Bernie the bolt...

I don’t know why but I’d assumed that Revels had gone the way of Spangles, Fruit Polos, the magnificent Aztec Bar and been assigned to the great sweet graveyard in the sky. Then wandering around my supermarket today I found some on the shelf; not the packaging I remember, but Revels just the same.

Back in the late sixties and seventies I remember them well. An alternative to straight Maltesers, not quite a Poppet, definitely Galaxy Counteresqe, but nothing like a Smartie.

I remember the flavours well too, can even taste them as I write this - orange creme, coconut, toffee, peanut, Galaxy Counter and Malteser. I hated the coconut and lots of other people must have felt like me as Mars replaced them with coffee creme - which I also hated. At around the same time they also dropped the peanuts (probably a nut allergy thing) and changed them to raisins – much to my disappointment.

For some reason I have always associated Revels with The Golden Shot, that strange crossbow quiz show where Bernie shot his bolt to the instructions of the contestants… Up a bit, down a bit, up a bit, fire! Yes, we've all had fun with that since we grew up a little.

Maybe they were a Sunday afternoon treat, but in terms of treat they weren’t very treatful. The coconut was oily, the orange sickly, the Counters and Maltesers boring, and only the nut (later the raisin) was really enjoyable.

Perhaps like The Golden Shot it was all about chance; a kind of sweet Russian roulette. After all you never knew exactly what you were going to get next and if you were really unlucky it could be the coffee – YUK! It must have been about a one-in-six chance of coffee and the faces my sisters used to pull when they got one was really comical.  Sometimes you would get a packet that was choc-full of orange ones, other times a glut of peanuts, but never a plethora of the coffee - they were quite rare (thank goodness).

Funnily these days I love coffee flavoured sweets. If Revels were guaranteed to have lots of coffee ones I’d definitely buy them. But too many orange cremes? Well, let’s just say I’m not prepared to take the chance.

Bernie the bolt!