Well, that’s it. Christmas is finally here. Like it or not, we’re all going to spend the next six weeks being relentlessly battered about the face by suffocatingly twee Christmas adverts. This is how it’s always been, and the first sighting of the John Lewis Christmas ad means that we’ve now passed the point of no return. But what should we make of this year’s offerings? Let’s take a look at the five biggest hitters.
JOHN LEWIS
Announced by Lily Allen on Twitter this morning with all the bewildering awestruck solemnity of the birth at the start of The Lion King, this year’s John Lewis ad is a bit of a departure. Yes, there’s still the sort of treacly piano ballad that sounds like an unnecessary aural representation of everything that Etsy has ever sold, but there’s also a cartoon. A deliberately old-fashioned, Disney-style cartoon about a bear and a rabbit trekking through the woods in winter. The rabbit is sad, for it knows that the bear will hibernate and miss Christmas. So the rabbit buys the bear an alarm clock so it can enjoy all the woodland festivities.
But questions remain. Does John Lewis sell alarm clocks that go off on specific days now? Given the trouble that the animals have unwrapping their presents, how did they wrap them? Or pay for them? Are you allowed to take foxes into John Lewis now? Will Lily Allen tweet this excitedly if she gets to re-record the I Feel Like Chicken Tonight jingle? Why doesn’t the bear eat the rabbit? After all, it’s just been aggressively forced out of a state of metabolic suppression. By rights, this advert should end with the bear either eating everything in sight, or having sex with the rabbit because that’s obviously what the rabbit wants.
You know how long the new M&S Christmas advert lasts for? Two full minutes. Think of all the things you could do in two minutes. Fix a leaky tap. Donate to charity. Fall in love. But no, you’d rather just watch Rosie Huntington-Whiteley stumble aimlessly through a series of German expressionist Alice in Wonderland-style scenarios while dressed in a variety of practical outfits, wouldn’t you? It all seems so redundant. All any M&S advert needs to say is: “M&S: buy a sandwich from us on your way home because you can’t be faffed to cook tonight”. Anything more is a waste.
BOOTS
Oh, I don’t like the look of this young hoodlum. He’s wearing a hoody. He’s monosyllabic. Is he knocking on doors and running away? Is he shoplifting? Is he stealing a bicycle? Is he … is he sneaking into hospitals and tipping old ladies out of wheelchairs? What a terrible indictment of modern Britain. Except – wait. He wasn’t doing any of that. He’s actually leaving Christmas presents for his friends, because they either looked after his sick grandmother or just happen to be quite attractive. Hoodies are OK after all! Clearly he got the money to buy all these presents by happy-slapping pensioners and dealing soft drugs, but let’s not dwell on that. Christmas!
MORRISONS
Perhaps the most unsettling of all this year’s offerings. Ant and Dec sit down at a table overladen with glistening festive food and watch an animated gingerbread man perform a song about the comparative inexpensiveness of groceries from Morrisons to the tune of Be My Guest from Beauty and the Beast. And then, in what I suspect is a clever comment on the cruel machinations of the entertainment industry, Dec eats the gingerbread man. It’s a horrific ending to an advert that seems to delight in the notion of food waste, and all it makes me want to do is watch Mr Burns sing See My Vest again.
DFS
Santa Claus is tired. It’s his day off, and he really doesn’t want to spend it shopping for furniture, but his sofa is broken so he must. He visits his nearest DFS factory, because he apparently doesn’t understand the difference between a factory and a shop. The industrial setting reminds him of his Christmas workshop, and he starts marching around with a clipboard officiously. Then, in this weird fugue state, he’s convinced to become a DFS delivery man. Santa delivers sofas now. Christmas is cancelled. Weird.
itsAwholeLOADofJD! 