Here we go then. The worst adverts of 2015. If you're just here for the videos and want to give my usual Christmas Message Of Despair, skip the next 1,000 words...
Some people I know who are teachers have start to tell me recently that children don't necessarily know why we celebrate Christmas. No Jesus, manger, frankincense, little donkeys or Boney M. No Once In Royal David's City, O Little Town Of Bethlehem or God Rest Ye, Merry. Not even that version of Oliver Twist that Alistair Sim did.
No, not because of immigrants or loony-left councils. They think it's something to do with shopping. Some other people I know - people who are legally adults - got so excited by the arrival of a Coca-Cola truck in Sunderland I'm fairly sure they soiled themselves. When I pressed them further it became fairly clear they thought Saint Nick was something to do with fermented vegetable extract.
Easter? Chocolate eggs. Hallowe'en? Gaudy tat from pound shops that catches fire in any room above body temperature. Bonfire Night? Bangy things. September: Back To School. May: Barbecues, beach holidays and booze. November onwards: the Christmas Behemoth. We even have days dedicated to shopping: Black Friday; Cyber Monday; the New Year Sales. Mother's Day, Father's Day, birthdays - our lives are mediated by how, when and where we spend money.
Everything that we do is filtered through spending money. Shopping. Adverts. Our whole way of life is driven by acquisition - or the desire to acquire things. Forget the library, theatre, cinema, park, gallery or even pub - people go down the shops for something to do these days. They rule our lives.
Nando's is event living. Starbucks a daily gift to oneself. Maccies is a treat. We're so entranced by McDonald's, in fact, that we'd rather step over a dying man than risk getting our Happy Meal.
We show our love for another by exchanging cookery books that will never be read; box-sets forgotten and filed the second they're watched and Christmas jumpers thrown out the second the deccies come down. The system we've decided to live by is predicated on us having, eating and burning more things.
It's a manifesto for our own unhappiness and subjugation. But it's an insanity that we're happy to go along with as long as our friendly local supermarkets keep us fed, banks keep giving us money and TV provider keeps churning out good-looking trash. Advertising is the oil that greases the wheels of this ridiculous state of affairs.
And so we absorb it, assimilate it and are influenced by these little precision-guided films without even knowing it. To buy, eat, drink, travel. To tell us that we deserve it. To understand that the overriding thing in life is to have whatever you want, whenever you want it. To be the masters of our own ultimate doom.
When we've burned the last fossil fuels, chopped down the last tree and killed off the last of the penguins we'll still have adverts telling us that we deserve more. That we should have more. Adverts are the ultimate expression of the way we enslave ourselves.
Not only that, they're really fucking annoying too. These are my selection for the worst adverts of 2015 but you can tell me which one you hated the most below. And if your most despised isn't present, feel free to add it below.
The Worst Adverts of 2015
My choices for the worst of the crop are below. Underneath that a poll. Read, weep and vote for your most-hated.
Tesco
People used to quite like advert families. The Bisto Family. The Nescafe Couple. The Milky Bar Kid. We welcomed them into our homes and missed them when they were gone. But somewhere along the line things changed. Now we don't like advert families. We hate them. We've learned to distrust our Gods - the banks and supermarkets and car-makers and broadcasters. We may never stop using them. But in this set of Tesco adverts is a new paradigm. We hate these adverts - and we hate the businesses behind them.
Vax Air Cordless Lift
Like a mongoose brushes off cobra venom, I'm immune to the supposed charms of Miranda Hart. I find her whole 'whoops I'm a bit clumsy and look a bit weird' shtick a massive turn-off. In fact I'd rate my fondness for Miranda Hart as somewhere between toothache and claiming housing benefit. This Vax advert has all the traits that leave me colder than an Iceland party-food pack present and correct.
Hive
Only a total bell-end could have written this ghastly faux-twee affair. A proper Clem Fandango. Someone with a sleeve full of tats, a vial of expensive beard oil and a belief that Ed Sheeran, Catfish and the Fucking Bottlemen and Kodaline are the last words in amazing music. Hateful.
Haribo
An exercise so fundamentally disturbing it can only have been made by actual children or psychopaths. Though it is incredibly fitting in that Haribo seems to have a phenomenal ability to reduce adults to dribbling infants.
Travelodge
I guess trying to make people go to a Travelodge in this day and age is a fool's errand, but breaking out the puppets just results in a mawkish, try-hard and charmless spot that suggests, contrary to common belief, that you'd be mad not to stay at a Travelodge.
Warburtons
The equivalent of buying David Attenborough and making him read out Katie Hopkins columns for the sheer Hell of it. Grisly, depressing - the utter triumph of cold, hard cash over something joyous and innocent.
Moneysupermarket
A surreal, grotesque sex nightmare harder to avoid in 2015 than George Osborne's horrible smug little face. Still, there are definitely bigger and more annoying arses on television.
Cortana
The man who says 'You make me laugh Cortana' looks like he's physically choking on the words. He looks appalled and ashamed of himself. But what's bizarre is that many, many people - perhaps 100 - sat and watched and nodded and smiled while this abomination was allowed to happen. Even when the man looks like he'd rather shoot himself in the head than say those words. You can see it on screen - a man whose very soul is dying in front of our eyes. And everyone involved still said 'yep, that's the shot. Print it. We're using that one.'
In the cult sci-fi film Cube a massive, self-contained, indestructible death-trap is constructed simply because no-one involved in its creation ever questions what their tiny part in its making portends. No-one ever questions it; no-one ever stops doing their job and something inexplicably terrible just happens as a result. Just like this Clean Bandit Cortana advert. A vast, mechanised, purposeless killing machine. Only the advert is much worse.
Lloyds
If anything good has emerged from austerity it's that our relationship with banks has been changed forever. We finally learned to distrust big business in 2015, though we haven't quite figured out yet what to do about it. In that context Lloyds' desperate, misjudged 'we're your friends, really' advert felt as outdated as Jeremy Corbyn's wardrobe.
John Lewis
John Lewis finally runs out of steam with the 593rd iteration of its cover-versioned sad-sad-sad-happy routine. A tired, misfiring emotional wank of a glory-years photocopy.
Andrex
Andrex seems to be on a mission to make people spew up into their TV dinners, with this the latest in a long succession of adverts apparently intent on either discussing bodily matter in great detail - or inspiring their sudden emergence.
Vauxhall
Nothing against Vauxhall, I just hate Jake Bugg - a man with a voice like a stress headache.
Aldi
Aldi graduates to the same level as the usual Big Four suspect with an ad featuring one of those signing voices that sounds like a Victorian urchin has been rescued from a gin parlour then partially educated by an aristocrat. The result is an estuary whine less loveable than cholera.
Madbid
Fuck off Postman Twat.
Vote: Worst Advert of 2015
Vote for your worst advert of 2015 here. But think carefully - you can only choose one...
And finally...
Finally, thanks to Jon 'Holmesy' Holmes for sending in this billboard spotted in Ealing. I have absolutely no bloody idea what the Hell is going on, but felt it deserved to be mentioned here.
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