“Today’s prompt is simple: write a sixty second comedic monologue.”

Author’s note: As I edge my way closer to my sixties, I’m constantly forgetting how old I am until I mention something like ‘Opal Fruits’ to the children I teach and they look at me blankly. ‘Opal Fruits’ were renamed ‘Starburst’ in 1998 – a decade before any of these children were born. It does make me think about the importance of brand names for products and whether certain things would be as successful were they named something else, and that’s where the inspiration for this monologue came from.

Additional note – I know it’s supposed to be a 60 second monologue, but the ‘Veet’ section alone (381 words) took 2 minutes when I read it aloud, and the entire piece is 1342 words, meaning that it would take at least 7 minutes to perform this.

‘Avez-vous un Snickers?’

 Have you ever stopped to think about some of our big brand names and asked yourself whether these products would be more successful if they had a slightly different name? Several years ago, Pizza Hut ran an ad campaign where they pretended they were rebranding themselves as Pasta Hut – the point being that they wanted people to realise that they didn’t just make pizzas. And here in the UK, we often rebrand items so that we’re calling them by the same name as the rest of the world – ‘Veet’, ‘Cif’ and ‘Snickers’ all had different names in Britain when I was growing up.

The problem is that these new international names often don’t make as much sense to us as the original name did. ‘Veet’ hair removal cream used to be ‘Immac’ – presumably because your underarms would be immaculately smooth after using the product. ‘Immac’ made sense, but ‘Veet’… That’s not a word – well, not in English anyway. Of course, it does sound like the French word ‘vite’ which means fast, so I’m guessing that the company who makes the stuff wants to subliminally advertise how quickly it does the job. I can picture the scene now in a French business meeting where all the advertising consultants are discussing the rebranding of their product for the UK market: (over the top comedy French accent) Ah, zeese Eengleesh, zey are so stupide, n’est-ce-pas? Zey will not realise what ‘Veet’ means…

And let’s be honest, the majority of English people are so useless at learning other languages that they really don’t know what the word ‘vite’ means – it actually sounds like ‘feet’. You can picture the scene in the chemist’s, can’t you?

Me: Have you got any ‘Veet’ cream, please?

Pharmacist hands me a tube of anti-fungal cream.

Me: Erm, ‘Veet’ aerosol?

Pharmacist presents me with peppermint cooling foot spray.

Me: ‘Veet’ wax strips?

Pharmacist gives me strange look as if wondering what sort of Hobbit feet I possess if I need to wax them.

And then I remembered what my friend Stephanie told me when I was 13: “Joanne Berry says the changing rooms in C & A smell like Immac.”

Joanne Berry says the changing rooms at C & A smell like ‘Veet’/feet – it makes perfect sense now.

‘Cif’ bathroom cleaner’s something else that’s had a rebrand. For decades of my life, it was known as ‘Jif’. Again, this is something that makes sense – you can get the cleaning done in a jif if you use this product. The problem is that this phrase works for us but not the rest of the world. The closest the French come to ‘in a jiffy’ is ‘dans un instant’ and the Germans say ‘im Handumdrehen’ which translates to ‘in no time’ or ‘in the blink of an eye’ but doesn’t have the catchiness of ‘in a jif’. And like ‘Veet’, the word ‘Cif’ doesn’t mean anything in English – unless you use it as an abbreviation for a sexually transmitted disease. I mean, can you imagine the confusion that would cause when a wife sends her husband off to the supermarket to buy cleaning products and then receives a text saying, “I’ve got the Cif”? Some women would take that as an admission of adultery.

But these problems with rebranding pale into insignificance beside the way that our beloved sweets have suffered over the years. I’ve mentioned ‘Opal Fruits’ – or ‘Starburst’ as they’re now known – and they’re a prime example of an original name that made more sense than the new name. As soon as you read ‘Opal Fruits’ on the packet, you knew what to expect: sweets that taste like fruit. But when you see ‘Starburst’, that doesn’t tell you anything. For a start, a star isn’t exactly something I’d want to put in my mouth – it’s a luminous spheroid of plasma tied together with self-gravity – yum! The sun is a star and I certainly don’t want a burning ball of light in my mouth, thank you very much. And as for it bursting…

‘Starburst’ is still quite a recent rebrand though as it was only twenty-five years ago. What really changed the face of British sweet eating was the renaming of the iconic ‘Marathon’ chocolate bar to ‘Snickers’ in 1990. ‘Marathon’ made sense – it was advertised with a mock up of an athlete about to run a long-distance race-. Someone handed him a ‘Marathon’ bar just as he was about to start and instead of chomping it down in one bite, the guy stood there for what seemed like twenty minutes biting through all the layers of chocolate, caramel and peanuts. It was called a ‘Marathon’ because it took a long time to finish it.

We were the only country that called it that. Everywhere else in the world called it a ‘Snickers’ bar, so eventually, a huge ad campaign was brought out to introduce the new name in England. We saw a French girl – you could tell she was French because she was wearing a beret – walking into one shop after another with the same question every time: “Avez-vous un Snickers?” Scores of bewildered shopkeepers shook their heads, not having a clue what she wanted, and I’m not surprised. Yet again, it’s a word that doesn’t make sense in English – or at least, not in the context of a chocolate bar. It’s the sound a horse makes, or the sound of a scornful laugh – neither of which springs to mind when you’re feeling peckish. In the advert, you’d be forgiven for thinking that she’s asking for underwear because it sounds like she wants some knickers. And since when was that the way to name a chocolate bar? All the other brands from the same family are named after astronomical features: ‘Mars’, ‘Galaxy’, ‘Milky Way’ – we’ve got connotations of a chocolate universe going on here. And then we get to ‘Snickers’ – grab an item of underwear and stick an ‘s’ on the front. You might as well call it ‘Sunderpants’ or ‘S’why fronts’… S’thong… S’G-string… I could go on all night.

But you do have to be careful with some of the original names for chocolate bars too. The ‘Topic’ bar was another product from the Mars stable. It was like a ‘Marathon’, but instead of “Comes up peanuts, slice after slice”, ‘Topic’ promised “A hazelnut in every bite.” My ex-husband loved ‘Marathon’ bars as a child but didn’t like ‘Topics’, so when he went on a residential trip with the top year of primary school at the age of 11 and was given a ‘Topic’ in his packed lunch, he decided to take it home for his dad – you know, the way that boys go on trips and bring back presents they haven’t actually bought because they spent all their money on football stickers at the start of the week. My brother did that when he went away to Scotland on a school trip – he handed out all the fruit he hadn’t eaten all week so my older brother got an orange, I got an orange, and my mum had two apples. Anyway, my ex-husband (who was not my ex-husband at the time but my fourteen-years-into-the-future husband) came home from his school trip on the Friday evening and gave his dad the ‘Topic’, his dad ate it, and that was the end of that… Until Monday morning when everyone was walking to school and a girl called Jenny asked my ex-husband if he’d finished the project they’d been given to do for homework. Only, she didn’t call it a project: she called it a topic.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

Jenny (thick northern accent): Have you got your topic?

Ex-husband (aged 11): No.

Jenny: But Miss said we had to hand them in this morning.

Ex-husband (panicking): No one said we had to bring them into school.

Jenny: So where is it then?

Ex-husband: I gave it to my dad and he’s eaten it.

There would have been none of that confusion with a ‘Marathon’.