Tesco’s weird take on Irishness, Boots’ night-bus terror: The Christmas TV ads, 2022

Spar

This is an ad in which various people, while larking in a carefree Yuletide manner with friends and family, notice things nearby – green sails on boats, lights on buildings, a formation of drones, a mill wrapped in a green ribbon, discarded clothing – that all resemble Spar’s tree logo. Basically, the ad is positing that the Spar logo is a naturally occurring phenomenon embedded in the very fabric of reality. Which is exactly the type of thing you might think to yourself when you’re buying Rizlas at a 24-hour Spar at 3am.

Boots

A young woman in a big scarf picks up a pair of glasses left behind on the bus and does what any of us would do. She puts them on. Suddenly the world is transformed. Outside the window a leafless tree is suddenly covered in Christmas lights. The drab and grey commuters around her become festive revellers, and the man to her right is turned into an anthropomorphic moose in a Christmas jumper. She shrieks with fear and strangles him with her big scarf before he can turn on her. She is jailed for many years.

[ Aldi’s Christ the Carrot, Amazon’s fake kindness: The Christmas TV ads, 2021 ]

Okay, that last bit didn’t happen. I’m trying to make a point here about the way Christmas-ad creators are irresponsible with their Yuletide whimsy. If a man sitting next to me on the bus suddenly turned into a smiling moose I’m pretty sure I’d beat him to death in a frenzy of confusion and terror and not just be delighted by the joy of Christmas. Anyway, in the actual ad the glasses give the young woman the ability to intuit what her loved ones want for Christmas. It’s all stuff she can get from Boots. Very convenient.

Disney

This is the story of a delightful animated child who is perturbed by the imminent arrival of a new sibling. She senses, accurately in my opinion, that this interloper will be a drain on the family resources and that she will be no longer kept in the manner to which she is accustomed. She is given a Mickey Mouse doll by her older brother in an attempt to distract her from this harsh reality and, possibly, the contents of their parents’ will. But she’s no fool.

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Eventually their mother returns from hospital, and for a moment I think the twist is going to be that the baby is also going to be a Mickey Mouse doll. (One of my nephews is a Mickey Mouse doll.) Sadly, they choose a different road. The new sibling is a large-eyed human baby, and our heroine is faced with a stark choice: reject this child and insist it be returned or form an alliance and vow to destroy the rest of the family together instead. She makes the latter choice, offering the baby the Mickey Mouse doll as tribute. It’s delightful.

[ ‘No one belongs on the naughty list.’ This should be big news: The Christmas TV ads, 2020 ]

Unfortunately, then the words “From Our Family to Yours” appear on the screen, above the brand names Disney, Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel, and I feel compelled to search my body for a Disney logo.

Tesco

Tesco has decided to present its ad as a campaign for the Christmas Party, a group whose hedonistic political ideology feels murky and vaguely Johnsonian. What fascinates me most, however, is the way Tesco has slightly modified the Irish version of the ad. It’s basically the same except for a clip of the Cliffs of Moher instead of the Cliffs of Dover, a gratuitous reference to The Late Late Toy Show, the word “madra” and an Irish-accented voiceover. Is that it? Are they the only differences between our two nations? Tesco thinks so.

Aldi

An anthropomorphic root vegetable with tiny black eyes as dark as his soul (if he even has a soul), Kevin the Carrot has always been a perplexing figure in Christian theology, because of his crazed desire to be eaten as part of a sumptuous, Aldi-purchased feast. In this year’s instalment the twisted tuber has been accidentally left behind by his family, who are, inexplicably, going to Paris on a human plane. Kevin is left alone in his surprisingly enormous house, much like his namesake Kevin the Human from the child-neglect fantasia Home Alone.

[ Marks & Spencer’s sick filth should be banned: The Christmas TV ads, 2019 ]

Like Kevin the Human, he proceeds to wreak painful torture upon a burglar who turns out to be Santa Claus. Let’s face it, Santa has long been playing a dangerous game with his festive break-ins. But such is Kevin’s general incompetence that he eventually finds himself launched through the air and into the crotch of a snowman. It’s not as sexy as I’ve made this sound. Then his family return, and they are all reunited at the dinner table as Santa Claus eats his food friends in the background.

John Lewis

Look, I get why people like this ad. Its depiction of a middle-aged man painstakingly learning how to skateboard before eventually being introduced to his skateboarding foster daughter is, on the face of it, very moving. Yet nobody finds it moving when I train for weeks on end to beat children at sports. Where’s my uplifting cover version?

Amazon

A father is perplexed by his daughter’s obsession with a snow globe that she carries everywhere. In the end, like any good modern parent, he decides to fuel her delusions by re-creating the inside of the snow globe in their greenhouse, with a Christmas tree, a tiny house, a snowman in a rocking chair and, most crucially, fake snow, created by a shredder he has purchased from Amazon. Because she’s unlikely to see real snow thanks to companies like Amazon.

Marks & Spencer

I call this one I Have a Beak But I Must Scream. Dawn French is now a flying plastic fairy who lives in a tree. She has the gift of life and decides that she’s going to make a friend. (Side note: this is also how parenthood works.) She chooses to grant sentience to Ducky, the woollen chew toy of the household dog. Ducky does not, as you might expect, instantly begin shrieking in pain and terror at her newfound self-awareness.

[ Be afraid, be very afraid: The Christmas TV ads, 2018  ]

Which is weird, because one of her button eyes is hanging by a thread, her “stuffing” is sticking out, and her existence out of nothing raises all sorts of terrifying questions about the nature of consciousness. At no point does she shriek “But where was I before!?” or “How can I speak? Did they teach me to speak in hell!?” Furthermore, Ducky is also now fully aware of the four shaggy limbs of doggy torment racing towards her, whereas before she rested in a void of ignorance.

None of this is addressed. Instead Dawn French narrates beautiful food at Ducky until I’m shouting at the screen, “Ducky has no internal organs – and if she does they’re made out of wool. How is she going to digest that food? You haven’t thought this through, Dawn French!”