Maltesers

Books Excellent article from January Magazine, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. Amongst many nuggets is this example of sponsorship gone mad:

From 1946 to 1951, first CBS and then NBC broadcast a very popular weekly radio serial, "The Adventures of Sam Spade," with Howard Duff supplying Spade's voice. The show was sponsored by Wildroot Cream Oil Hair Tonic, which ran a widely distributed series of newspaper comic-strip advertisements in which Spade, in the space of eight frames, accepted a case and solved a mystery, always involving hair cream.

Suddenly Kim Cattrall turning out for Tetley doesn't sound quite so incorrect.