I was doing some work on the BT part of our site this week, and part of it caused me to have a massive, MASSIVE flashback to when I was a wee nipper. Hands up everyone who can remember ‘Buzby’…
Back in the late 70’s, British Telecom (who would become simply BT) split away from the Post Office, and to show this split, they got a whole new advertising campaign, involving Buzby: a curious creation, like weird mating between Big Bird (off Sesame Street) and Roobarb & Custard, the latter being because he was in fact voiced by the great Bernard Cribbins, he of The Wombles fame, amongst other things (and who is soon to be appearing the next series of Doctor Who)!
It’s kinda weird, for those of us who can remember Buzby, contemplating just how far BT have come. Sure, back in 1980, everyone had a BT phone (because there, basically, was no-one else to get a phone from, unless you lived in Kingston-Upon-Hull) but that was as far as our massively advanced communications infrastructure went at the time. And they were all Bakelite ones, with the big-turny-dial. (For the youngsters, why do you think we still call inputting the number in your phone ‘dialling’, when a dial is something round, and phone keypads, well, aren’t? That’s why!)
But now, fast-forward 28 years, and BT are a massive global company, with fingers in every aspect of the communications pie. So, we don’t get BT phones, we get BT Mobile phones, we get BT broadband, and we get BT Vision, their TV service.
Which ain’t bad really, given that in my lifetime, I’ve seen them go to that, from having a talking canary as a mascot……
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