Spooner on… The Toxic Xmas Telly Smog of the Year

Yuletide greetings one and all! I was not there for London’s Great Smog of December 1952 when impenetrable miasmas caused by coal smoke, diesel particulates, bitterly cold weather and an anticyclonic, windless weather-system reduced visibility to an arm’s-length, penetrated homes and killed thousands of those with respiratory susceptibility; the old, the young, the asthmatic, the poor, the usual…

BUT I do recognise that the Great Smog ultimately led to the passing of the Clean Air Act of 1956 which was, perhaps, the first Act of Parliament designed to address our ever-burgeoning cluster-fuck of environmental pollution.

I can only hope that this year’s monstrous, toxic fog of Xmas Telly Ads will lead naturally to a similarly useful Clean Media Act of 2026.

It’s unlikely that the Toxic Xmas Telly Smog of 2025 will kill the old, the young or the weak but it will certainly make most of us heartily sick.

HOWEVER, as Lord McKelvey has pointed out while shaking me gently by the throat, it is my job to look at these ghastly things and offer my opinion of them so that you are fore-armed against their polluting influence.

So here we go, strap on your vintage gas-masks and let’s plunge into the murk, god help us all.

Barbour, We’ve Got Christmas Covered, Aardman
Pollution Rating – Sore eyes and a tickly throat.

Ah, Aardman, offspring of the estimable Peter Lord and David Sproxton who must be ever-venerated for their masterpiece The Wrong Trousers. Neat, sweet and somehow the bastard love-child of Tony Hart’s Morph and the late-lamented Victoria Wood, this little diversion is as Xmassy as a fat robin and as deft as an Antoine Dupont reverse-pass.

But here’s the thing about Xmas Telly Ad Pollution; the particles get everywhere. We all know the chap in the red-corduroy trousers and the waxed jacket – and because I consume a great deal of televised rugby and cricket, the various cut-downs, stills, re-workings and extensions of this amusing jeu d’esprit now follow me everywhere. I think I can probably do that Rocky Horror Show audience-thing of voicing along with the dialogue and it’s only early December. How I will feel about the lovable stop-motion characters by Twelfth Night, remains to be seen…

John Lewis,  Where Love Lies, Saatchi & Saatchi
Pollution Rating – bring the oxygen tent immediately.

Apparently, this is a ‘response’ to the popular and controversial TV series Adolescence. I didn’t watch that – but I find this deeply depressing.

Middle-aged man has terrible MDMA flashback to a time before parenthood provoked by pity-gift of terrible record from obviously disturbed teenage son. There’s something haunting about the sound-design and the melancholy protagonist that underlines the meaninglessness of the beautiful life he has subsequently made for himself and his trophy family. The horrible truth hangs in the air of the suddenly empty basement nightclub like a cloud of nitrous oxide. Your wife and family hate you. You are alone in the existential void. Merry Xmas.

Debenhams, Debenhams Delivered, Exposure
Pollution Rating – tape up your windows and switch on the nebuliser.

I thought Debenhams had died? Apparently not. Maybe it just exists online now? Am sure Lord McKelvey knows.

One of the common themes of this year’s parade of abominations is a kind of awful ‘knowingness’. We know this is a Xmas Telly Ad, we know you will hate it, we don’t care. As a jolly celebrity who I don’t know exclaims. ‘I’m in a shoe!’ and an imaginary cavalcade of giant manifestations of late-stage global capitalism trundles menacingly down a criminally unaffordable north London street. Also (I think) Peter Crouch bellows ‘Let’s have it!’. The premise is also weirdly self-referential – is it too early to get all Xmassed-up? Yes, Debenhams, yes, it will always be too early for desperate fudge.

Asda, The Grinch, Lucky Generals
Pollution Rating – daub a red cross on the door and run.

I did try to watch this again before writing this review but I just couldn’t, Charlie, I couldn’t do it.

Asda’s media agency has gone completely mental, and this television commercial is absolutely inescapable, however esoteric your viewing profile may be – and what’s more it conforms to the ancient advertising law: IF YOU CAN’T SAY IT, SING IT.

A person from planning with weird spectacles has discovered that Xmas is expensive and that in these difficult times, purse-holders, often male, resent the cost of the mid-winter celebrations. Fortunately for weird-specs-person, Asda has some cheap things that will mitigate the effects of the dismal, annual money-drain. Oh and people like Dr Seuss. Oh and they LOVE a Xmas tune, however cruelly mangled.

What is astonishing is how they have made what is obviously a very expensive television commercial (multiple dancing extras, locations, cherry-picker end-shot) appear so cheap and tacky. Though it is a blight upon the world, it probably serves its purpose of driving hordes of desperate families into this particular mercantile Gehenna. Go Asda!

Sainsbury’s, The Unexpected Guest, New Commercial Arts
Pollution Rating – proudly treating our media channels in the same way as the water companies treat our rivers.

Again, this is so ubiquitous that I am unable to rewatch it. So, trusting in memory, here we go!

Take a ‘beloved’ character from the works of renowned antisemite and ‘national treasure’ Roald Dahl, The Big Friendly Giant and use the borrowed interest delivered by his ‘charms’ to flog your Xmas tat. That’s it. That’s the brief. So we must endure a no-expense-spared ‘romp’ featuring a ‘bad’ giant who is stealing people’s Xmas food – and the selfless attempts of various Sainsbury’s wage-slaves and said BFG to restore Xmas cheer with free deliveries. I think I have got that right. Oh and there’s a helicopter. Of course there’s a bloody helicopter.

There is, however, a single mitigating touch. I don’t remember if this detail is in the pernicious book, hidden in a forest of ‘snozzcumbers’ and other infantilised stereotypes, but I like the fact that the BFG’s cutlery, at the glorious concluding feast is a garden fork and spade.

Little things like this just about give me the strength to carry on.

Marks & Spencer Food, Traffic Jamming, M&S in-house
Pollution Rating – pure carbon monoxide.

This isn’t just a Xmas Telly Ad, this is a Marks & Spencer Xmas Telly Ad – with all of the egregious unctuousness that implies: Dawn French; snow; Xmas traffic jam; Fairy Godmother; glossy artificial canapés; inclusive crowd in a delivery van; jollity; wry comments; a nation despairs.

I find it interesting that both Sainsbury’s and M&S have fantastical storylines that involve them giving away food to their customers. That would be an interesting use of the Xmas Telly Ad budget for 2026. Onward!

Tesco, That’s What Makes Christmas, BBH London
Pollution Rating – light dusting of red Saharan sand.

‘Xmas isn’t perfect, that’s what makes it Xmas.’ This gnomic endline underscores an execution that is not appalling! Why? Writing! Observational humour! That’s why!

There really has been a writer near this, I can tell.

Tesco gives us a mash-up of the Royle Family, Alan Bennett, Ross Noble, Gavin & Stacey and Friday Night Dinner – and it is quite amusing! I especially enjoyed the middle-class twits arguing over who is Mummy’s favourite. Oh and the whistle to call those dogs in Xmas outfits. And there is no blundering, heavy-handed product placement! Xmas hats with pom-poms off to Tesco!

Whether I will feel the same way after seeing the great cloud of ad-extensions that will doubtless follow in its refreshing wake, who knows

Aldi, It’s a 24 Carat Christmas for Kevin and Katie, McCann Manchester
Pollution Rating – too much carotene makes your skin go a funny colour.

Those of you, perhaps a round Xmas dozen, who have been reading my annual Xmas Telly Ad Review in Decision Marketing for as many years as I have been writing it, will know my feelings about Kevin The Sodding Carrot. I am a regular Aldi shopper (proper Parmesan Cheese £2.95!), and remember vividly the first year that I saw a small child in a pushchair on London Road clutching a plushie version of Kevin The Sodding Carrot and the vast, yawning pit of existential despair that opened in the pavement before me…

As ever, this is elegantly and professionally done and contains one or two good jokes (Where have you been? Lapland. You know, where the dancers come from.), but for the love of Satan, I am so weary of it. Now Kevin is getting married. He is lost on his stag do. Will he be back in time for his ‘Marry’ Xmas?

I really cannot express in the words available to me in the English language, or possibly even in any other form of human communication HOW LITTLE I CARE.  The animation is, as ever, beautiful.

Lidl, More to Value this Christmas, Accenture Song
Pollution Rating – passing cigarette smoker.

This is, of course, yet another monstrosity which has gone for the ‘narrated by irritating child’ option, always a safe festive bet. I cannot bring myself to elaborate upon the vapid, unrelenting sentimentality and the ‘wry yet telling’ insights that it offers BUT I will say that it announces the return of that admirable initiative, the Lidl Christmas Toy Bank – a scheme that allows shoppers to physically donate a toy for children who might otherwise receive none.

Go selfishly for Xmas bargains! Stay for the selfless initiative!

Waitrose, The Perfect Gift, Wonderhood Studios
Pollution Rating – attar of roses, cinnabar, frankincense and myrrh.

Oh Waitrose! Could you be any more Waitrose than this?

The bastards have only gone and actually hired Richard Curtis to write their Xmas Ad and it stars that ‘jolly good sport’ Keira Knightley (of whom, more later) and charmingly hangdog comedian Joe Wilkinson.

In a peculiar reverse ferret, the ad is only viewable online and the executions we see on our televisions are ‘teasers’ to make us go and look at it there in all of its four-minute glory.

I cannot bring myself to precis the action, but suffice to say that it is exactly what you might expect from the fabulously wealthy writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually – sentimental, charming, not taking itself too seriously, astonishingly high production values, walking the line between twee and nauseating, you know the schtick.

BUT I DON’T CARE.

Knightley is the star of Working Title’s 2012 Anna Karenina adapted from Tolstoy’s doorstop-novel by the recently deceased jobbing genius, Tom Stoppard, and directed by that Wayne Rooney of romance, Joe Wright. And for her performance in that film I can forgive Keira anything, even this rebarbative, spangly nonsense. Visit the Waitrose website at once.

(That’s enough Xmas Telly Ads, ed)

And apparently you all agree that’s enough Xmas Telly Ads. As a recent article on this excellent site puts it: Jingle hell: 17m Brits left cold by this year’s festive ads.

Is this surprising? I don’t think so. The public, taken for fools by politicians and media moguls alike, patronised and exploited by Billionaire Tech Bros, watching the planet burn and explode all over the place, subjugated by fear and uncertainty and weary of the scorn with which they are treated by the heteropatriarchy have had enough.

On January 5th 2026 I am fully expecting the arrival of THE SINGULARITY, caused not by the Robot Overlords achieving full AI sentience and dispensing with us, but by the sheer number of people returning to work and saying in perfect unison ‘OH, YOU KNOW, A QUIET ONE THIS YEAR.’

I heartily wish all my readers (that Xmas dozen) a very Merry Xmas, and, however long it lasts, a Happy New Year!

Jonathan Spooner is consulting creative director at Spoon Creative