In June 2023 the confectioner Allens announced that they were ceasing production of Fantales the caramel and chocolate toffee sweets wrapped in mini biographies of film stars, best enjoyed as you waited for a film to begin.
I recall well my first encounter with them as a 10 year old newly arrived Australian at the Hornsby cinema in what was then the outskirts of Sydney. The caramel and chocolate was a similar flavour to caramel street sweets I used to have in Sri Lanka, but the lozenge was much more jaw-breaking. And I had encountered no wrapping like the truly telegraphic but absorbing bios in the tiny script in black against a yellow background. It didn’t matter that the bios were often of movie stars from the heydays of Hollywood – Tab Hunter, Bette Davis, Joan Blondell, John Wayne, with occasionally more contemporary stars like Sandra Dee or Bobby Darin.
