It's like a party on the phone!!

As old-fashioned as this looks, with 1950's-style smiling heads and
dated fonts, this billboard was in August 1987, thirty years
ago, not sixty. But it was before the days of pocketable telephones,
and before most people had any inkling of what the Internet was. In
the summer of 1987 my emailing was entirely around my own campus.
Later that year I started regular email conversations with some
friends in the USA and in the UK. But that was not from a home
computer yet. And certainly not from a telephone.

This billboard makes me think someone high up at British Telecom said
to their advertising team, "I bet those young people out there are
dying to eavesdrop on the phone, like their parents did when they were
young! Let's give them a chance! And make a few quid!!"

I imagine that Talkabout did not last very long.

I scanned this from a roll of Kodak Gold 200, shot in my Minolta X370
with its rather unsharp f/2.8 50mm lens. It is right between a string
of pictures taken in Harlow, Essex, and some more taken in London. I
think this was London, but I am not sure.

And please don't think about the logic of the instructions. It appears
that, if you were eighteen years old, you could not use the service.

It had its detractors and got discussed in the House of Commons:

hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1988/feb/09/telephone-talkabout-service