They broke the replicant mould when they made Rutger Hauer. For years, the puckish Dutchman was the face of Guinness, bringing a sliver of sly wit to a parade of overly art-directed black-and-white head-scratchers that channelled Dalí as much as Dublin.
These days, Hauer is the disembodied voice of Lurpak, trumpeting the benefits of butter in short, self-amused exclamations that make him sound like a forgetful wizard dispensing cryptic advice to adventurers. “Let’s find a groove!” he declares in the latest campaign for Lurpak Spreadable, an ad that goes to excessive lengths to conflate cooking with improvised jazz, encouraging us to frisbee all those boring recipe books out of the window and go – gulp! – freestyle.
There’s a lot of cymbal-bashing, honking sax crime and skee-bop-diddly-bow while an attractive posse of would-be Chet Bakers go berserk in the kitchen, crashing ingredients together with jazz-fired abandon. It’s Ready Steady Cook meets Whiplash, and would be unbearable were it not for Hauer’s scat commentary. “Spread it, baby!” he hoots at one point, before offering up a contrapuntal Sid James laugh ahead of the ultimate hepcat punchline: “Man, those guys are cooking.”
It helps that these bebop brunch-a-maniacs have fridges crammed with ricotta, figs, asparagus and octopus. Octopus! If I were to dig out a Dave Brubeck CD and attempt something similar, no amount of Lurpak Spreadable could plausibly conjure a dazzling dish from leftover kebab salad, two Peperamis and an out-of-date Müller Rice. The result would be totally Mingus.
