By now, the John Lewis Christmas advert is an institution; a can’t-lose cocktail of insipid, slowed-down Live Lounge balladry, organza-veiled nostalgia and a sharp reminder that existence is a meaningless sham designed to camouflage the ever-present spectre of death. This year’s offering has turbo-charged that blueprint. Ostensibly it’s the story of a lonely penguin offered a penguin companion by his child owner. Which is sweet, right up until the moment you realise that the penguin companion has had absolutely no say in this.
John Lewis has positioned her as a terrified cross between a mail-order bride and the goat that gets fed to the T rex in Jurassic Park. Then comes the Shyamalan-esque twist ending. You see, it turns out that the penguins aren’t real. They’re just toys, conjured to life by a child’s vivid imagination. Watch the ad back a second time and this becomes devastatingly clear. The kid isn’t feeding a penguin; he’s just flinging fish fingers on to the floor. He’s not staring at kissing strangers because he’s slowly coming to realise that his pet is lonely; he’s doing it because he’s a pervert. No wonder his mother can barely even bring herself to look at him. She’s just worked out that she gave birth to Buffalo Bill from Silence Of The Lambs. And, while we watch a boy smoosh two toy penguins against each other in a horrific approximation of sexual intercourse, Tom Odell limply whelps “It’s real love, it’s real love” over and over on the soundtrack. It isn’t real love. At absolute best, it’s a gonk-bonk. A nightmarish gonk-bonk that exists solely in the mind of an infant serial killer. Merry Christmas!
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