Nothing says Christmas like a giant CGI Venus Flytrap. That, at least, is the thinking behind John Lewis’s playful new Christmas ad, which arrives on our screens today and features one of the carnivorous plants, known as Snapper, grown from seed by an eight-year-old lad named Alfie (Teddy Holton-Frances, a natural).
Rather than an outright heartbreaker like last year’s Beginners, featuring a main painstakingly learning to skateboard in order to bond with a new foster-daughter, or 2020’s mostly animated Give a Little Love, showing small acts of kindness, this is a joyful exhortation to embrace new traditions. It’s backed by tenor Andrea Bocelli singing a cheerful, specially-commissioned Italian pop aria, Festa (Celebration). Though it’s not without pathos.
Alfie thinks he’s growing a conventional Christmas tree but when his seedling sprouts trigger hairs and digestive glands he’s pretty happy. Like Audrey 2, the flytrap in Little Shop of Horrors, only not so bloodthirsty, Snapper grows and grows, becoming steadily more disruptive and eventually too big for the living room of the house Alfie shares with his sister, mum and gran. Snapper is cast out into the cold, but Alfie still loves him. (He is a ‘he’, according to a John Lewis spokesperson.)
On Christmas morning Alfie impulsively dashes outside and lays his present at Snapper’s snow-dusted roots. Moved, his family follows suit. Snapper pounces on the gifts like a hydra-headed Labrador attacking an unguarded Christmas buffet, wolfing them down with his many mouths. Then he basically spits the unwrapped gifts back into the family’s hands.
It’s unconventional, to say the least: a triffid gobbing pressies at you. But also rather clever. After all, the newest Christmas tradition the UK has adopted is the sanctification of the annual John Lewis Christmas advert, which has become part of the festive calendar along with the monarch’s speech and the carol concert from King’s. Each year the company has to up its game in the face of witty, kooky ads from rival retailers.
Outright schmaltz won’t cut it after the horrors of the past few years and a continuing cost of living crisis. Christmas ads from all the major retailers this year contain the suggestion of difficulty or moderate hardship – to be overcome, of course. Hannah Waddingham et al ditch the traditions they can’t be bothered with for M&S; the lights go out on Graham Norton’s Waitrose party; three old women recapture their youth for Amazon. Not too much is made of the fact that Alfie lives in a household otherwise apparently composed of single women, but it’s noticeable.
Snapper, dreamed up by Saatchi and Saatchi and brought into being by creative collective Megaforce, isn’t a surrogate dad. But he is a larky, expressive presence, decked out in Yuletide red and green, and easily converted into merch, from plush toys to children’s books. There’ll be a 15-foot Snapper outside John Lewis on Oxford Street from today, and another at Kew Gardens outside the Carnivorous Plant House. Apart from the two-minute origin story of the main ad, Snapper will appear in various comic shorts featuring products from John Lewis’s suppliers.
Of course, you may abide by another modern Christmas tradition and reject the very notion of enjoying ads designed to sell us stuff. In which case, may I direct you to comedian Simon Brodkin’s YouTube Channel where you can see his peerless spoof Christmas ad from 2022, with its tagline: “Supermarkets. Pretending to care.”
