Best and worst 2011 Christmas adverts
Time was we'd judge the start of the Christmas season by the appearance of crackers in shops; nowadays it's the appearance of the first Christmas adverts.
With fully 50 days before 2011's Yuletide there were Christmas adverts on our tellies; filmed in the unseasonally pleasant September and October across the country. Freddie Flintoff in a duffel coat, surrounded by fake snow, santas and mince pies. In St Albans. In September.
So, what festive delights await us this year? M+S had ditched Twiggy and Danni; the Sainsburys ad constitutes Jamie Oliver's swansong; what would John Lewis come up with this time?
Absurdly, Xmas adverts for the big supermarkets and department stores have become event television. But how big - and shit - have these events been this year?
By my money they've mainly got it right. Iceland has backed away from the insanity of last year's Donovan adverts; Marksies has ditched its middle-class smugathons; the overall tone is of restraint, when compared to last year anyway.
It's not all good. The Boots girls are still coming - perhaps due to the entry of Ann Summers into our advert marketplace - and there are still two truly diabolical efforts here.
Familiarity - and you can bet you'll become very familiar with these ads - is sure to breed contempt, even fury. By the fifth time you've seen the new Littlewoods or Toys R Us ads you'll be ready to hurl your chestnuts at the telly.
But with any luck this year's crop of Christmassy ads should leave you relatively unmolested come Christmas morning. Just pray no-one has a Halfords-style reaction when unwrapping presents.
John Lewis
Celebs: None
It seems to be John Lewis' modus operandi to make viewers cry these days, with their ads ploughing a fairly shameless furrow that seems to work for them.
I think the strategy pretty canny. It's a rich seam of nostalgia, sentimentality and general warm fuzziness - all the stuff that makes Christmas what it is.
Next year's advert will apparently feature a sickly kitten being stroked in front of an open fire by Terry Wogan for a full 120 seconds, while Gary Jules' Mad World plays in the background.
Turd rating: One
Sainsburys
Celebrities: Jamie Oliver
"Goto Sainsbury's for a magical Christmas feast," says this last effort from Jamie Oliver on behalf of the upmarket supermarket.
Nice idea, nice execution. Minimum Oliver. Good work.
Turd rating: One and a half
Iceland
Celebs: Stacey Solomon
Where was there to go after last year's Xmas Iceland offering, featuring Jason Donovan as a perverted ringmaster? Well, back to basics really. Christmas parties, finger food, Stacey Solomon's enormous face - I'm fairly unsure Stacey and her family will be tucking into gammon over Xmas, mind.
I take exception to the horrible new Solomonised recording of Driving Home For Christmas - a song I always make sure I have on a CD when actually heading home on Christmas Eve.
Not especially egregious then - and a thankful step back from the Lynchian horror of last year - but I doubt any celebrity would ever be seen dead entering Iceland, which seems to be ever closer to some sort of underclass shopping experience every time I hazard upon one.
Turd rating: Two
Waitrose
Celebs: Delia Smith, Heston Blumenthal
I'm a bit nonplussed by this one, featuring Delia and Heston. It hinges everything on four distinct products and doesn't really compel me to find out more.
It looks a million bucks - a bit Downton Manor via Heath Robinson and Tim Burton - but it doesn't feel especially cosy.
A bit chilly, all told, like a Heston artichoke and air-dried Haribo truffle in liquid nitrogen.
Turd rating: Two
Morrisons
Celebs: Andrew Flintoff, Bruce Forsyth
Hmm. Jury's still out on this one. I suppose Freddie still has enough goodwill from the Ashes in 2005 and 2009 to get away with this - and some good decent, honest, thick Lancashire shtick probably doesn't do any harm, although it's a bit much that they actually correct Flintoff's awkward delivery.
Nice cameo from Brucey at the end and a fairly strong message - Freddie like pies! Legend! Meat! Christmas! Pastry! Brulliant! - unlike many of the ads featured here.
Turd rating: Two
Marks and Spencer
Celebs: X-Factor cannon fodder
It's fairly apparent that M+S and John Lewis are competing to be the winterval shopping experience and Marksies has really wheeled out the big guns for this X-mas effort.
Riding the X-Factor bandwagon has brought its own problems that rather trouble me (the singers either got a paltry £3K each or nothing, depending on who you listen to - Merry F'ing Xmas) but as an ad in itself it's well executed and reasonably inoffensive.
I just find it hard to shake the feeling that we're all implicit in an evil plan to make berks like Simon Cowell even more filthy rich than they are already. From somewhere in Brighton comes the sounds of Johnnie Robinson gently weeping.
Turd rating: Three
Argos
Celebs: None that I'm aware of
A novel, decent conceit but I'm not sure why a family of sperm are striding around shopping centres looking for Christmas presents.
There's one extremely strange - and rather disturbing - aspect to this. "Mmm, eggnog," says Father Sperm, Homer Simpson-style, absent-mindedly.
"Mmm, Bieber," says Ma Sperm, appreciatively. Actually, more than appreciatively. Lasciviously, you could almost say.
Now, I suspect Bieber is legal, but probably only just. What's more he looks about four. Just imagine the Dad lusting after Hermione Granger and see how you feel about that.
Mmm, Granger...
Turd rating: Three
Halfords
Celebrities: None
Nice idea, nice execution but this is a terrible assault on the senses - the sort of thing the CIA used to blast at Manuel Noriega.
Turd rating: Three and a half
Boots
Celebrities: None that I'm aware of
I find it hard to believe that the Here Come The Girls tattoo doesn't have some sort of Pavlovian effect on half the population these days - its very presence like the foreshadowing of some horrific catastrophe.
Personally I'm inclined towards punching myself in the neck, but voiding of stomachs, noses, bladders and bowels are all empirically-proven side-effects of hearing this tune.
Since this one has a clear Great Escape theme to it I'm hoping there's a bonus ad that involved them all being taken out to the woods and machine gunned.
Turd rating: Four
Matalan
Celebrities: None
I wonder if the Wachowski Brothers ever thought that their revolutionary Bullet Time trick photography invention would ever be used to shill a discount supermarket chain in a bizarre Christmas advert.
I'm guessing not, just as I'm guessing that no-one would have foreseen the inclusion of a mind-spinning Inception-style telescopic reality setting for an advert selling trouser-vendors.
I just find this confusing - and I don't get what it has to do with Matalan. Presumably all the people feature in it are asleep, bald, pale and nude - possibly in a gigantic monster-feeding embryo chamber.
Turd rating: Four
Toys R Us
Celebrities: None
Why, when you have a much-recognised and much-loved Christmas advert in the form of the ageless "There's a magical place; We're on our way there; With toys in their millions; All under one roof" ad, would you piss all that brand equity down the drain with a vile American rap waffling on about coupons?
Appalling. Inexplicable. Appallicable.
Turd rating: Four and a half
Littlewoods
Celebrities: None
An absolute fucking disaster, unless the aim was to reposition Littlewoods as the most low-rent outlet on the marketplace.
The ASA has actually been moved to an issue a 'we don't like it, but we have to go along with it' rebuttal to complaints that this ad is killing Santa. And replacing it with what? A bloody credit card.
If this were Japan some ritual boardroom suicides would be going on about now. Possibly metaphorical, possibly not.
I never want to see this ever again.
Turd rating: 245,835,585,299,001
So, there you have it. A rotten bunch to be sure, but this could have been so much worse. No-one would ever pretend that Fukushima was a good thing - but the alternative doesn't bear thinking about.
And, just in case you think I'm overcooking things somewhat, take a look at this - and never, ever forget.
Top ten AdTurds of 2010
Here are the top ten AdTurds of 2010, by traffic. They don't really reveal how searched-for the ads were - the VanCompare advert is only so high because several outraged Sweet fan forums linked to the site, urging other Sweet fans to attack me - but as a good rule of thumb, these ads must have stood out from the crowd.
That may be because people loved them, hated them or just wanted the chance to see them again. Either way, with certain caveats, these ads made an impression. Make of that what you will.
2. Bing adverts
5. BT - Adam and Jane 'What Happened Next' results
6. WeBuyAnyCar
7. Carlsberg's World Cup advert
Jamie Oliver’s Sainsbury’s sausage ad. (This is not where sausages come from.)
This new advert for Sainsbury's is both baffling and extremely shit.
It starts with Jamie Oliver, a person who no doubt means well but who is, ultimately, fairly annoying, strolling through the countryside, talking purposefully to no-one in particular about the concept of "taste" while wearing wellies. This cements rather clumsily the idea of natural goodness, the great outdoors and good, honest food.
As Jamie walks, he gradually runs out of breath. You half expect him to start reaching for the inhaler but thankfully he reaches his destination without dying. That destination is where the ad gets a little weird, and also becomes forehead-slappingly dumb. Because instead of this field being full of farm animals, as you might plausibly expect, it actually contains a frying pan full of cooked sausages. Before viewers have time to ask questions such as "Why?" or "How?", Jamie takes a bite from a banger and informs us that it represents:
Everything that Sainsbury's stands for, in a bite.
This advert sums up the relationship Sainsbury's would like its customers to have with their food. Rather than provide illumination about the process of husbandry and slaughter that goes into the highly mechanised process of making a sausage, Sainsbury's prefers to create the idea that fully cooked sausages magically appear in the middle of a pretty field after being apparently conjured from nothing by Jamie fucking Oliver.
Other shit things include dismal overacting and, at the end, the way Jamie gazes wistfully off to the right of the screen like a model in a 1970s Littlewoods catalogue underpants photo spread.
You might also be interested in this. Think of it as an outtake from the Oliver shoot.
Megan Thompson-endorsed, is it?
In the latest batch of Sainsbury's adverts, foul-mouthed chef Jamie Oliver has been replaced by an ordinary family, albeit one where the mother used to be an annoying Yorkshire prostitute in EastEnders. It's part of a deliberate attempt to reposition the supermarket, ramming home the idea that you can "feed your family for a fiver". Rich toffs who like vine ripened tomatoes and swordfish fillets are dead. Long live commoners who eat things like "pork chilli".
Using an apparently "real" family to get across the authenticity of your product is, of course, an entirely original idea, provided you discount the long running Oxo family commercials from the 1980s. And the recent Quorn adverts with the nagging teenage girl. And the dysfunctional BT Broadband family.
In the most recent Sainsbury's advert, called "Chilli Endorsed by Child", we are introduced to the father of the house; a slightly overweight stripy polo shirt-wearing dummy whose one saving grace is his ability to knock up peasant food for his ravenous Neanderthal clan. (His backstory, presumably, is that he is a tradesman of some sort, perhaps a heating engineer or plumber. He likes his football and the occasional pint with his mates but he never gets drunk and "would do anything for his kids". He drives a Vaxhaull Meriva.)
Here we see the pestering child motif run riot. The girl of the house starts banging on about composting and recycling, you know, like they do. One can almost sense the smug nods of recognition among the parents who make up Sainsbury's target demographic as the dialogue unfurls. In reality, of course, their kids are on MySpace threatening to stab each other.
The child whines:
What kind of pork is it?
To which the father replies:
Pork from a pig pork.
Thus his familial role as well-meaning but ultimately clueless is cemented. Still, the old bastard gets his own back. Mercifully, he refrains from tossing the pan of boiling acid gristle all over his daughter's homework and instead seizes his moment at the dinner table to give the little cow a masterclass in sarcasm.
After getting the reluctant child to admit the shit on the plate actually tastes alright he delivers the killer line.
Megan Thompson-endorsed, is it?
You sense this may culminate in violence as Megan hits puberty. Luckily the scene terminates before blood - or chilli - is spilled.
