Time for tea?

In 1976 TyPhoo Tea ran one of the best Who promotional offers ever, featuring the work of the great Chris Achilleos on the boxes, 12 photographic collectors cards, and a supporting hardback annual style album called ´The Amazing World of Doctor Who´, with an outstanding cover, again produced by Achilleos. Apparently there´s a wallchart to go with this, although I have yet to find a photo of this. Just a shame the cards are photographs rather than original artwork, but hey, you can´t have everything (not that us power crazed megalomanics listen to such sweeping statements).


You can still pick up the cards for a reasonable price on ebay and the like, and the album is also occasionally found. However the promotional boxes themselves are probably the most sought after and few and far between, after all, who keeps old tea boxes?!


I used a picture of the album on my post about Chris´s work (here), and should again plug Chris´s website where you can order limited edition prints of the cover artwork, and a great Tom Baker portrait, again used in the promotion. You can visit his website here.


Unfortuantely we were a PG Tips family (probably my fault as I was also an addicted collector of the free collectors cards which appeared in these, so my poor mum probably had no choice but to buy PG!) and I have never had the disposable income to buy the stuff second hand since. But as soon as I win that lottery...

When I originally posted this I had lost the source of these images, which I have now rediscovered. Who collector Mike Hall has an excellent site called Dalek-mania which contains a wealth of information on all things Dalek and beyond, including original props. He has marked these images as his own copyright, which we respect, but wonder if the artist and manufacturer (and designer!) also have copyright claims. As the images are in the public domain, and refer to a once publicially available item, we think it´s OK to reproduce them here in this context. However, please respect this copyright if you copy these images for your own use by at least crediting Mike and his site.