Rick Astley is well and truly back. From his renaissance as an internet meme, to duetting with the Foo Fighters, being one of this year’s Glastonbury sensations and now he’s in a Christmas ad for one of the big supermarkets. You really wouldn’t get this from any other guy.
The scene is set in a massive out of town store, with the snow coming down – clearly close to the big day – and the orange glow of the Sainsbury’s sign a beacon for distressed, last-minute shoppers.
Except unlike reality, inside all is serene. No exhausted faces, arguments through gritted teeth or desperate blokes hoping upon hope that if they walk up and down enough, the perfect gift for their partners will appear (it won’t). No fistfights over the last turkey, or wearied revellers pushing trollies piled high with plonk.
Instead, a loveable little tyke, missing most of her top deck of teeth (it’s cute, don’t worry about it), takes to the tannoy to ask a question about Santa. ‘Oh no!’ the shoppers think, she’s about to have a lifechanging revelation at a Sainsbury’s checkout… one punter drops a bag of oranges, a Father Christmas balloon pops. But all is well, she just wants to know what Santa has for his Christmas dinner.
Though for some reason, Saino's refers to him not by any of the trillion monikers he has accrued over the millennia, but as “The Big Fella”. As if he’s the focus of an end-of-the pier comedian's skit about weight loss or a Nineties football commentator referring to a player who's good in the air. And ironically, in this ad, the Santa is quite skinny.
The theme tune to Ski Sunday kicks in, for some reason, and with it in roll the puns – he’d start with a charcute-tree. Well one pun, as they're abandoned immediately after by the delivery driver who predicts he’d next tuck into a turkey crown, (goodbye cracker-style word-play, we hardly knew you). Two random punters in a greenhouse next posit how he would like Beef Wellington (“I’ve got no beef with that” – says Santa listening in from Lapland who, at least, is still on the pun train).
And with that, up pops the advert’s other big fella, Astley, in full self-deprecating mode talking about cheese. That leads to a very tortuous reference to his massive hit Never Gonna Give You Up that isn’t worth unpicking here. Then after talk of mince pies and some sort of pudding shaped like a house, everyone’s delighted, the big fellas included.
It’s all jolly and cosy fun but look closely and does it hang together at all? To quote Astley, “Never going to tell a lie and hurt you.”
