The best Christmas ads come in small packages

This year’s commercials have shown that tired ideas can be subverted, and that good ones needn’t cost the earth

Hurrah for Aviation Gin, the drinks company that has freed the “Peloton wife” from the tyranny of her lousy bike and even lousier husband.

For those with no idea what I’m on about: Peloton is a ghastly online spin class in which people around the world compete with each other on static bikes whilst an instructor yells things like “let’s do this!” and “smashed it!”.

I’ve nothing against spin classes. I occasionally do one at my gym – the teacher blasts Motown at a bunch of middle-aged women for twenty minutes – and it’s the closest I’ve come to a disco in years.

But Peloton is far more sinister. Its recent Christmas ad featured a man buying his wife one of the company’s machines. Twelve months later, she returns the favour in the form of a video diary documenting her “growth as a person” thanks to this ugly lump of metal. The ad’s message was clear: “Woe betide any woman who doesn’t stay slim for her man.” Shares in Peloton promptly – and rightly – plummeted.

But in adland, one company’s loss is another’s gain. Aviation Gin quickly capitalised on the Peloton ad, recasting the same actress who starred as the beleaguered wife as a gin-drinking good-time gal out on the tiles with her pals. They toast to new beginnings; we toast to Peloton wife’s freedom to get pissed this Christmas.

However, the unofficial prize for Christmas Ad of 2019 has already been won by the Hafod Hardware store in Wales. The independent store produced the two-minute ad on a £100 budget, featuring the shopkeeper’s two-year-old son sweeping, shelf-stacking and wrapping gifts with predictably endearing results. As the toddler locks up the shop and heads homeward, he magically transforms into his dad, striding into the sunset with a Christmas tree on his shoulder. I’m close to tears just writing this. Unsurprisingly, the ad has gone viral.

Sadly, this year’s John Lewis ad is a bit of a divider by comparison. Not only must its CGI dragon have cost a fortune to make, but the end result, particularly the bit where the dragon breathes on a frozen pond and all the children fall through the ice, left me unsure whether I was watching a Christmas celebration or a disaster movie. Christmas is anxiety-inducing enough without drowning children.

One thing I did like about the John Lewis ad, though, was its red-haired girl protagonist.That’s another thing I find fascinating about advertising, how suddenly something like red-haired girls are a “thing”. Who knows, maybe one day glasses wearers will also be deemed enough of a “thing” to feature in adverts. Because despite a whopping 64 per cent of the public needing them, no one in ads (apart from those by Specsavers) seems to be bespectacled. Honestly, it’s beginning to drive me nuts – specs discrimination, I call it (ho ho ho).

I’d also love to see some adverts featuring women my age who aren’t smiling and sucking their tummies in, a sight is so rare that a recent snap I spotted in the Desmond and Dempsey (they of posh PJs fame) festive catalogue made me literally gasp.

In it, a woman in her seventies sports a velvet, tiger-printed dressing gown, a pair of shades and a proper Christmas hangover. She looks like Marianne Faithfull’s older sister who’s gone to stay with the rellies and is already sick of the grandkids; the kind of woman who would happily chuck a Peloton bike out of a window.

This year’s ads have proven that tired ideas can be subverted, and that good ones needn’t cost the earth. So come on, adland, let’s make it a new year’s resolution: better, funnier, cleverer ads, and at least a few starring grumpy older women wearing glasses – my door is always open.