1970s PG Tips Chimps Wedding Speach Advert
PG Tips is a brand of tea introduced in Great Britain in 1930. From 1956 to 2002, their television commercials featured real chimpanzees dressed in human clothing acting in different situations.
Other notable examples of similar productions include the US 1970s kids show Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp or TBS's Monkeyed Movies/The Chimp Channel from the late 1990s.
Many of the chimps featured in the ads came from the Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire, England. Well known celebrities and actors like Peter Sellers, provided some of the voices.
The way they made the chimpanzees mouth open and close while talking is that the people making the commercials would spread peanut butter on the roofs of the chimpanzees mouths and they will try to get the peanut butter with their bottom teeth, making them look like they are talking.
This page would focus on the wedding speach commercial that aired in the 1970s.
Synopsis[]
The commercial takes place at a wedding, where chimpanzees are talking about how good it was. Then, one of the chimps suggests some PG Tips tea.
Why It's Cursed[]
Animals dressed as/acting like humans (especially apes, the human's closest relations) don't really fly well today in the modern world. The bizarreness of these ads is quite cringy when you look at them through a modern perspective. Also, some of the chimps featured in the commercials had trouble adjusting to living like wild chimps after they had retired from showbiz because they had been trained to act like humans.