ate them.

I'd peel back the paper...

take out the liquorice stick

and rather than suck the sherbet through the liquorice,

which I think you're supposed to do...

..I used to lick the liquorice...

..wet it

and then I would dip into the sherbet and eat it like that.

Except, when I got to the very end,

and then I'd just tip the whole thing up, backwards into my mouth

and always cough, Every time it would make me cough.

I'd get white powder all over my school blazer and my shirt.

It was a kind of ritual.

It was a good one.

But childhood memories aren't just about the sweets

we choose to eat ourselves.

Between the ages of five and ten,

there was one sweet that very much defined

the relationship with my father.

I suppose one of the greatest ever sweets for me

was actually not mine at all, it was my father's toffee,

and it was special because it came in a tray.

A little tin tray, full of toffee and it came with a hammer.

And he would sit there and crack the toffee

with this little metal hammer...

..into very sharp pieces.

And then sometimes he would let me have a bit, but it was really his.

What I preferred was a chocolate toffee,

a little nugget of chewy toffee, covered in milk chocolate.

As you open it, you get the smell,

you get this wonderful hit of sugar and butter and cream.

I almost measure every other confectionery

by that chocolate toffee.

It was desperately comforting.

It was also, I suppose, part of another world,

part of a grown-up world.

You see, I wasn't always a good kid.

I could be quite naughty.

And I would get told off. My father was very strict.

He'd take my sweets away.

He'd threaten to smack me.

But then, there'd be that moment

when he'd give me a sweet afterwards.

It was...his way of doing something he couldn't do,

which was to say...sorry.

"I didn't mean to get angry. I didn't mean to make you cry."

It was kind of whip and kiss.

The sweets he took away and the sweets he would give me.

My toffee and Dad's toffee differed in one important way -

mine included that most indulgent of ingredients, chocolate.

A confectionery which has always had strong connections

with the Quaker religion.

'In the 1870s the Cadbury brothers set up shop in Bournville.

'There were many other makers of chocolate,

'but the Cadburys had to do it differently.'

Not bad. Not bad at all, Margaret.

I've met up with a direct descendant of one of these Quaker dynasties.

Deborah Cadbury -

at a Quaker meeting house in the village of Bournville,

a place built upon the humanitarian values

of these early chocolate pioneers.

Wonderful building.

-Smells like my old Sunday school.

-SHE LAUGHS

-Typical Quaker meeting house.

-This is very simple.

The senses weren't to be indulged. This was a puritanical religion.

The path to God was simplicity.

-The senses weren't to be indulged?

-No.

-But this is chocolate!

-Yes, yes.

-I know, a wonderful irony, isn't it?

-It's a wonderful irony.

A delicious irony.

But the first chocolate product

wasn't the Bournville dark chocolate bar.

It was in fact a chocolate or cocoa drink

with curiously puritanical origins.

At the time,

drink really was ruining many poor families

and there was just no safety net at all.

Quakers took temperance terribly seriously

and it led them to be fascinated in the idea of,

"Could we get cocoa going as a business?

"Could we try and develop a nutritious alternative to alcohol

"that people actually want to drink?"

Why were the Quakers so successful in business?

I think they were immensely trusted in the community.

Here they were, these Bible-reading men in their sober clothes,

totally trustworthy.

And cocoa, for instance, in the 19th century,

there were a lot of manufacturers

who were, you know, bulking out their product

with all sorts of things like lentils or pearl barley

or molasses if you were lucky,

or if you were unlucky, with brick dust or vermilion, or red lead,

you know, poisonous substances.

-It's like the spice trade, the same thing.

-Yes, there was no regulation

so the Quakers were really appreciated

when they were coming along, trying to make a purer form of cocoa.

These chocolate drinks that were part of the temperance movement

grew slowly into dark chocolate bars.

But in the late 1800s,

the Swiss invented a groundbreaking product - milk chocolate.

This led to a frantic race amongst the Quaker firms

to meet this foreign chocolate threat head-on

and the result in 1905 was the birth of the first-ever dairy milk bar.

But the Quaker firms were once again forced into confectionery battle

in 1932, when an American, Forrest Mars,

set up shop in Slough, producing the first-ever Mars bar.

The Quakers, or more specifically Rowntree's,

in turn fought back with a flurry of new brands

in an attempt to knock this American interloper off his perch.

Rowntree's had an extraordinarily innovative run.

They came up, in very quick succession,

with Dairy Box - this is all in the 1930s -

-KitKat, which became a huge brand.

-Ah, yes!

And then they had Black Magic, Mars came up with Maltesers.

-Are these like Chocolate Wars?

-It was like Chocolate War...

Well, it was always like Chocolate Wars

because there was always some new technology just round the corner.

-BELL RINGS

-Good morning, sir. Why, it's Mr Monkhouse.

Oh, you can call me Bob, or even better,

you can call me after six o'clock.

-You know what I'm here after, don't you?

-I know, Mr Monkhouse.

Yeah, you're right. I'm after your marvellous Mars bars. Two, please.

-Mars are marvellous, aren't they, Mr Monkhouse?

-Marvellous?

They're marvellous with a capital Mmm!

Between the ages of eight and 11,

my primary school in Wolverhampton was MY confectionary battleground.

Whether it was in the playground or the classroom,

friendships were formed, alliances forged,

enemies made and all over sweets.

This is a place of good memories.

This is a place of...

..fun, where I'd arrive with my satchel,

but also my little bag of sweets that I'd just bought at the sweet shop.

And we'd swap them and we'd share them, or we wouldn't, depending.

THIS is where the bike sheds used to be.

It's where my brother used to come for a crafty fag.

And although I've never smoked...

..I've always wanted to come here

and have a very crafty sweet cigarette.

Of course, this sweet cigarette

isn't quite like the ones that we had

with their little glowing pink tip.

But strangely, it still feels really naughty!

Having a ciggie in school, albeit a sweet one.

I can remember sitting in here and...

..eating sweets from under the table.

Having a little bag on my lap...

and secretly eating sweeties

when I was supposed to be learning my times table.

Probably why I can't add up to this day.

Midget gems, floral gums, jelly babies...

because they were the quiet sweets.

They weren't in wrappers that crinkled.

They weren't in foil that crunched.

They were quiet sweets, so nobody knew what I was up to.

Never shared them.

They were MY sweets.

You shared in the playground, it was the way...we made friends, really,

was sharing sweets, but not the ones in the classroom, they were mine.

In order to understand more about why I've used sweets

to win friends and influence people,

I've met up with child psychologist Laverne Antrobus.

She's conducted

some informal experiments with children

to see what our behaviour around sweets can reveal

about our personalities.

So, fill your little box,

your plastic container, as quickly as possible.

The boys are doing it absolutely indiscriminately, anything.

I would have been a little bit more like the girl on the far left,

getting only what I want and doing it very quietly.

-And she's being very selective.

-She knows what she wants.

This isn't about quantity for her,

she knows exactly which sweets she wants

and isn't interested in having more than any of the others.

Share out the tray of sweets and chocolates equally.

And he's straight in for the big one.

The lad on the right, he didn't know what a lot of the sweets were,

it's just that they were bigger than the others.

These are slightly older children.

The girl with the blonde hair

is not scared of pushing everyone else out of the way.

Oh, they've got gummy bears!

And he's in. Look.

He's like a hawk... watching exactly what he wants.

OK, so do whatever you want to do with two sweets.

-And they're both in.

-"In my mouth!

"Just in case somebody else claims them!"

-And the girls are much more controlled.

-Yes.

She's so happy that she's eaten one,

but she's got one left.

Now this is a conundrum, isn't it?

To share the chocolate bar.

Look, he's actually giving it out.

That's quite interesting actually, that suddenly he's got an idea...

Suddenly he's in charge and is very happy to be the leader.

"You have some, I'll have some."

The girl in the middle is suddenly, I think,

very aware that she's not done too well out of this.

Oh, look! She's given one back!

She's giving up her sweets... to make someone else happy.

-Is that like you?

-Yeah. Absolutely.

I think one of the things that struck me about these tests

was that basic human characteristics that we all have

are there very early on in young children.

You know, can we share?

Can we be independent without somebody else feeling

that we are encroaching on their space?

Is there strength in numbers and how long do we keep that going

when actually, we really want to be on our own?

As you were watching,

I felt that you were picking out bits of yourself there.

I'm definitely more like the girl on the far left.

Not being pushy... taking my time.

Were you a sharer?

-I know that I would have offered certain people sweets...

-OK.

..and not others.

It was quite political.

I wanted to let people know what I thought of them.

-You know, "Take two. I like you!"

-"And you can't have any."

"You can't have any. I'm sorry, you just can't have any!"

The extraordinary thing is I don't actually feel

40 years older than those kids.

I totally associate with what they're doing, their behaviour.

I'm going to give you a sweet, see what it conjures up for you.

Let's see... I was the only kid who liked very sharp sweets.

I loved sweets that were very citrus, so very lime, very lemon.

Tart sherbet that used to bring all the veins out on the roof of your mouth

and used to make your tongue hurt.

And I would eat as many of these as I could.

I think I quite liked the pain, actually!

Ah! Love Hearts!

The most political sweet - you could really use these.

If you unwrap them very, very carefully,

you can actually rearrange them in the pack.

What was the message on the one that you put in the order that you wanted it to come out?

-"Be mine."

-(Be mine.)

-Be mine.

I'm not going to tell you who I gave it to, though.

OK.

Wow.

Now, marshmallows...

My dad used to bring these into my bedroom

at night, and he'd put one or two sometimes on my bedside table.

I'd said, several years ago,

I'd said that a marshmallow,

particularly the pink ones,

they were the nearest thing you could have to being given a kiss.

And when Mum died,

my father, night after night, would put them on my bedside table,

and he'd remembered the fact

I'd said that they were like getting a goodnight kiss.

I mean, they are incredibly soft.

What do you think it said about the relationship

that there was a marshmallow?

Or that he'd remembered that that's what you'd said.

I was surprised that he'd remembered it. I...

You know, he wasn't the sort of father that I would sit on his knee.

You know, he wasn't the most tactile of parents.

But I think this was as near as he could get.

He was the sort of man who it would be very unlikely for him

to even mention it,

but he still put it on the bedside table.

-And that was enough.

-No.

'It seems right that some 40-odd years later

'I should return on a pilgrimage of sorts

'to the very place where my life changed for ever.'

'A place in which my most defining memories

'were intrinsically connected to sweets.'

The wood panelling is still here.

There was a huge AGA here.

A great big cream thing.

Oh, THIS!

Yeah. This is the scullery.

My dad made these cupboards. I remember him making them.

These stairs still creak, just like they used to.

Ah, the old sun window!

This beautiful light used to come through that.

I remember that well.

-HE LAUGHS

-There's my bedroom.

-HE GASPS

-Oh, yes. My little bed.

Obviously, there's some sad memories in this room.

I remember my dad coming in and telling me my mum had died.

I think he said, "Mummy's gone to heaven," and...

And...there were lots of happy times.

Christmas with my pillowcase on the bed

and the selection box with all those wonderful chocolates

that we all used to think tasted a bit stale,

and all the better for it.

Oh, they smell exactly the same! That hasn't changed at all.

I've not eaten one of these for years.

And it is, there's something...

It's like being 11 years old.

It was a weird time, cos I went from being...

I suppose a desperately happy little boy,

a kid in a big family,

because there was Mum and Dad, there were my two brothers,

and there was Auntie Fanny.

She was the incontinent one who used to sit in a special chair.

And then suddenly, my brothers left home, Auntie Fanny died...

Then Mum died.

Dad was out at work or at one of his Masonic meetings in the evening

or whatever he really did instead of going to Masonic meetings...

and I'd be alone.

And this house was quite big and scary for a little boy.

Every creak -

and they're lovely wooden floors in these houses under the carpets

and they do creak quite a lot -

and every bit of wind in the chimneys...

I used to get really scared.

And this room was where I used to come and feel safe.

And I'd shut the door.

And I'd tuck myself up in bed and I'd pull the covers right up.

I'd wait to hear my dad's key in the door.

Sometimes I'd fall asleep, and sometimes I wouldn't.

It's very odd going from a busy, happy, bustling family life

to being a little boy with his marshmallow.

'It's quite a strange feeling being here again.

'It's not unpleasant at all, a lot of happy memories in this house,

'particularly at Christmas

'with Mum packing up all the Christmas presents.

'I used to help her wrap them.'

RAGTIME MUSIC PLAYS

'Don't forget the Fruit Gums, Mum.'

1968 and now living with Dad and my new stepmum,

I officially became a teenager.

My life was all about KitKats, Aeros, Fruit Pastilles and Smarties

and strangely, all of them felt very grown-up and very modern.

But little did I know that every single one of them had been invented

in pre-war Britain by that other major Quaker firm, Rowntree's.

ADVERT: Here are millions of Smarties.

First born in a grocer's shop in the shadows of York Cathedral

back in the mid-1800s, Rowntree's, like Cadbury's,

conducted business with Quaker values at their core.

But in pre-war Britain,

they became the self-declared pioneers of confectionery marketing.

This is the archive, welcome.

'Which is why I'm in York to meet company archivist Alex Hutchinson.'

Now, I've seen a film where somebody gets squished in one of these, so...

I'm going to try not to crush you!

These... Oh, wow!

-So these are the original artworks?

-Yes. That's post-war.

-I can't have Smarties in the house. They'd be gone in seconds.

-Mmm.

I couldn't sleep knowing there was a tube of Smarties in my house.

Well, they weren't always known as Smarties.

When we first made them in the 1880s, we called them Chocolate Dragees.

Yorkshiremen didn't like that so called them Chocolate Beans.

The first people to eat chocolate were really fine, elegant ladies

in Europe who didn't like to pick up bits of chocolate

because they would melt and stain their white gloves, so Frenchmen,

French confectioners, coated them in this sugar shell

so as they picked them up,

the chocolate wouldn't melt on their fingers.

They're the first type of chocolate sweet.

This is really nice, it really makes your mouth water.

It's quite heavy

and this is the original artwork for Rowntree's Fruit Gums.

-Oh, that little lad!

-Mm-hmm. He was the Fruit Gumster.

I've got to say, these were the ones for me,

the ones that you could actually... They felt like fruits in the mouth.

The raspberry with the little drupelets of berry.

This next row is packaging.

-The original packets.

-HE GASPS

This is one of the very, very early Quality Street cartons.

Imagine opening that and finding the gold coins.

NEWSREEL:' You've probably wondered at some time or another

'how these delightful little wiggly things get on top of a chocolate.

'And now you can see that it's all done by hand.

'There's no girl like a Yorkshire girl for dexterity and quickness

'in squeezing out the swirls of rich chocolate.

'At least, that's what they say.'

A particular favourite of both my mum and my stepmum's,

the selection box of chocolates,

always had female connotations for me. They were about giving,

receiving and saying far more than what was ever in the box.

So it seems apt that back in the 1930s,

these fancy boxes were so...well, fancy.

Buying a box of chocolates - it was tantamount to a marriage proposal

because they were just so expensive.

In 1933, Rowntree's came up with a cunning plan.

They created a new line called Black Magic

which was a very good quality chocolate

but it was in a plain carton

and the chocolates didn't cost you the earth.

They hit upon this new advertising campaign.

They were trying to persuade people that you could buy a box

of chocolates for someone you'd only been out with once or twice.

-It isn't a proposal, it's a box of chocolates.

-Just a box of chocolates.

LADY IN ADVERT: But as I took the record,

it dropped and smashed into a million pieces.

I thought he'd never forgive me.

But tonight, he came with a box of my favourite Black Magic chocolates.

Those centres are absolutely dreamy.

These are original chalk and charcoal sketches

-for the 1933 Black Magic advertising campaign.

-Wow.

Heavens! Smoking AND fur!

-HE LAUGHS

-Yes, I'm not sure it would go down quite so well

with today's consumers.

-So elegant, though.

-It was very, very popular in its time.

-Yes, I remember Dairy Box. It was a treat.

-Mmm.

-It was a treat.

It wasn't as special as being given a box of Black Magic.

No. We were aiming them at different consumers

so Black Magic was meant to be romantic whereas Dairy Box

was what you could buy for the girl next door

just because she was fun and you liked her

but you didn't have to be going out with her.

My father would give Mum Black Magic

and then later, my stepmum, she got Dairy Box.

-Oh, well, speaks volumes!

-It so does!

-Ready for a break, dear?

-How did you guess?

-And a KitKat.

KitKat? Yes, please. It's just what I need.

-SNAP!

-Crisp, isn't it?

-I like the chocolate too.

-Just right for a break.

Have a break, have a KitKat.

This is one of the really early KitKat moulds

from when we used to make single fingers of KitKat.

-Single fingers?

-Yeah, we made single fingers of KitKat in the 1930s.

For me, the whole point of a KitKat, it's that moment

when I USED to be able to run my thumbnail

down the foil and then break the KitKat.

And some clot changed the packaging.

Well, I suppose you could say it's to do with our Quaker roots.

We had to... Really, truly!

We changed the packaging because we realised that

if we had our KitKats in a flow wrap, they would be even crisper

and better preserved when they got to the consumer.

It's not the same.

I've never quite forgiven you for that, to be honest with you.

'So you have it then.

'Marry the creamy milk from Shropshire

'with the cocoa from Ashanti.

'Cream and brown, Britain and Africa.

'And that is Dairy Milk chocolate.'

# Yummy, yummy, yummy I got love in my tummy

# And I feel like loving you... #

1971, and I was 15.

A time of creative expression, wild colour and, well, gay abandon.

# Who loves to kiss you Ooh, love, I love it so... #

Chocolate confectionery was about to get very sexy,

in more ways than one.

So I'm dusting off my tie-dyed T-shirt

and heading to Cadbury's HQ to reminisce in some of those

quintessentially '60s and '70s advertising campaigns

with Tony Bilsborough.

My real chocolate years were the mid to late '60s,

-when it almost seemed you could measure my life in chocolate bars.

-Yeah.

The ones that I knew very well

but also the new bars that would come along.

For me, the perfect bar was the Cadbury's Flake.

Yeah, the Cadbury Flake actually dates back to 1920

and it was invented by a guy on the line here

who just happened to see the chocolate pouring into the moulds

and out again and the way it folded backwards and forwards.

They would, in the old days, just chip that off,

either remelt it or throw it away and he loved the texture

and put in a suggestion to the company

and it was taken up and that's where Cadbury Flake came from.

But yeah, by the '60s,

what you're seeing there is the product pretty much

as it had been for many years, but a lot of support from advertising.

So you've got the famous Flake girl.

Yeah, I was a teenager

when the Flake girl first appeared on my television.

She played a very important part in my growing up.

Yeah, as in most young men's lives, yes!

'Enjoy Flake. Cadbury's Flake.

'Fold upon fold of creamy milk chocolate.'

The '60s, like the '60s in general info confectionery terms

was a time of experimentation. Limitless possibilities.

'It's full of biteable bubbles.

'New Coffee Aero tastes as good as it looks.

'Bite it and see!'

Oh, look!

# Nuts, whole hazelnuts!

# Cadbury's take them and they cover them in chocolate. #

'They came in search of Paradise... and found it.

'Tender coconut moist with pure syrup.'

-Oh, raisin bar!

-Yep.

-Amazin' Raisin.

-The Amazin' Raisin.

The Curly Wurly. I can remember getting my very first Curly Wurly

and it seemed huge.

In fact it seemed impossibly huge. It was like holding a firework.

-Yeah!

-It was a great big thing.

-Look at this font.

-Indeed, very '70s.

It launched in 1970, so you've got the sixpence

-and the 2½p, both old and new money.

-Oh, everything was double price.

That's right.

-And of course the iconic...

-Aztec!

-..Aztec Bar.

The Aztec Bar was - let's not mince words here -

it was a copy of the Mars Bar.

The advertising tied in with the golden age of TV advertising

which was the '70s.

-'Aztec.

-Hey!

CHANTING

'Az-tec.'

I can remember that campaign because it was the first time for me

that advertising any sort of confectionery

had got really exciting.

-It was like watching a feature film.

-Yeah.

These are the days when the budget was limitless.

'Cadbury's Aztec - a feast of a bar.'

This is '70s, this is almost hippy box.

-This is your long, flowing dresses.

-I had a shirt like that.

We all had a shirt like that!

Now, look at him. The Milk Tray Man.

The Milk Tray Man, yeah.

Although we'd been making the product for 50-odd years,

it really became famous in the late '60s with the Milk Tray Man.

HARPSICHORD MUSIC PLAYS

In 1968, you see him first appear. The actor who played him,

Gary Myers, played him for 20 years.

Did everything from skiing down slopes to diving off high cliffs

into shark-infested waters.

Similar I suppose in style to James Bond

and other characters of the time.

He was a gentleman. I mean, he left his calling card and then went.

-And that was as far as it went.

-Y....es!

Well, that was the impression.

He was a stalker.

There's no way that he would get today any airtime at all.

'And all because... the lady loves Milk Tray.'

And as the Milk Tray Man dived into uncharted waters,

I too dived fully into my adolescence

with all that this entails,

growing up emotionally, psychologically and sexually.

We moved from busy Wolverhampton to the countryside

where I had no friends and where my relationship with my father

and my stepmother became strained, to say the least.

It was a very bad teenage time.

I was deeply unhappy and looking for somewhere that I felt was mine,

something comforting, something...

Just a special place, a safe harbour.

And it was the woods, and I'd come here with sweets

and I'd sit and eat them.

There were some sweets that I associated

with adulthood and growing up.

They were the things that my father didn't like me to eat

like bubblegum and chewing gum which he disapproved of

but also odd things like Walnut Whip.

He wouldn't allow it. I think it was probably the way I ate it,

which was to bite the top off and then I did this curling tongue

down into the cream thing which probably didn't look very nice.

That was banned.

The thing my father disapproved of most was the chocolate Flake.

The advert used to make my father's eyes lower to the floor.

He would never buy me a Flake.

He used to buy them for my stepmother.

And watch her eat them. But I wasn't allowed one.

So I used to snaffle them and take them off to the woods.

I just loved everything about them - the way they crumbled,

the way I wasn't supposed to eat them

and the way they used to leave little bits of chocolate on your clothes.

They were just plain naughty, really. And I loved them.

I was sort of preparing myself for adulthood, I think.

For that little escape of getting away from the family

and away from home and out into the big, wide world.

And so, as the busyness of adult life took over,

the big, bad world of sweets would now take something of a back seat.

Work began to feature more heavily, and sweets,

bar the occasional one, slowly faded from my life.

Just as I've matured, so too has the confectionery industry.

All of the original Quaker firms have now been swallowed up

by larger, global food manufacturers.

The battle for ownership of the British chocolate maker Cadbury

could be over. A British name for almost 200 years,

the firm looks set to be taken over by the American food giant, Kraft.

Indeed, the childhood experience of sweets has changed hands too.

Long gone is the innocent, excited dash to the local sweet shop

with pocket money in hand. These days,

parents ration their kids' intake

and the age of the multipack is firmly upon us.

But despite these changes, whatever wrappers they may come in,

wherever we buy them, and whoever does the buying,

one thing is clear - sweets hold a very magical power over us.

'Problem solved.

'Mm, but what happens when we get to the last one again?'

So, next time you pop a sweet into your mouth,

spare a moment to remember the child within.

It's why sweets are so beguiling and so important.

We are, after all, just grown-up kids.

Something as simple as this can keep us young at heart.

# Everyone's a Fruit And Nutcase

# It keeps you going when you toss the caber... #

'Cadbury's Flake - fold upon fold of creamy milk chocolate...'

'Don't forget the Fruit Gums, Mum.'

'And all because... the lady loves Milk Tray.'

MUSIC: "Days" by The Kinks

# Thank you for the days

# Those endless days Those sacred days you gave me

# I'm thinking of the days

# I won't forget a single day Believe me... #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd