You can still get Birds Eye Frozen Beef, of course, and although this ad is aimed at housewives, this product is now mainly aimed at the elderly or those living alone. Although I can appreciate how helpful it can be to have meat in small portions (I'm a devotee of Waitrose Easy To Cook), the frozen stuff is never quite as nice, in my opinion!

Why don't we have more adverts for cream nowadays, eh? Cream is great.

Yep, it's another tantalizing problem which we don't have access to! What on earth happened to poor Worried Jane? Another letter which confuses me is the question from an unmarried mother about adopting her own child after the father clearly left her high and dry. I'm going to have to page friend of the site Kif; did unmarried mothers not have automatic custody of their children, or has she given up the child to the local authority and is trying to get it back? It's not clear.

Ah, potted beef. I can still taste the memory of it on buttered toast, and it's probably no mistake that it's being marketed here as a kids' food. The tablecloth is a little something for Mum, even if she's an army wife!

I'm sure I remember PG Tips offering coupons towards children's books a few years ago, but I've not seen anything like this for some time, because presumably it's expensive to produce! Nice idea, although I hope that lad on the bottom right got a clip round the ear. Cheeky sod.

Blimey Nora. Somehow, I don't think there was an equivalent advert in Playboy questioning men's fatherhood skills. Despite the wider range of men's magazines available nowadays, there still aren't, but women are still fed a good spoonful of guilt in adverts aimed at them. Why do we put up with it?

See? Only BABIES use sanitary pads! Anyone else feel like they're being talked to like a toddler?

Oh dear. Obviously, I hope things worked out for these two girls, but it makes your heart sink to see Mary come up trumps again with her judgmental language. What makes her think that either of these two girls will EVER put themselves in such a position again, given the trauma that they're suffering? This is before the legalisation of abortion in Britain (excluding Northern Ireland), which happened in 1967, so if either of them were pregnant, their options were to bring up the child themselves (or have their parents go through the charade of pretending it was a sibling), have the child adopted, or to have a dangerous illegal abortion.

Let me be clear. There are many domestic tasks that appliances have made easier. However, this ad is promising far, far more than the reality can deliver. Nice electric spit, though.

I find it interesting that older motherhood is not being seen as a problem here, when there's an awful lot of panic nowadays about women 'delaying' having their first child. I suspect that legitimate concern over how helpful IVF can be after a certain age has been extended to a general panic, which isn't helpful.

I'm sure regular readers can guess my problems with this ad, especially the idea that you'd put up with replacing one of your meals with Trimetts biscuits and milk on a long-term basis. Maybe the idea was that the horrible flavours they sold the biscuits in was enough to put you off food for the rest of the day.

Wowee! Get a load of this competition! Although I have no idea how they managed to judge it, given that it appears to involve random ticking of boxes. I'm also amused at the new 'end-of-roll' reminder, so I guess we can assume that in-product nagging of consumers started around this time.

Hmm. Read the first letter and see if you agree with me that there may be more to this than Mary realises. Everyone loses their temper occasionally, usually when they're tired or have had a hard day, but regular bouts of extreme anger are different. It's particularly concerning that the husband only displays this anger to his wife, so everyone else in their lives probably think that he's an ideal man. Of course, domestic violence wasn't really taken seriously until the 1980s; when my aunt left her abusive husband in the 1970s, the police were prepared to sit at a distance when he visited her, meaning it was only her quick closing of the door which prevented him from stabbing her with a knife he'd concealed.

Women who could clearly remember the fashions of 1926 in 1965 must have been, at the very youngest, 50 when this was published. Oddly enough, I've just worked out that this group of women would have included my grandmother, which is something for me to ponder for the rest of the day.

Here's another advert insulting older women from Prom. This time, they're suggesting that it's even worth cancelling your holiday if you're not happy with your hair. After all, you wouldn't want to show your husband up, would you?