Name: Christmas advert wars.
Age: Instigated by John Lewis in 2007.
Appearance: As emotionally manipulative as capitalism is allowed to get.
Too early. It isn’t too early. It’s November now. Christmas is only seven weeks away.
I don’t care. I don’t want to watch Christmas adverts in November. Then my advice to you would be to stop watching television, because this week the floodgates have opened.
Well, if that’s what it takes. Wait! Let me tell you what they are first. This year’s Marks & Spencer Christmas advert features celebrities such as Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Queer Eye’s Tan France diligently working hard to give their friends and families the best Christmas ever, to a syrupy piano ballad version of Meat Loaf’s I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That).
Sounds like a pretty textbook Christmas ad to me. But wait – Ellis-Bextor then torches a pile of Christmas cards and smashes up an Elf on the Shelf with a baseball bat.
Really? Yes. The message is: “This Christmas, do only what you love”.
What, arson? No, the message is that Christmas shouldn’t be a time of thankless duty. People should make their own new traditions.
And those traditions should involve breaking things that your children love, and also setting your kitchen on fire deliberately? No, I mean … hey, look, Michael Bublé’s doing the Asda advert this year.
What’s he doing in it? Kicking over a Christmas tree in front of his crying children? No, to be clear, only M&S is advocating acting in a weirdly selfish way this year. Asda has just paid Bublé to turn around and sing the first line of It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.
Bit lazy. Well, do you prefer the new Argos advert, in which a child’s doll comes to life and starts dancing?
It depends. Does the doll retain its cold, dead lifeless expression throughout the aforementioned dance? Why yes, yes she does.
Hard pass. What about Freemans, then? Its Christmas advert is just a bunch of attractive people holding up products it sells, like socks and rollerskates and perfume, for a few moments each.
I … I don’t understand. A Christmas advert that just wants to sell things to you? I know, right? No wider agenda. No attempts to go viral. It’s a Christmas advert that is recognisably an advert. This doesn’t happen any more. Christmas adverts are now short films designed to make you remember the first world war, or the concept of loneliness or how funny it would be if a dog went on a trampoline. Maybe Freemans is the future.
But that’s what I expect from a Christmas advert now, not just a handful of product shots. Maybe next year Ellis-Bextor will be hired to declare war on the north pole or something, then. That seems to be where this is all heading.
Do say: “Christmas television advert season is upon us again.”
Don’t say: “Let’s all go and blowtorch some Christmas cards!”
