The Richard Spooner Column: What an 'apeeling ' idea�

I 'm often reminded of that 1970-80s television advertisement for Smash instant mashed potato which starred Martians.

They were a family of robots who would watch humans as they laboriously prepared mashed potato in the traditional way.

The robots would then mock what they witnessed by guffawing as they heard how “Earth people peeled their own potatoes with their metal knives, boiled them for 20 of their minutes and then smashed them all to bits ”.

The laughing Martian solution was, of course, to use Smash instant mash with the catch phrase “For Mash Get Smash. ” The adverts featuring the Smash Martians were voted TV advert of the century by Campaign magazine.

Smash was launched by Cadbury 's in 1969 when they decided to diversify from their production of chocolate. The brand has since been sold by Cadbury and is now owned by Premier Foods who, using their Batchelors brand, launched their own recipe in 2006.

I only mention this because I was wondering if those same Martians could be mocking us in a few years for taking hours to commute into cities and going shopping with pockets and purses bulging with notes and coins.

Covid-19 restrictions have forced us to work from home and proved for many that they have no need to attend an office every day to earn their daily crust.

While we may miss the office camaraderie, how many of us will be looking forward to a return to wasting a good chuck of our lives sitting in cars, buses and trains to make the daily toil into the office?

How those Smash Martians would laugh when instead we could be happily locked on to the office via computers from the comfort of our own homes.

And another object of their mirth might be our use of flimsy paper, now fortified, bank notes and heavy coins to conduct purchases. Of course, I can even remember those enormous white £5 notes that had to be folded to put in your pocket or purse while the weight of change could make you walk lop-sided.

But now traditional paper notes and coins are falling out of use, another product of the “no touch ” Covid-19 years.

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), consumers are increasingly adopting cashless payment methods while governments are stepping up the planning or piloting of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Many companies are experimenting with accepting open-source digital currencies, such as Bitcoin, for treasury or portfolio allocation.

A cashless trend was already strong, according to the previous year's research, but in 2021, Covid-19 prompted more movement away from physical cash. In 2020, about 72 per cent of respondents said that their country was likely to become a cashless society. But that grew to over 81 per cent this year.

Meanwhile, the percent of respondents believing their country would never become cashless, saw a stark drop from 28 per cent to 19 per cent.

FOOTNOTE: The Smash Martians became so popular in the Seventies and Eighties that unauthorised copies of the metal figures were made from car parts by workers at a car factory�

JL