Properly, that is an outrage. There are just a few stuff you shouldn’t mess with. Roast dinners. The nationwide anthem. The John Lewis Christmas advert.
You see, the John Lewis Christmas advert has lengthy operated on an ideal components. Each November we’re handled to a luxurious mini-movie, the parts of which have lengthy since lapsed into custom. It should be festive. It will need to have a slowed down piano ballad cowl model of a nostalgic pop music. It should even be unfathomably unhappy, both as a result of it’s about an outdated man dying of loneliness on the moon (2015) or a Christmas tree being banished to the backyard as a result of it’s a bit too excitable (2023).
However most significantly – most significantly of all – it should not be about John Lewis. The entire level of a John Lewis Christmas advert is that, if folks watch it out of context and are subsequently requested what it’s promoting, they need to ideally reply ‘palliative care’ or ‘some sort of childhood trauma charity’. The purpose of a John Lewis Christmas advert is {that a} foreigner ought to be capable of watch it all through and nonetheless don’t know what John Lewis is or why his kink is making folks from Surrey cry.
However overlook that this 12 months. As a result of this 12 months, John Lewis has thrown all that within the bin. This 12 months, John Lewis has dedicated the unforgivable sin of actually setting its Christmas advert inside an precise department of John Lewis. That is fairly frankly unforgivable.
The plot of this 12 months’s John Lewis advert is as follows: a girl goes purchasing within the large Oxford Avenue John Lewis as a result of she desires to purchase her sister a gift, at which level she falls right into a twee flashback Narnia the place she revisits her sister at numerous moments throughout her life to strive to determine what to purchase her. Conveniently, all of those recollections immediately correlate with a distinct John Lewis division. There’s the reminiscence about jewelry. There’s the reminiscence about furnishings. There’s the second the place the sisters tearfully reconnect after a interval of estrangement, which it seems is definitely a reminiscence about scarves.
Disgusting, isn’t it? John Lewis appears to be below the impression that the purpose of a tv industrial is to say ‘Hello, we’re a store. You should buy issues right here’. Which – and I can’t overstate this sufficient – it isn’t. The purpose of a tv industrial, as John Lewis has made completely clear up to now, is to be prestigious and summary, and persuade probably the most unbearable folks on social media to publish performative messages about how a lot it made them cry. Everybody is aware of that.
However oh no. Apparently John Lewis has now acquired it into its head that it ought to remind us that it’s a functioning enterprise with employees and branches and inventory. What kind of wild reasoning is that this?
I have to additionally take concern with the music this 12 months. The soundtrack to the John Lewis Christmas advert is Sonnet by the Verve. Not a slowed down model of Sonnet by the Verve. Not a model of Sonnet by the Verve performed on a toddler’s toy piano and sung by a wan, tuberculosis-ridden Victorian lady like in each different John Lewis Christmas advert for the reason that daybreak of time. No, it’s actually simply Sonnet by the Verve, like somebody at John Lewis simply taped it off the radio or one thing. What’s the purpose of that?
Truthfully, it’s a superb job no person watches tv any extra, as a result of it means folks will solely see this within the type of a skippable YouTube preroll advert, and it’ll fairly frankly save John Lewis plenty of embarrassment. A Christmas advert about commerce? That not solely exhibits folks the issues it sells however what the within of its outlets appear like? It’ll by no means catch on.
I’m working actually arduous to salvage this one. Perhaps the lady within the store isn’t excited about her sister in any respect. Perhaps she tripped ahead and hit her head on a clothes rail, and what we’re truly seeing is her life flashing earlier than her eyes as she slowly bleeds out. That’s higher, isn’t it? That’s a bit extra John Lewisy.
And but I worry this isn’t the case. It truly is simply an advert a couple of lady going to a store and performing some purchasing. Let’s write this one off as a misstep, we could? Subsequent 12 months, let’s have one thing extra conventional please. Let’s have an advert a couple of boy with a damaged leg, or a canine that’s been hit by a automotive, or a bodily manifestation of the idea of bereavement. You understand, just like the outdated days. In spite of everything, Christmas isn’t Christmas till you’ve been bummed out by a store.
