It’s got flying hedgehogs, bad haircuts and the return of
moon Hitler, but this year’s TV ad is all about people being nice to each other – well, kind of
Clearly, there couldn’t be a normal John Lewis ad this year, because this has been anything but a normal year. There’s a pandemic on, no branches of John Lewis are actually open, and 1,500 of its staff were recently laid off. Indeed, if John Lewis had chosen to lavish millions of pounds on an avalanche of traditionally twee misery, there’s a strong chance that it would have qualified as an act of criminal negligence.
Instead, this year’s ad is more uplifting than we’ve come to expect. It features an original song – as opposed to a gloomy minor-key cover version of, say, I Like to Move It Move It – and consists of a montage of clips in which people are simply nice to each other. But are they really being as nice as everyone says? I’m going to rank the individual clips from worst to best in terms of basic human decency.