Family: It’s Christmas in anyone’s language
MY favourite Christmas advert doesn’t involve bouncing boxer dogs, ice-skating yetis, Mrs Claus, a perambulating carrot or a roving robin. There’s no improbable mix of feral animals setting animosity aside and it’s not even plugging something British. It’s an advert for a Polish auction website.
This heart-warming – read tearjerking – tale is of an elderly chap in Poland learning english.
We follow his progress as he covers his home in stickers bearing english names – even his dog gets a Post-it tacked to its schnozzle.
He embarrasses himself on the bus shouting: ‘You are perfect!’ and later proudly holds aloft a fork. ‘Knife,’ he declares confidently. Up goes his knife. ‘Fork,’ he intones. We see him in the bath, swearing at his rubber duck using entirely inappropriate phrases from a film he’s watched.
The comedy underscores the poignancy of the advert’s denouement in which he travels to the UK for Christmas. his proud expat son opens the door and there is the old boy’s granddaughter. And there wasn’t a dry eye in my face when he tells the poppet in english: ‘hi – I am your grandpa.’
This ad is massively popular far beyond its native Poland, which tells you a lot about how international humour can be and the power of the internet and, especially, advertising.
Our modern view of Santa – red-robed, white-bearded and jolly – is the invention of the advertising men of Coca-Cola, not of ancient folk tales. The ploughman’s lunch was a triumph for the Cheddar Marketing Board, never the genuine staple of peckish kings of the furrow.
The TV series Mad Men showed us how the guys and gals in advertising can re-invent themselves and everything around them. The show even referenced the real-world print-advert campaign that made America take the VW Beetle – surely the world’s ugliest motor – to its heart.
The Polish ad trumps our trite and commercial offerings, for while the audience know the family in the ad are not real, the plight they face is all too true for millions around the world.
It’s a story of modern times as youngsters move off in search of work and, yes, love, leaving the elderly isolated behind.
Eastern europe has whole villages bereft of youngsters – and we Scots know a thing or two about losing the younger generation to the siren call of far-off cities.
If someone you love is moving away, it hardly matters if it’s 200 miles or 2,000 or whether they’re leaving Wigtown or Warsaw, Kirkwall or Krakow.
If the ad has a flaw it is that while the Poles have no V in their alphabet, theirs is a fearsomely complex language and so they are dab hands at new ones.
Every Pole I’ve met speaks spectacularly good english – even if those schooled in the Communist era are sketchy about Britain’s finest hour when we stood alone against hitler to defy his assault on their homeland.
But that’s quibbling. The advert’s message is immaculate. Christmas is a time to be together, when the family flock makes maximum effort to gather.
There’s an old Scottish saying that the best Christmas gift is having every seat at your dinner table occupied and it’s a pretty good rule of thumb.
Because what really pulls the heartstrings in my favourite advert is the power and value of family ties stretching across miles and generations. And that’s something no advertising man has ever had to synthesise.