Patronising, embarrassing, lurid - the high street stores have got their Christmas ads all wrong

A quality article from Charlie Brooker in The Guardian:

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Well, on TV it is anyway. At this time of year, every ad break turns into an extended brainwashing exercise as one campaign after another hammers its way into your head by dint of sheer repetition alone.

"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas" is, of course, the theme song of this year's offering from Argos, which affects solidarity with the average hard-shopping prole by depicting the high street as a hellish dog-eat-dog war zone straight out of Saving Private Ryan, the only thing missing being the occasional eye-popping shot of a young soldier getting his leg blown off - which, to be fair, wouldn't really be in keeping with the Yuletide spirit.

Stephen Fry's voiceover complains that Christmas should be "more ... well, Christmassy", at which point it cuts to a shot of an Argos delivery van pulling up outside a suburban home, as though that's the very essence of all things "Christmassy", which it isn't. The birth of Christ, a crowded train, a party-hatted boss drunkenly molesting a co-worker - that's Christmassy, you idiots.

Apart from Boots, whose "Here Come the Girls" celebration-of-vapidity is at least entertaining, all the high street stores seem to have got it a bit wrong this year. Iceland's ads are the most lurid, as they continue to hawk an increasingly terrifying range of oven-ready vol-au-vents (Loaded Prawns, Filo Parcels, Squirrel-and-Onion Swastikas and so on) using the dream-team combo of Kerry Katona and a Nolan sister. These ads precisely evoke the queasy sensation of drifting off in front of a bloated 90-minute festive edition of Birds of a Feather following an over-rich pudding and three Baileys too many. And maybe that's the point.

Celebrities feature heavily in supermarket ads. Asda continues its intensely patronising "stars in the aisles" campaign, in which well-loved faces slum it among the downtrodden workforce. Sainsbury's dumps Jamie Oliver into a sort of Dickensian pop-up book filled with miniature slaves. Morrisons has really dropped the ball, with an excruciating advert called "Lulu's Christmas Dream", in which Lulu wanders through a cosy, snow-caked market town peopled exclusively by a baffling combination of minor celebrities. There's Gabby Logan carving her turkey, Nick Hancock having a snowball fight, Denise van Outen giggling on a balcony, Diarmuid Gavin winking at Lulu as though recalling a particularly grubby one-night stand, and Alan Hansen filling his trolley with 500 tins of Miniature Heroes, all of it backed by Take That's Shine. It's like a low-rent Ocean's Thirteen. If it had used Alan Partridge instead of Lulu, and (I Believe in Miracles) You Sexy Thing by Hot Chocolate instead of Take That, it could have been the best Christmas commercial ever. As it is, it's just embarrassing.

Speaking of embarrassments, the Spice Girls have managed to imbue their long-awaited comeback with all the glamour and class of a hurried crap in a service station toilet by whoring themselves out to Tesco. The first instalment, in which the Girl Power quartet try to hide from each other while shopping for presents, represents a important landmark for the performing arts: Posh Spice becomes the first human being in history to be out-acted by a shopping trolley.

Marks & Sparks win a nerd rosette from me for managing to authentically replicate the style and tone of late-50s/early-60s movie trailers, although the undertone of its commercial is a tad suspect: it took me three or four viewings to realise it, but Twiggy and co are desperately showing off in a bid to impress Antonio Banderas, who looks a bit like a CEO in a brothel trying to decide which prostitute he fancies using. I keep expecting him to point out two of them at the end, and for the advert to cut suddenly to a grotesque scene where both of them pleasure him at once in a velvet boudoir, filmed in the same style as the slow-mo food porn it uses for its other commercials. All of which isn't very Christmassy either. But maybe that's just me.

Said ad is accompanied by yet another vintage song: It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. Presumably the ad agencies hold some sort of summit each year in the run-up to Christmas, where they negotiate who has the right to use each track, just so there's no duplication. "You can have Winter Wonderland provided we get to keep Wizzard." That kind of thing. Old-fashioned crooning is in vogue this year. I'm expecting the Bing Crosby/David Bowie take on Little Drummer Boy to make an appearance next time round - in a Currys ad, accompanying a shot of a wireless inkjet printer or something. You know. In keeping with the original sentiment of the song.