Describe the colour above. What do you mean "poo brown"? You are right, of course, but, according to British Leyland, that is Sienna.
I have always been fascinated by paints and paint-codes, but also, with two kids still of a potty-using age, I am currently more familiar with the various shades of poo than I ever thought I would be. Or ever wanted to be.
Quite why brown, and so many takes on it, were so popular in the early 1970s is beyond me, particularly when manufacturers then had to go to such extravagant lengths to give the colour a name that conjured up precisely what it wasn't.
The British motor industry may have been lurching towards imminent collapse at the time, but boy did we still rule the roost in coming up with romantic names for various hues of poo brown. Everyone expects the likes of Arianca Tan on a Morris Marina, but less so when it comes to the finish on more sporting cars such as MGs and TRs. Yet, in a spirit of total equanimity to its products, they were all touched with Leyland's sh**ty stick, too.
I browse through the swatches and imagine them being read out by Alison Steadman in her tour de force role as Beverly Moss in Abigail's Party, depicting an era when, in a horribly introspective Britain – which, thanks to package holidays, was only just discovering that there was a world beyond Chatham – cheese and pineapple on sticks was the height of sophistication, along with the belief that Beaujolais should be stored in the fridge (although it turns out that Beaujolais apparently should be, yuk).
The deluded misnomers of BL paints just seem to fit that world perfectly. "More Russet, Tony, or perhaps you would like some Harvest Gold?" (Russet below), "Oooh, Bracken, everyone's doing Bracken nowadays," (above) or "No more Bronze Yellow for Laurence, he's had enough."
