Barry says: “We brought the films down in 2022 and later that year, we were invited back to see some of them being run through the Steenbeck editing machine.
“It was fascinating, to see these films for the first time in 50 or 60 years.”
Kay Foubister, the acquisition curator at the moving image archive, says it’s an important addition to their existing collection.
“It’s highly unusual to get a complete set of adverts, especially from the early days of commercial television,” she says.
“It only really began in Scotland in 1957 so to have a collection of ads relating to all these titles that we all know, and all had in our households, is fantastic.
“I grew up with The Bunty, my mother got My Weekly and my granny got The People’s Friend. And now we have adverts for them all.“
While TV advertising might have been in its infancy, DC Thomson had connections with some of the biggest names in the business, including Mather and Crowther, whose founder James Ogilvie would go on to inspire the TV series Mad Men.
