RICHARD ORD: Why I mourn the death of the world’s dullest chocolate bar

It’s sad, not because I was a huge fan of them – I’m a Snickers man, if you're reading this Mars marketing department (winks to camera) – but at the impending loss of that old joke of my youth.

Q. What’s got a hazelnut in every bite?

A. A Topic!

No, squirrel faeces.

I cleaned it up a bit, but you get the drift. And anyway it’ll mean nothing unless you’re a kid of the Eighties who remembers the TV ads featuring Toby, a naked peanut-shaped humanoid creature wearing a bow tie, telling us there’s a ‘hazelnut in every bite’. (Look him up kids) .

To be honest, I was surprised the Topic bar took so long to be discontinued, given its incredibly dull name.

It’s as if the marketing people just gave up. Maybe there was something good on telly the day they met up for that confectionary bar naming meeting.

I mean, there are some good, bad, and incredibly left-field names for chocolate bars but that takes the biscuit.

Celestial bodies were all the rage at one point. Mars bar, Milky Way, Galaxy… the exotic space/chocolate association was weirdly natural. Possibly hinting at an out of this world flavour. That said one celestial body was never going to get a look in. Few, I’d argue, would rush out to stick their tongue in Uranus products, no matter how brightly coloured the packaging.

But Topic bar!?! I checked the dictionary definition. Topic: ‘A matter dealt with in a text, discourse, or conversation.’

I can see you salivating already.

What next? The ‘Agenda’ bar, the ‘Issue’ stick, or what about an ‘Any Other Business’ selection box?

There’s a few sweets that have bitten the dust. Every street corner when I was a kid had eight-year-olds with candy cigarettes hanging from their bottom lip. There were even liquorice pipes for the posh kids, the bowl of which was encrusted in hundreds and thousands to look like smouldering ash! Can’t imagine why they were discontinued.

I thought they had stopped making Texan Bars too. It was an extremely tough and sticky chew. Apparently they are still doing the rounds, but only within the NHS. Dentists use them to extract fillings. Bite and pull. Takes out a filling every time… just like they did in 1975.