We will always be together, together in electricdreams.. apart from all The Worst People in Britain that is.They are a nightmare
Ah – it’s barely November, so the John Lewis Christmas advert must be dropping.
You don’t even have to flip through the telly for it any more: if you’ve ever spent a fiver in a branch of John Lewis, they just email it straight to your inbox, like when U2 gave everyone that free album they didn’t want.
I think the executives at John Lewis are the only people in the UK more excited by – and organised for – Christmas than your mum. Just like your mum will start asking you what you want from Santa around July, the John Lewis lot are probably in production on their Christmas ad on January 1.
And they’ve got the formula pretty much down pat by now. Take a well-loved old song. Have it reinterpreted folksy ballad-style by some nice young singer with a voice like cherries and milk being strained through a silk handkerchief and off you go…
This year sees Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder’s 1984 electro-pop hit Electric Dreams softly crooned by 20-year-old Londoner Lola Young. It soundtracks an ad that shows a young lad befriending a lovely young (female) alien whose spaceship has crash-landed in woods near his home.
Like all the John Lewis ads, it’s a fairly tame exercise in warmth and togetherness that you will either find charming and heartwarming or tacky and predictable depending on where your personal taste lies. One thing is for sure – it won’t offend anyone. Or so you’d have thought, right?
Wrong. You have reckoned without The Worst People in Britain. The new John Lewis ad has driven The Worst People in Britain mad. Here they came, spewing their rage and bile…
Some of them thought the advert promoted the “sexualisation of young children”. (The two kids share a very chaste kiss.) But these were minor complaints. The real bulk of those who the (again, utterly innocuous) advert drove into a frenzy were our old pals the Massive Racists. They literally couldn’t believe that in 2021 John Lewis had the nerve to make an ad featuring a black family. Not only that – the only white person in the ad was the alien.
Flaming right-wing nutter and hopeless estranged father Laurence Fox managed to get an anti-woke tirade into his rant along with his customary racism: “On a positive note, at least John Lewis made the token white-skinned person in their Christmas advert a non-binary alien. So a good day for diversity and inclusion.”
On and on the racists went…
“This is an insult to the indigenous people of Britain!” I am sick to death of this stuff. Seems we are now living in a black country! “Enough is enough!’
“Another anti-white advert from John Lewis. Be happy to see your company go bankrupt!”
And our old friend – “GO WOKE, GO BROKE!”
And it occurred to me, not for the first time, how exhausting it must be to be very, very right wing and racist. To see that advert and not think – like you and me – “Ooh, I
quite like that.” Or “Mmm, that’s a bit lame.” But to see an attack on your culture. Your heritage. Your history. Your very existence. To feel so threatened and angry that you need to take to the internet and spend the whole morning spewing hatred and rage. Man, it just seems like a lot of hard work, doesn’t it?
One thing is for sure – it won’t offend anyone. Right?
“Wow,” I thought to myself as I watched the ad again, as I tried really hard to see whatever there was in it that had made the racists so crazy, “I didn’t see this coming.”
You know who did see it coming? John Lewis. Being wiser than I am when it comes to the British public, the retailer had anticipated this reaction. Ahead of the commercial arriving, John Lewis customer director Claire Pointon stressed that they already had protocols in place to protect the young cast of the ad.
“We always have a duty of care to anyone who is in our adverts,” she said. “I think it’s shocking but, unfortunately, you do get racist abuse on certain stuff.”
Britain 2021: where if you dare make an ad featuring a minority group, you’re already prepared for a deluge of racism. Well done, everyone. Merry
Christmas, indeed.