Hovis’s “Boy on the Bike”: The 47-Second Ad That Britain Voted Its Favourite Ever

A boy pushes a heavy delivery bicycle up a steep cobbled hill. That is the whole setup of the 1973 Hovis ad, which lasts only 47 seconds. Its power comes from the setting, the music and the way it was filmed.

The director was Ridley Scott, at the beginning of a career that would take him to Hollywood, and it was one of five Hovis ads he directed in the early 1970s for Ridley Scott Associates. The boy was played by Carl Barlow. Many viewers assume it was shot in northern England because of the brass band, but it was filmed on Gold Hill in Shaftesbury, Dorset, in the south, and the voiceover uses a West Country accent.

The music is the largo movement from Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” played by the Ashington Colliery Band. Together with the village setting, it gives the ad a strong feeling of nostalgia.

Britain has kept choosing it. In 2006 it was voted the nation’s favourite advertisement of all time, and a 2018 YouGov poll picked it as the best advert of the 1970s. Hovis and the British Film Institute restored the film in 2019. It shows that an ad sells best when it looks like a small film instead of an ad.