Shopping at Safeway is an undertaking I never got round to in this lifetime. Growing up, they were this inoffensive brand that was always there somewhere in the backdrop, but I don't think I ever so much as set foot in one of their stores (same deal with Somerfield). My parents were long-term Sainsbury's devotees, and by the time I was old enough to manage my own food acquisition they were already disappearing, in the process of being swallowed up by Morrisons (an unfortunate fate, since Morrisons is the UK supermarket chain I'm dead-set on avoiding). The Safeway experience is one that I'll forever have to partake in vicariously, through the televised adventures of Little Harry and chums, the array of highly articulate tots who promoted the chain through the mid to latter half of the 1990s. What better way to establish your chain as a warm and family-friendly place to hang than to show small children having the time of their lives while on their weekly shop with their parents? Meanwhile, the accompanying tagline, "Lightening The Load", asked that we equate not just convenience and efficiency, but also wholesome good fun with the brand.
The child star who originally fronted this campaign was known as Little Harry. He was played by a boy named Jack Hanford, who was reportedly chosen from more than 1500 prospective young actors, although his innermost thoughts were delivered in the droll tones of Martin Clunes, best known for playing Gary in the contemporary sitcom Men Behaving Badly. The campaign owed an obvious debt to the then-recent Look Who's Talking films, which used a similar gimmick in pairing grown-up voiceovers with footage of ankle-biters. Harry would experience the various perks of shopping at Safeway with the fascination and naivety of a young child, but expressed through the sardonic musings of an adult, an approach that allowed for an easygoing mix of endearment and absurdism. The idea was to emphasise that Safeway was a particularly ideal choice for shoppers with little kids in tow, but even if you didn't fall into that demographic, you could perhaps still see a bit of yourself in Harry's wry observations. No matter what your age, your weekly excursion around your supermarket of choice was such a major part of your routine that there was something infinitely relatable and charming about following a single family and how their lives revolved around the contents of their grocery bags. Somerfield had a similar premise going (under the banner of "Shopping In The Real World"), but in their case the ads centred on an adult woman played by Suzanne Forster, and her slightly drippy husband with the tendency to misinterpret shopping lists ("I meant mincemeat for mince pies!").
In 1996 Harry was joined by a new co-star in the form of Molly, who was played by Rosie Purkiss-McEndoo and voiced by actress Lesley Sharpe, and was initially introduced as a romantic interest for Harry. Molly's encounter with Harry was treated by Safeway as a major event (it even came with its own line of tie-in merchandising), although it attracted its share of controversy at the time, from those who felt uneasy about the amorous overtones given to the tykes' interactions. Still, the outcome was ultimately not a pre-school recreation of the Gold Blend couple, with Safeway likely having broader motivations for adding new blood to the cast than to sell a few themed tea towels. The disadvantage in using children as the long-term faces of brands is that they'll grow up significantly within the space of a few years, so unless you're willing to build that into your campaign narrative, you might have to accept that they'll only have a limited shelf-life. I would hazard a guess that this is why Harry was all but phased out in later stages of the campaign, with ads shifting their focus toward Molly and her Paul Whitehouse-voiced brother, as well as a few additional "guest" faces, including a Northern Irish kid voiced by Frank Carson, an American girl voiced by Ruby Wax and a Scouser voiced by Cilla Black, although Harry did eventually return for a 1999 installment set at a millennium party. It served as a neat send-off for the campaign as a whole, as going into the Y2K Safeway made the decision to move away from television marketing altogether, and didn't have much longer to go as a brand. But of course the memories live on in our VHS recordings.
The first of the ads, from late 1994, saw Harry making his introductory visit to Safeway. He'd dared hope that his mother (Michèle Winstanley) was taking him to Toys R Us (the shopping locale where every child wanted to be be in the 1990s) and was initially disappointed to discover that they were headed for a supermarket, but was swiftly won over by the ease of the Parent & Child parking, and by the opportunities to comment on his fellow patrons from the vantage point of a trolley seat (including two sisters in a trolley with handy double seating). He was less sure about the bag-packing and carry-out service, since he could only interpret the helpful clerk as a stranger tampering with their goods before following them out of the building - the underlying narrative being that Harry was not accustomed to seeing such convenience from wherever he and his mother had shopped previously, so it was all new and alarming to him. (The ads often included shots of the Safeway employees smiling at the children, thus emphasising the genial service you could expect to receive within, although in this guy's case he cracks a curiously half-hearted smile, causing him to come off as being just as wary of Harry; not sure what the intended narrative is there.) Safeway's infinite friendliness to the young family crowd came to our hero's aid, when he and his mother were able to "hide" from the perceived stalker in a baby changing room (presumably helping his mother to deal with an entirely different predicament), with the subsequent dissolve into the Safeway logo imparting the implicit message that parents would do well to view Safeway as a refuge from less accommodating venues. The ad went out of its way to cram in as many perks as possible - the option of gifting your loved ones with a Safeway voucher was not explicitly cited by the narrator, but was cunningly slipped into the mise-en-scene, when Harry and his mother walk past a poster promoting this very service.
Clunes' voiceovers naturally did a lot of the heavy-lifting humor-wise (slickly matched with Hanford's expressions), but for me the real high point of this ad is a moment where Harry has no words, and is instead having a grand time pretending to wield a sword - amid all the witticisms, it is heartening to see glimpses of the kid just being a kid.
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