The death of the brochure...?

Every now and then, a faint memory from my childhood is reignited by a random connection with something I happen to be doing right now.  One minute I’m pouring cornflakes into a bowl, the next I’m a seven year old in a purple tank top making Blue Peter’s Thunderbird Island on a Formica kitchen table.  A simple puncture repair on one of the kid’s bikes can instantly create a time-warp, allowing me once again to become Liverpool’s very own Evel Knievel, jumping over other (smaller) children on my red Chopper bike.

I’m certain both of these memories are reasonably accurate (even the purple tank top bit) but occasionally something pops up, clear as day, which seems somehow too far-fetched to have really happened.

Take this for instance: The other day I’m wondering round an out of town Retail Park when I spot an Argos catalogue pallet.  My mind flies off at a tangent: It’s October, probably 1971, maybe a year either way.  I’m heading out of the front door for school when Mum says ‘The Littlewoods catalogue’s arrived. You can read it when you get home.’

Now, it’s not the event itself that’s far-fetched; it’s trying to reconcile now the level of excitement I felt at the prospect of an evening with the Littlewoods catalogue.  I should clarify at this point that it was of course the toy section gripping my attention – it would be a few more years before I realised there were other equally enticing pages for a young teenager to spend an evening with.  No, the toy section of the Littlewoods catalogue in the early 70’s was every child’s dream.  It was like visiting Santa’s Grotto every night, drooling over the pictures like Homer Simpson contemplating a doughnut.  The details are still quite clear; it was Mousetrap, Frustration and football game called Super Striker I was craving.

It’s just possible that you’re all reading this thinking ‘what a weirdo’, but I can’t have been the only one.  And now, when I look at my kids sweeping their hands across their i-pad screens, devouring images of the latest ‘must have’ stuff (right now it’s Pandora bracelet charms and Lego Technic), it’s easy to see the same behaviour repeating. Sure, they do still occasionally flick through an Argos catalogue but it looks to me like those days are numbered.

And what of the holiday brochure, the mainstay of travel marketing for decades – has that too reached the end of the road?

I think it has. Like my old red Chopper and Super Striker, and the Littlewoods catalogue itself, what was once enticing and exciting in equal measure has now become a relic of the way we used to do things. 

The death of the travel brochure has often been greatly exaggerated but this time the game’s up. The obituaries will say it survived floppy disks, brushed aside CD ROMs and USB sticks, and breezed past online content – but it was mobile that finally killed it.