In the 1980s, it was possible to bag yourself a ‘speedboat’ simply for sharing a general knowledge baseline with your average seven-year-old – and being able to throw darts in the general direction of a dartboard. All while under the watchful eye of the late Lancashire-born light entertainment legend Jim Bowen.
He who – like many entertainers of the lightest persuasion – enjoyed the automotive trappings keenly associated with Rolls-Royce Silver Clouds when at the pinnacle of televisually enhanced fame and fortune.
Of course, you had to appear on popular Sunday teatime family TV game show Bullseye to facilitate these suburban dreams, and to stand any chance of making a splash on the closest watercourse to your Nottingham homestead in your brand-new Shetland 535. Which, technically, was less a speedboat and more a cabin cruiser-class motorboat.
Thankfully, other more practical – yet equally aspirational – prizes were readily available. Like 1.1-litre Rover Metros, Proton 1.3GL Sagas and brand-new Morris Itals, if you were lucky and possessed good hand-to-eye coordination.
Still, even a Morris Ital was preferable to the food blender and cuddly toy up for grabs over on the other channel’s leading game show, fronted by that other late, lamented legend of light entertainment, Sir Bruce Forsyth.
Yet away from the glamour of television, other awesome vehicular prizes were being promoted via the most unlikely of sources.
Clickety-click to win a Ford Sierra XR4i
Light years before car prize giveaway companies started flooding your social media channels – and before Tim Berners-Lee birthed the internet – holiday camera film manufacturers were giving away exceptionally cool cars such as the Ford Sierra XR4i.
Snappy favourites Kodak would enter you into a draw for a fast Ford simply for identifying silhouettes of other (less fast) Ford models and writing a pun-filled caption to comedically describe a random photo. A fast Ford minus an RS badge, yet still a seriously cool car both then and most certainly now.
While today you can enter an internet draw to win yourself a Renault 5 GT Turbo for a few pence, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s you had to work a lot harder to be in with a shout of such hot hatches.
Or in the case of the story I’m about to tell: middle-of-the-road Rover cabriolets.
Rover rag-top
It’s not that I desired a Rover 216i Cabriolet in 1993. Statistics would probably confirm that across the whole of the UK at the time only 2.3 people dreamed of owning a Rover 216 Cabriolet – and 1.3 of them were almost certainly recently deceased.
No, I saw it as a means to an alternative automotive end. The idea being to win one of the 100-or-so Rovers up for grabs and quickly flog it to some poor, unsuspecting type who habitually romanticised about open-top motoring – and hopefully wasn’t recently deceased. Then I would invest the £12k I’d recoup into a car I actually wanted at the time: a big-bumper Mk2 VW Golf GTI 16v in Oak Green metallic.
The 4.10 at Kempton
Mercifully, I didn’t have to attempt to get invited onto a prime-time TV quiz show in order to pull off my cunning plan – or purchase a tonne of Kodak 35mm camera film. And one thing I categorically didn’t have to do was blow my entire semester’s student grant and fall out with my parents – a scenario which had quickly come to bear a year earlier.
Brief backstory for context.
Desperate to have an early-’90s hot hatch while attending art school, I decided to bet myself into ownership of a Golf GTI, courtesy of the bookies conveniently located at the top of the road where my student digs were situated, which I walked past at least twice a day.
I was inspired (and frustrated) by a fellow BTEC HND Advertising Design student called Dan – who hailed from Manchester and was definitely selling recreational drugs to other students in order to fund his own lukewarm hatch habit: rocking up every day in his second-generation Ford Fiesta XR2 in Caspian Blue metallic.
Long story short, my initial winning streak on the horses abruptly ended when I placed £800 on the 4.10 at Kempton. I forget the name of the horse, which is odd, as my entire ethos was based not on racehorse form but rather the names of the equines and the colours their riders were wearing. Such was my searing skillset.
However, another opportunity then presented itself. Returning home that summer to my parents’ – not least because they wanted to keep an eye on their eldest son’s new addiction – I discovered another route to hot hatch acquisition. And it would all be thanks to the Daily Express.
Scratchcard scrutineering
Half-open barn door kitchen, gilet-wearing sensibilities, as-yet-unpopularised soft-roader of Japanese descent, and a Daily Express subscription, my parents were the epitome of early-’90s Middle England. Which, at that exact moment, didn’t conflict with my socialist student rumblings, as said ‘news’ paper had just started giving away Rover 216i Cabriolets that summer.
All I had to do was see whether the strip of five free scratchcards included in every copy of the Daily Express matched the car registration plates printed in that day’s ever-so-slightly politically right-leaning reading material. My maths reliably informed me that by approximately 27 July that summer I’d have won a Rover 216i Cabriolet. Statistically, it was a given.
That said, in order to achieve this I needed to think big. I couldn’t merely rely on the one copy of the Daily Express my parents had delivered each morning. Instead, I had to plan on the scale of a military campaign. By my calculations there were 12 newsagents within a three-mile radius of the family home. It was the early 1990s, remember, when people read newspapers and regularly purchased a bag of lemon bonbons by the quarter. Which was handy for me.
Post Office savings raider
I raided my Post Office savings account, which family members had thoughtfully paid into since I was a small child, knowing the day would come when, as a young adult, I would inevitably fulfil my prophecy of Rover 216i Cabriolet ownership.
Essentially, I was snaffling up stacks of freshly delivered Daily Express copies from individual newsagents’ suppliers – times 12 – each and every day. Which wasn’t at all suspicious. This labour-intensive routine quickly took hold of my life and became my new addiction. Although I’m not sure support groups existed in 1993 for people who sold their souls to ensure a Rover 216i Cabriolet was their end game.
Unfortunately, just like the time I was convinced I would win the National Lottery within weeks of it launching, luck failed to arrive and I never won a Rover 216i Cabriolet. But not through lack of application or physical footwork.
If only I’d invested the same degree of industriousness into my art school studies, I’d probably have ended up illustrating published titles on varying automotive topics and gone on to realise a wife, kids, career, double garage and an actual life, rather than waxing lyrical on Petrolblog about sorry episodes most people would opt to forget.
My losses continue to be your reading gains, folks. But my question to you is this, which also happens to be the title of this blog if you were with me from the outset: what lengths would you go to in order to win the car of your dreams?
