Remember those Milk Tray ads where a Heathcliff-like stanger risked death to deliver strawberry creams?

This week I am thinking back to the sheer lunacy of the Milk Tray ads that were so popular in the 1980s and 90s.

A tall, dark and handsome stranger, brooding and muscular with a lantern-shaped jaw, dressed entirely in black performs innumerable astonishing feats of strength in order to anonymously break into a beautiful woman’s home and leave a box of the desired confectionary with a single rose and a calling card embossed with a slick and manly silhouette.

And it’s “All because the lady loves Milk Tray.’

So apparently breaking and entering a property to leave a svelte beauty some chocolate and a rose is actually not a criminal offence, or in any way creepy, if indeed you are sufficiently handsome and James Bond/Heathcliff/Adonis-like.

I mean this Milk Tray guy is so determined to deliver his box of chocolates to the mystery lady he admires that he skies down a steep snowy mountain narrowly escaping being engulfed by an avalanche, hangs off an air-bourne plane at immensely high altitude before dropping down to the exact precise address by means of a nifty silken parachute, dives deep under water evading a fire that breaks out on a jetty or simply wades into the lady’s unoccupied home while staring wistfully into the camera as he thinks about the high romance of his actions, never once thinking said woman might be more than slightly unsettled by the anonymous delivery or actually straight on the blower to the PSNI.

What I want to know is why this handsome stranger insisted on all that preternatural abseiling, jumping, sweating and climbing up steep inclines. and side-stepping explosions to boot, in order to anonymously leave a box of chocolates when he might have just done the sane thing and called her up, arranged to meet her and given her the darned sweets directly while declaring his deep seated infatuation instead of almost ending up in an ICU unit in order to leave said sweets in her empty boudoir?

Yes, yes, every woman wants to believe that her beloved would go to extreme lengths for her, but I mean, within reason.

Never once have I felt a man should reasonably risk death while hanging off a plane to confirm his devotion.

But in any case, I think the Milk Tray man was clearly mad as a wax banana, and the notion of risking death to deliver some stupid chocolates sheer lunacy.

But apparently you can flirt with criminality, as in breaking and entering, if you are dashing enough, can emulate 007 in your physical ingenuity and pulchritude and have a calling card that is designed to let the woman know there’s a hunk out there who would do anything for love, and never once did he give in to the temptation of opening the box in order to scoff one or two toffees or strawberry creams.

But from an advertising point of view, the format was certainly a hit, with its absurdly hyperbolic romance wherein the way to show a woman you love her naturally involves jumping off a cliff, swimming miles and then proudly emerging from the water to leave a box of calorific delight on the bed of the beloved while she was probably at work or, who knows, out on a date with someone less given to crazed subterfuge.

Wouldn’t it have been better if they had just met up and shared the chocolates together, and he, I dunno, simply told her that he loved her so much he was willing to risk breaking his neck, collar bone and both legs, all in the name of a sugar rush of love?