Jingle bells, flashlight sells! I know Amazon is bad, but their Christmas advert had me sobbing

The advert, featuring a young ballerina whose show is cancelled because of the pandemic, packs an emotional punch. It nearly made me forgive Amazon, writes Jenny Eclair

French ballet dancer Taïs Vinolo stars in the Amazon Christmas advert (Amazon/YouTube)

Okay, we all know Amazon is bad. They don’t pay sufficient taxes, they’ve ruined the high street and they don’t treat their employees fairly. The other unforgivable thing they may have done, though, is steal this year’s Christmas telly ad crown. Surely that’s good old John Lewis’s job? Well, that remains to be seen, but I defy anyone to watch Amazon’s 2020 festive commercial contribution without blubbing.

When it first aired during Bake Off last week, the old man and I were choking and sobbing and searching down the back of the sofa for bits of old toilet paper to blow our noses on.

By now everyone should have seen it, but for those who are coping with lockdown 2.0 sans telly, the gist of the ad is that a young ballerina, played by French ballet dancer Taïs Vinolo, is chosen to be the star of her dance school’s Christmas show and gets to try on a fabulous feather and diamante headdress. Then it follows a montage of scenes depicting the onset of lockdown, with our heroine still diligently practicing in Zoom rehearsals with her classmates, at home in her bedroom and on the stairs of the block of flats where she lives.

Eventually she receives a letter (letters work better than emails on film) informing her that, due to the pandemic, the Christmas dance show is cancelled, so she vents her frustration in a series of fabulous dance moves outside in the pouring rain.

At this point, she could catch a chill and end up in bed with a hot water bottle but fret not folks, this is Christmas adland. Instead, her little sister, alarmed at her sibling’s disappointment, decides that The Show Must Go On and invites the neighbourhood to an evening of solo dance en plein air.

Okay, by now your eyes should be brimming. Enter stage right, a dishy young male neighbour who, having seen our lovely dancer flexing on the communal stairwell, is seen thinking intently before ordering something from Amazon on his phone. This turns out to be a powerful torch that he shines down on our young ballerina as she takes centre stage on some convenient garage roofs and dances in the snow.

If you are not full-on howling by now, you are officially dead, so you might as well forget Christmas because you won’t be needing Amazon or anything else for that matter.

Like any sane person, I despise Amazon’s tax dodging and worry about how it treats its workers. I’d be a massive hypocrite, however, if I said I didn’t use the thing, because I do. I have also encouraged people to buy my books from there because you can love independent bookshops ‘til you’re blue in the face but if they don’t choose to stock the Éclair oeuvre, then I’m afraid Amazon is the alternative. Author gotta make a living and while individual stores, supermarkets and WH Smith don’t have room to stock us all, Amazon does.

Many people won't agree with me, but for those still reading, the Amazon ad has set the bar extremely high for Christmas 2020. It’s a genuinely brilliant piece of storytelling that manages to use the pandemic to its full dramatic advantage, reflecting real-life Covid scenarios that we have all witnessed over the past year. The neighbours who stand at their windows to watch the young girl dance remind me of clips I saw on social media in the spring when Italians crowded onto their balconies to listen to a talented local belting out some opera. Similar scenes were then played out around the world, with possibly less success in north London, where one pretentious street decided to stage a windowsill Shakespearian production. It’s for this reason alone that I thank my lucky stars I live in south London and have triple glazing.

The casting of the ad is also brilliant, as it seems to offer a smart response to the awful UK government ad that re-emerged last month – the one featuring a young Asian ballet dancer who apparently gives up on her dance dream to retrain “in cyber”. It was an advert that caused offence to every temporarily unemployed performer in the land.

The Amazon ad stars a beautiful teenage black girl, who, despite the setbacks of a global pandemic, refuses to give up on her dream and dances on. Her potential future love interest is played by an equally gorgeous teenage boy who we see responsibly wearing a face mask in a public space (nice touch) and who saves the dancing show by pointing his newly delivered megawatt torch in our ballerina’s direction from his flat high above the garage roofs. Thanks to his powerful flashlight, everyone, neighbours, family and us, the viewers at home, can watch her do her glorious thing. Romeo and Juliet ain’t got nothing on this.

This ad is roughly two-and-a-half minutes long and manages to pack in as much story as a two-and-a-half hour film. I tell you, if sales of torches don’t go through the roof this Christmas, I shall eat my hat.