A potted history of John Lewis Christmas adverts
So it's come to this. A John Lewis Christmas Advert rundown...
From 2010 to 2018 I dutifully slaughtered the new John Lewis Christmas advert because, well, for the same reasons that everyone else - even the bloody Guardian - writes about it, as if the arrival of 120 seconds of marketing content is akin to the Christmas Truce. After 2018 I gave up. Nothing I could ever say would make any difference: John Lewis would dutifully, lazily fart out another couple of minutes of trademark emotional sludge set to a winsome cover version - whether I wrote about it or not.
This year they seem to have broken the mould somewhat. In the place of anthropomorphised animals and a band-singer-gone-solo dirge we have [checks notes] a terrifying, carnivorous opera singing plant. Pick the fucking bones out of that, Marksies.
It’s a break from the past I’ll give them that. Having presumably discussed every possible cutesy animal going, it was a bold move from whomever suggested a triffid would be the peg on which John Lewis’ Q4 profits would hang. Paired with the frantic operatics, it comes off as a cross between a BBC3 sitcom, Little Shop of Horrors and what might happen if you typed ‘John Lewis ad but fucking mental’ into an AI chatbot.
It doesn’t really make any sense, but, in 2023, what does? This is, after all, competing with a Home Secretary trying to start a race riot and news that Boris Johnson asked scientists if Covid could be cured by directing a hairdryer up the nose.
So maybe we should welcome this 120 seconds of in(s)anity - after all, at least they’re not trying to make us cry anymore. If you have the time, inclination and sufficient well of mental wellbeing, why not take a trip down memory lane at a dozen or so previous efforts and see if you can pinpoint the year I lost my marbles.
2018: Bohemian Rhapsody
I am immune to the supposed delight of other peoples’ children, specifically the sound of the them singing. The sound of children laughing – heck, even my dormant hormones stir a little in their long slumber – but children singing? Genuinely horrible noise. Children are rubbish singers. And so it goes with this John Lewis / Waitrose Bohemian Rhapsody advert.
What have we got here? There’s some kids (awwww!) singing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, something about robots… it’s a spot of blah because John Lewis and Waitrose are doing something with their branding and everyone must know about it. The tagline interests me – “For us it’s personal” – because this advert has hit the airwaves, probably at some obscene price, just as John Lewis is sacking 270 of its staff. I’m sure the irony is not lost on them.
John Lewis, of course, is usually in hibernation at this time of year, waking only to spunk twelvety billion pounds on an advert in which a:
CGI / old / young;
person / animal / creature;
is sad / is sad / is sad.
When John Lewis ventures out of its natural Yuletide habitat its adverts generally involve children in some way, so to deliver a precision-guided arrows of consumerism straight to the hearts of weepy parents with crap drawings on their fridges, emotions utterly shot through years of looking after small humans and deep, deep wallets full of cash unspent on the nights out, city breaks and romantic holidays rendered impossible by enslavement to their offspring.
What else are they spend money on, but expensive and unnecessary kitchenware, expensive and unnecessary aspirational food, and expensive and unnecessary bed linen, straight from your friendly John Lewis and Waitrose stores?
And because this advert has a lot of money and a John Lewis logo lavished on it, people on social media are simultaneously evacuating their bladders, orgasming and weeping at the same time – as if they have swapped all of their mental faculties for one big gland that responds solely to emotions, pinballing from weepy mawkishness to an almost feral desire to spend £38 on a selection of herb-infused olive oils for that woman at work they don’t like.
So forgive me if I don’t join you in dabbing at your cheeks, getting slightly tumescent and feeling the need to do John Lewis’s job for them by sharing it all over social media. I know it’s not Christmas yet, despite John Lewis buying the festive season in 2012, but bah fucking humbug.
2017: Moz The Monster
So Elbow have graduated to John Lewis Christmas advert levels of fame, loveableness and National Treasure status. They’re doing a cover of The Beatles’ Golden Slumbers in the latest version of John Lewis’ festiva Agent Orange assault on Britain’s airwaves, involving a blue monster called Moz who oh who gives a flying fuck.
I’ll be honest with you, I’m losing this battle. Every year I come up with a new mode of attack on the John Lewis Christmas advert and every year they remain impassive – and then go ahead with another multi-million-spunking, heartstring-tugging bottom-lip trembler of an advert whose rough notation goes SAD-SAD-HAPPY-BUY AN EXPENSIVE BAR OF SOAP FOR SOMEONE YOU DON’T REALLY LIKE.
It’s like someone smiling as you insult them, someone impervious to your irritation who keeps doing something irritating, a zombie that doesn’t know it’s dead. Every year John Lewis rises, yawning from its annual January – November dormancy and farts another 120 seconds of vastly expensive guff into the Twittersphere.
“Oh it’s just a bit of fun,” you say. No it isn’t. It’s a wholly predictable photocopy of last year’s effort that only garners attention because the concept of John Lewis Christmas advert has generated a momentum of its own, giving lazy journos, hapless vloggers and doomed bloggers something to write about when they should be doing something more fruitful, exciting, life-affirming. Hell, just something.
2016: Buster The Boxer
John Lewis kills Santa, with help from a CGI dog ripped off from the internet.
I knew two things that bothered me about the new Christmas John Lewis advert straight away. I don’t even have to think about it any more – it’s more of an instinct, as if I’ve tuned into to some cosmic understanding of advertising and I can see the code running through it. John Lewis clearly adopts the position that if something ain’t broke it’s not worth fixing it and, while it may not actually be powered by an algorithm, you could shade it in with varying degrees of mawkishness, children, snow, animals and general naffness.
A penguin; a bear; a snowman; an old man; a cute kid – and now a dog on a trampoline. Every year sees a new (often computer-generated) focus of sad/happy sentiment.
But back to those two things in 2016’s Christmas John Lewis advert. The first is that it’s pretty much a straight rip of popular internet meme that features, er, a boxer dog on a trampoline. I can’t vouch for himn being called Boxer, but he might as well be. There used to be an advertising blog called Copycunts that called out this sort of stealinginspiration-taking, but I don’t think it goes anymore, so I’m doing the job.
Secondly, all those CGI animals. I know that we all love animals and we like to pretend they live in a Wind In The Willows-style fantasyland where they’re all mates and roll meatballs at one another and sound like Billy Crsytal and David Jason but… they’re not.
Humans destroy animals; they destroy the places animals live. Christmas, shopping, huge warehouses, massive lorries – few of these things are good news for animals. When I see Christmas John Lewis advert in which one of their trucks squashes a badger flat on the road in one of their patented festive messages I’ll print my approval.
I don’t hate Christmas. I love Christmas, but I don’t need a supermarket to fire a starting pistol for me and tell me how I’m supposed to feel about it. Imagine Theresa May, with her haunted headteacher stare, broadcasting a 100-second party political broadcast telling you sternly to enjoy Christmas and vote Conservative. That’s what it’s like. Imagine Tony Blair frowning into the camera with his cold, dead, shark-like eyes and telling you he’s not a war criminal and, by the way, merry Christmas. Imagine Nigel Farage. Just imagine him, the little shit. Ugh.
We live in an age where, apparently, we don’t like people telling us what to do. Unless that involves a department store using a computer-generated animal to make you go shopping and post soppy scrap all over Facebook celebrating your compliance with an advertising message.
2015: Man On The Moon
Ah, – the true meaning of Christmas. Vile emotional manipulation filtered through the prism of unfettered capitalism, masquerading as a kindly old spinner of yarns. If the festive period isn’t for assuaging your guilt by shedding a tear at this annual emo-porn debacle, then I don’t know what is.
Why have we ceded control of our emotional state over to advertisers? Why do we feel the need to drip this incontinence all over social media? Why do we have to be told by adverts how we’re meant to feel about loneliness of elderly people at Christmas?
Lest we forget, the only reason this advert exists is so that you go into John Lewis – bereft of ideas for Christmas gifts – and spend a hundred quid on a load of tasteful, expensive shit no-one actually wants. That’s literally the only reason it exists: not because John Lewis are worried about old people being sad over the festive period.
I do not believe that anyone who works in advertising is evil. But an advert functions not as a cuddly expression of collective will – but of dispassionate, monolithic need; a need for increased turnover, revenue, profits. A giant maw whose only need is to be fed and simply doesn’t care about penguins, snowmen or a lonely old man.
John Lewis finally runs out of steam with the 593rd iteration of its cover-versioned sad-sad-sad-happy routine. A tired, misfiring cry-wank of a glory-years photocopy.
2014: Monty The Penguin
It’s that time of year when John Lewis returns to not simply tug at your heart-strings, but tighten them to such a degree they nearly snap and then pull at the with the force of a scramjet, thereby ripping them out of your chest cavity and leaving a trail of bloody viscera across your living room.
Here’s what I identified – and predicted 100% correctly – as the main ingredients for a John Lewis advert last year, followed with my assessment of this year’s effort.
• Animals – Check. This year it’s a penguin called Monty who has attracted his own hashtag, so simpering berks can tweet their soppiness to a disinterested nation.
• Sadness – Check. Monty is sad because he doesn’t have a mate. Probably because he’s a penguin living in Upper Forty-Five-Penceborough.
• Snow – Check. We see Monty and Sam (for that is the young lad’s name) larking around in some snow, probably filmed in August.
• Anthropomorphism – Check. We have a penguin behaving as if it were a human. And is actually a cuddly toy.
• Love – Check. Sam loves Monty. Monty wants to love another penguin, but can’t. Because he’s a penguin and therefore has no concept of emotions. Although he can, because he’s anthropomorphised. Sam gives Monty a mate – she is called Mabel. Both have their own Twitter profiles, for God’s sake.
• Nice visuals – Check. One million quid’s worth.
• A cover of a sad song – Check. Tom Odell weeping John Lennon’s Real Love.
You could set your clock by John Lewis adverts – not simply by when they turn up, but exactly what ingredients and in what order. It’s an equation, refined and reduced by lots of cash, but an equation nonetheless, designed as dispassionately and as calculatedly as engine mapping on a new car.
Weep and you weep at maths.
2013: The Bear and the Hare
Keane made a good song once, believe it or not – it’s this one sung here by Lily Allen and is called Somewhere Only We Know. A bear and a hare are having a romance, by the look of it. Wonder how that works.
This is getting ridiculous now. Forget reality shows, this is the most absurdly exploitative television gets in the 21st century. Where do we go from here?
The last time I wept at anything I saw on television was about ten years ago, watching a Simon King documentary about two orphaned cheetah cubs that he’d rescued. After two years of raising them by hand King decides that they should have the chance of the life they were born for, and releases them into the wild. Shortly afterwards one of them is killed and King is distraught when he finds the body, the twin cheetah mewling in confusion. It came at a time in my life when I’d recently lost someone and I cried my eyes out for about half an hour.
Next year John Lewis will just be showing that clip, accompanied by Leonard Cohen singing I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry – with a picture of a cashmere scarf at the end of it.
2012: Snowman
We all know the form by now. An effort that is fairly explicitly trying to make you cry. A precision-guided Cupid’s Arrow aiming to shatter your emotional aorta and cause a blockage of sludgey mawk in your left ventricle. A psychological heart attack in advert form.
In this one a snowman – bereft of a comedic genital carrot and possibly related to the Weeping Angels as no-one ever seems to see it move – fetches some gloves for his missus, requiring a massive trek across, apparently, a bit of England that resembles the Alps.
Next year will be Barber’s Adagio For Strings as a series of rostrum-camera’d sepia photos of beloved personalities who have passed away (Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecambe, the Dad’s Army cast etc) ticks over in a starlit sky above a donkey sanctuary.
2011: The Long Wait
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.
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.
2010: Always A Woman
The world is sitting with big, fat tears rolling down their faces watching this advert for John Lewis, at least that’s what’s the internet is telling us.
Really? The first time I became aware of it was when people started telling us about it on the Suggest an AdTurd form and my housemate started throwing things at the telly.
The first thing I thought was Bill Fucking Joel. I’m not sure how lyrics like:
She can kill with a smile / She can wound with her eyes
or;
She can ruin your faith with her casual lies
really invite me to buy into this touching life story. To me it suggests deep duplicity and cruelty and, of course, she also ‘steals like a thief’.
That’s just for starters though. Because she will also ‘carelessly cut you and laugh while you’re bleedin’. This woman sounds awful! She’s a sociopath! How many teasmaids is that going to sell?