Most likely you remember Nicole. Also her father, Papa. "Nicole!" Papa would say. "Papa!" Nicole would answer. Theirs was not, perhaps, one of the most conversationally complex father-daughter relationships ever to be realised on the small screen. Yet, for a while, they were the topic of intense national fascination.
Intense and scrupulous. When it became apparent that the actress who played Nicole did not, in real life, drive a Renault Clio, as she did in the ads, newspapers reported the fact with a mix of astonishment and hurt dismay.
Technically, of course, there was no reason why she should drive a Clio any more than Bruce Forsyth should really shop for his furniture at Courts. Just because these people endorse these things, it doesn't necessarily mean they really use them. But such was the strength of people's attachment to the Papa/Nicole narrative that they couldn't bear to think of Nicole, at any point in her day, in a clapped-out Peugeot.
Usually with car advertisements, people recall the advertisement, but not the make of the car being advertised. You remember the perilous mountain road, the landslide, the fireball. But the car that emerged, all shiny, at the end of it - was that a Fiat? A Citroen? A Saab? Nope, it's gone.
The Papa/Nicole Clio advertisements were a triumphant exception. The name of the car seemed to come to the lips as quickly as the words Papa and Nicole. They sold 300,000 of the original model. A revamp three years ago sold 200,000 more. It's the best-selling Renault ever in the United Kingdom. Papa and Nicole may have appeared to spend all their time on trysts, but on the quiet they were among the canniest car-shifters in recent automotive history.
A third Clio is now among us, substantially restyled to reawaken our interest. It's fair to say that the passing decade has not been altogether kind to the original model. Like the VW Golf, it had its day of pomp, but it looks distinctly aged now, forced to sit out a whole new round of exciting developments pertaining to rounded body parts and friendly headlamp clusters. It's quite possible to confuse an old Clio with a Mini Metro - not a fate one would wish upon any car.
Meanwhile, rivals have swept in, offering cars that do the Supermini thing with the vigour and energy that were once the preserve of the Clio. What do you suppose Papa jumps into these days, in order to get to a saucy assignation on the other side of town? Whisper it, but my hunch is he probably uses a Toyota Yaris.
We'll probably never know, of course, because Papa is in retirement now. (He was last seen marrying off his daughter in 1998.) He's been replaced by a less personal campaign, based on the idea of the Clio as a potential restorative for lost "va-va-voom".
But in order to stand any chance of working on our va-va-vooms, the Clio has to replenish its own, and it does this successfully in a redesign which, according to Renault, has binned or refashioned 50% of the last Clio's structural and bodywork components. Out goes the old nose and the old slightly floppy bonnet, and in comes the new, taut and short front end, with a fat Renault badge suspended between two vaguely op-art grilles. The back is chopped off almost sheer, with the hatch window rounding off into the roof, making the car seem still more compact and manoeuvrable than it was.
Inside, the dashboard has been entirely made over, but with a view to becoming simple and clean rather than setting your heart on fire. There's a new, slightly trendy-looking, double-hooded housing for the instruments, but even so, the degree to which the interior of the Clio will stoke your va-va-voom will largely depend on how you feel about the usual grey plastic components arranged in the usual style and order.
It's definitely perky to drive, though. I was loaned the 1.6 version (one of seven engine options) which, if not exactly rally-ready, was quick off the mark and effortless to wrestle around the place. The verb "to nip" could have been invented for the Clio. It's an errand-running town car most of all, but it's firm and insulated enough that you could stand to be in it for long periods if you needed to.
In order to annoy its competitors, the Clio comes with a number of features generally only seen on bigger cars. A rain and light sensor, for instance, spares you the onerous duty of turning on the windscreen wipers and headlights. But the greater selling point, probably, will be the car's economy levels. Buy the 1.2 version and, Renault allege, you'll get more miles per gallon out of it than from any other car in the class. Then again, a recent poll of American motorists put petrol mileage 20th in a list of 35 things that Americans say they are looking for in a new car.
Va-va-voom, specifically, wasn't among the options, but you sense it would come a lot higher up. The Clio delivers its share of that. The message is still the same from the Papa and Nicole days: it's a goer, but on the quiet.
