Predictions for John Lewis' COVID-Edition Christmas Advert

I don’t know about you but the prospect of Christmas during a pandemic does not exactly thrill me. My own possible scenarios are thus: 

1. I remain in what will be by then Tier 3 London and spend the day on various glitchy FaceTime calls to my family in Tier 3 Birmingham, as I get steadily drunker on the Bucks Fizz I started on at 9AM.
2. I go home due to an eleventh hour national broadcast by Boris Johnson, naturally dressed as Father Christmas, announcing that all the rules are off for three days, prompting the papers to proclaim he has “sleigh-ed the virus,” and a spike in coronavirus-related deaths two weeks later. I am too nervous to actually go near any of my family members, so I spend the day eating roast potatoes and a selection box, sitting at a makeshift table in the garden, wearing a gorgeously festive puffa jacket.

Whichever way it goes (and I’m sure the prospects I’ve outlined there are certainly not as strange or sad as it’ll get for some), Christmas is going to be weird this year – but as the heartwarming old saying goes, Capitalism Finds a Way. As the single most important economic period of the year, both the government and the shops are going to be doing everything they can to make sure we’re still spending, despite the fact that so many have lost jobs and livelihoods this year. And their grand apparatus in this mission? Christmas adverts.

The “Christmas advert” is a strange mutation of The Idea of Christmas (you know: family, friendship, golden roast turkey and so on, ignoring the fact that the reality is more like: arguing, seeing who dies on Eastenders, and overdone pigs in blankets) and our shopping-obsessed culture, that for some reason British society has come to regard with a special significance and reverence. Since the department store John Lewis – whose festive TV spots have come to be lauded to such a deranged degree that they “premiere” during ITV programmes with especially high viewership –started at it in 2007, almost every large chain and supermarket has followed suit. 

Essentially, the Christmas adverts compete with each other to be the most heartwarming, in order to remind you to buy stuff from them. This year, with Christmas being so unusual and up in the air, however, you do have to wonder what they’ll come out with. I have some thoughts, therefore, about what I’d imagine we can expect from this year’s John Lewis ad: please join me on this depressing thought experiment, where there’ll be absolutely loads of footage of an old person speaking into an iPad.

There’s no way they can get around not talking about it, considering that the advert is going to have to be about it. And there I was, hoping for a bit of escapism from my festive advertising! 

There is always a sad character in John Lewis adverts, because they are adverts, not major motion pictures, so there has to be someone sad in order to quickly build the empathy required for the emotional response they’re after. This year they’ll be hitting the heartstrings especially hard, and who tugs at them more than the Old, particularly in a year which they spent a significant chunk of shielding from the rest of the population? I will say here that this is not to underplay or be in any way cynical about the plight of the elderly this year – which has been genuinely awful, thanks to a total lack of care and provision from the government – and more to point out that advertising frequently plays on our deepest sympathies in order to get us to think it understands us on a human level, when in fact it only understands us as economic actors. Just Fun Little Thoughts…x

Bonus points if it’s shot through a window. 

The child will be shot in a warm glow in a family home. There will be ambient noise where you can hear the mum going “Say hello to grandma” while she clatters fish fingers around in the kitchen, over the music. The grandma’s house by contrast will be silent and lit by the television only, to signal that she is miserable. 

Considering that in-home tech has been one of the year’s big trends – Zoom, that weird Facebook frame, VR headsets, the proliferation of Ring and Alexa – paired with the fact that it doesn’t look like Miss Rona will be taking her leave anytime soon, I think that the advert will lean heavily on its powers: relatable and sales conscious!

Last year’s John Lewis Christmas extravaganza was an animated short featuring a dragon who breathed too much fire (which if you ask me is slightly too reminiscent of the cinematic masterpiece Happy Feet), but for 2020 I’m pretty sure they’ll go for realism to really lay on the “DOESN’T THIS REMIND YOU OF YOUR NAN??? DOESN’T IT???” response. 

Can’t you just imagine this? The starring old person (played by Captain Tom Moore) is settling in for a lonely night when lo! A (socially distanced) choir of kids with tinsel round their heads and Adele in their hearts, lead by their grandchild, arrives outside their house just in time for the “HELLO FROM THE OTHER SIDE” bit. Absolutely risible stuff that I’m getting annoyed about despite the fact that it hasn’t even happened (yet)!

Alright maybe that’s a bit on the nose.

Nothing says Christmas like crying in your living room because you haven’t seen your family for a year barring that one afternoon in the summer where you all wore masks and stayed six feet away from one another!!!!