As soon as the clock ticks over to November 1, some kind of magic alchemy takes place: the Hallowe’en pumpkins disappear, Bonfire Night is mysteriously forgotten and instead our supermarket shelves and TV screens are filled with Christmas galore.
Case in point: the Argos advert, which has now been released and promises more festivity than you can shake a stick at, and certainly more than I’m prepared to see two months before the big day, though supermarkets and retailers seem determined to tell me otherwise.
We are promised that this clip heralds the return of “TV toy favourites Connie and Trevor”: that would be a sentient Barbie-type doll (there may well be plenty of ads that riff on the Barbie’s massive success this year; probably less so its apocalyptic counterpart Oppenheimer) and a talking toy dinosaur. So far, so Toy Story, but Buzz and Woody never made TikTok videos like Connie appears to be doing.
On Trevor’s command “Lights, camera, coffee machine” (he's filming, of course), Connie leaps forth and, clad in a sparkly pink jumpsuit, proceeds to execute a slick dance routine that naturally takes in a decent chunk of Argos products, to the strains of Le Freak by Chic.
And certainly, if you’re looking for an atmospheric coffee machine, Sonos device or even a Shark hairdryer that doubles as a wind machine, this is the right place to be, even if the joke at the end – that Trevor has been filming himself the whole time – is rather predictable.
But is predictable a bad thing? In the world of Christmas ads, this certainly doesn’t break any new ground, even if This Country’s Charlie Cooper adds a certain amount of charm in his brief appearance as camera-dino in chief Trevor.
The motif of toys coming to life is one that we see every year (done with varying degrees of success) and even if this doesn’t reach the heights of, say, a John Lewis advert – boasting neither a heartbreaking story or a knockout central concept - it’s also a perfectly palatable thirty seconds of TV that I would chuckle at once and glaze over at thereafter. Long live Christmas.
