Its the
time of the year where each day it is getting one day closer to
Christmas, meaning everyone needs to buy their Christmas presents
from the Christmas shop. Christmas!
This
means that Christmas adverts are back on the television, and it was difficult to miss the controversy surrounding this year's offerings.
There's that one with the snowmen and the singing, the one with the
singing and the dancing; plus Morrisons and Asda are leaving dads up
and down the land weeping into their Batman costumes by giving all
the credit for the Christmas Day experience to an actress. Only the
coffee firm who chose to run with an advert depicting Rasputin
fisting a lobster have escaped criticism.
For
many, the appearance of Christmas adverts is the official beginning
of Christmas itself. There are problems with this – its essentially
a construct, and therefore unlike the first swallow of the winter, or
the last man standing at an office booze-up, should not be taken as a
natural sign of this watershed. However this is rendered less moronic
compared to the excitement that seems to grasp some at the first
sighting of the Christmas advert for Fizzy-Cola-Super-Pop. My
childhood Christmases may appear to have not been as traditional as I
once imagined when I admit that not once did I spend evenings on end
gazing out of the window, awaiting the distant rumble of articulated
lorries. In fact there was a haulage firm and skip hire at one end of
the road, and the shuddering and jostling of the lorries and their
rusting chains as they hurtled through the narrow bends of the
village scared the living shit out of me; I would tend to be walking
up the road at the time to purchase sherbet from the newsagents, or
something equally wistful and nostalgic. I still occasionally run for
the panic room at DAL Towers when a tractor coasts past the bottom of
the drive to this day.
Altogether
more appropriate were the adverts they used to show for mayonnaise.
These were mercifully brief, tended only to be shown in the couple of
weeks leading up to Christmas Day, and listed the foods you could eat
with said condiment in a jaunty reworking of The Twelve Days of
Christmas. It spread the message
of the deliciousness of Christmas, and mentioned the word Ham. If
anything this was a more palatable marker for the start of the
festive season, and if you didn't like it, it was also very easy to
ignore; such was the brevity that one could simply belch loudly to
avoid it. Nowadays even the lengthiest of burps would only take you
into Act III of the latest M&S epic, in which Twiggy discovers
the powdery snowball fight she had at the beginning of the advert
distracted her from remembering to put any ruddy clothes on.
Sadly
the mayonnaise adverts have now changed and, whilst still not up to
the duration of the aforementioned epics, the simplicity has gone and
the deliciousness has been replaced with vaguely unpleasant recipe
ideas. Stir a spoonful of it into mashed potato. Spread it on top of
a chicken breast and grill it (which would surely have the same
effect as leaving a pile of mayo in the midday sun and allowing it to
dry out into a form of gone-off eggy savoury fondant icing). Spread
it on a wall and eat it with a pickled egg. Mix it with tonic and
drink it from a tramp's boot. All and none of these ideas are
suggested, and in DAL Towers at least, ignored with contempt.
In
the week when the Leveson Report will be published and Chelsea are
set to announce their next three managers, it is important we do not
lose sight of the importance of the loss of the simplistic mayonnaise
adverts. Without them we are left staring out of the window, waiting
for the lorries to roll in.
