Every year, the most anticipated advert of the Christmas season comes courtesy of John Lewis, the favoured retailer of the nation’s middle classes. And, every year, there is keen discussion as to whether the store has pulled it off. The formula has now been in place for two decades, including a cover of a well-known song by a modish artist (this year, Sam Fender and the Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’), a central idea that might or might not tug heartstrings and, of course, a less-than-subtle plug for the company that is actually paying for the advertisement.
There have been poor John Lewis commercials in the past, but I am struggling to remember one that so cynically wallowed in tweeslop and naked commercialism. It is even more depressing because the store has hired none other than the great Kristin Scott Thomas, presumably for a Santa’s sackload of cash, to star in this lamentable effort. Scott Thomas plays a grandmother named Gloria, whose grandchildren show no interest in her fuddy-duddy board games and old-fashioned wooden toys. She is about to give up and hand over generous sums of cash for Christmas, but then, because it’s a festive advert, the wooden dog, Pickles, comes to life.
Rather than Scott Thomas fleeing in terror from the possessed trinket, the Paul Whitehouse-voiced canine gives her a lesson in the true value of the festive season. This, naturally, involves eschewing independent shops, which are dismissed as either too expensive or too gimmicky (oh, how the pot calleth the kettle black!) before Scott Thomas, accompanied by her loquacious toy, undergoes a terrifyingly fast ride in a demonic rickshaw that deposits her at the nearest John Lewis.
Expensive toys duly purchased, Scott Thomas constructs a gaudy playroom in her home and the reconciled grandchildren cavort madly, as if they have had their annual fix of E-numbers in one go. Or, alternatively, if their kindly old grandmother, revived by her brush with the dark side, has simply slipped them an E to keep them on side.
It is an astonishingly bad advert on several different levels. Fender, who has had a long-running number one single this year that nobody can even remember, is a boring choice to do a boring cover of a great song. It serves as a reminder of how much better the Stones are, even now, than the youthful pretenders to their throne. Of course, the ad is a paean to shameless consumerism – it is produced by a shop that wants to sell a lot of products – but even by these standards, it is a joyless exercise in weirdness that makes you wonder if those responsible for this travesty have ever enjoyed a family Christmas, or if they spend 25 December as they do every other day of the year, tweaking algorithms and staring blankly at TikTok.
And then there is Scott Thomas, by far the starriest name that John Lewis have recruited to sell their wares. She is one of the finest actresses that this country has produced in the past few decades; anyone who wants to see the extent of her range can either watch her on Apple TV as the brittle MI5 chief Diana Taverner or as Madame Ranyevska on stage in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. It is painfully depressing, then, to see someone of her infinite poise and intelligence being stuck in such a banal and thankless part when countless other actors could have played the role. I thought I detected a flicker of despair behind her eyes at several points, and could only empathise.
It is an astonishingly bad advert on several different levels
John Lewis have boasted that this is a bigger-budget advert than usual, and while Scott Thomas and Whitehouse do not come cheap, it suggests that the company have equated spending money with success: precisely the message that the advert attempts to preach against. There have been John Lewis commercials over the past few years that have worked extremely well, such as 2022’s exquisite ‘The Beginner’, which shows a foster father trying to ride a skateboard so that he will be able to bond with his new teenage ward. All of them were rooted in an understated emotional truth and did not feel the need to whack the viewer over the head with an unsubtle message. But this exercise in bizarre schmaltz is, frankly, terrible. You can’t always get what you want, but I hope that this failed commercial gets its fair share of abuse.
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