Pure punk rock

A cute 'on this day in history' piece from The Guardian archives today. It concerns a man who decided to add an obscene message to his employer's sticks of Torquay rock. There's something frightfully quaint and old-fashioned about the whole tale, from sugar boiler Michael Leigh's insertion of the word 'balls' (about as mild a swear word as you can get. The very punk rock term, 'bollocks' - it was 1977 after all - wouldn't fit in the rock), to the fact that most of the 'tarnished' product was given away. Today, it would probably be marketed to within an inch of its shelf life with an ad campaign featuring Vinnie Jones or some other cartoon villain. Sometimes you have to think that Sam Tyler's better off back in the Seventies.