How did contemporary culture become so dismal?

Watching the Christmas John Lewis ad, over and over, I’m struck by how much British life has changed – and not for the better. We’ve all become so tastefully downbeat, introspectively sentimental and utterly lacking in brightness.  

In the early 1980s, the big TV advertisement of the Christmas season was for Woolworths. I should explain for any younger readers that Woolworths was a kind of Amazon depot, except that you were required to go there yourself on your legs and search for what you wanted with your arms. 

The 1981 Woolworths advert was bright, gaudy and carnivalesque. A cavalcade of middle aged, distinctly uncool and definitively unsexy celebrities – two thirds of The Goodies accompanied by Anita Harris, and Windsor Davies and Don Estelle of recently defunct sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum – parade around the Woolworths wares attired variously as clowns, tin soldiers and thigh-slapping chorus girls. 

They are joined by geisha girls in kimonos, the likely influence of the recent number 1 hit ‘Japanese Boy’ by Aneka (the less said to younger readers about her, the better). The thundering keyboard bassline of the song is reproduced here. Strangely, there are also some Cossack dancers (I’ve thought long and hard but can’t explain their provenance or relevance). 

The ad proclaims repeatedly that it is going to ‘a cracking Christmas’, ‘a cracker of a Christmas at Woolworths’. It is very much about prices and shopping and products. DIY toolkits, records, fashion handbags, aftershave, cameras, home brew kits, hair driers. 

In our decade the big Christmas ad is for John Lewis. It is a department store something like Woolworths, so that’s the same. But, in 2022, as in other years, the big John Lewis ad is grey, maudlin and quiet. No product is displayed. It takes place in a bleached-out world of call-centre drudgery and miserable urban car parks. Oddly, the main characters have a notably large and enviable suburban property; presumably, the missus must be bringing in the bacon, though she’s time-rich enough to be cooking large meals from fresh ingredients. 

It is all seen from a distance – even the party scene is viewed from outside, through glass. In fact the ad is even more grey and quiet than usual, with the caption after the twist at the end telling us ‘Over 108,000 children in the UK are in the care system’. (A friend of mine dared to hope that the ad might just be about a man learning to skateboard. ‘Oh thank god this year it’s not trying to spin some corporate social concern nonsense,’ he thought. He should’ve known better.)

The idea of a cracker of a shopping spree and crackdown prices? Of crowds and light and smiles and just one day to have fun and forget the dark rumbling gloom of life? Heaven forfend! 

To think we used to fret about Christmas being commercialised. If this is the alternative, please can it be again? 

Of course, not all modern Christmas ads are downbeat, and it’s worth noting that they get jollier the cheaper the outlet – Asda and Morrisons. Lidl, though, is showing discouraging signs of being both cutesy and self-aware about being cutesy. 

But what this all speaks to is the dismal tone of contemporary mass culture. It is timid and downbeat and sad. People are always isolated and lost, with maybe one other person they can rely on, possibly, if they’re lucky – but beware, in adland those people often die. 

ITV has recently thrown itself enthusiastically into a TV advertising campaign to get people talking to near-strangers about their problems. I’m hoping this might be followed up with ads in which nosey parkers are told to mind their own bleeding business. 

The visual aesthetic of what we watch has gradually become jaded, too. In TV ads and shows, it is always dark outside and not much brighter inside. Next time you’re watching modern TV count how many lamps appear in people’s living rooms. (The average is four.) The colour palette always hovers murkily around those perennial cheery favourites dun, taupe, and umber, with occasional vivid splashes of burnt russet. In a recent episode of The Crown, Princess Anne drew back the curtains on some rosy dawn and I swear it made no appreciable difference.  

I wouldn’t mind if this washed-out, mumbly lifelessness were a mere flash in the pan, but it’s been ramping up for about 20 years now and cannot even be knocked into a different groove by global pandemics or wars. It’s so ingrained that TV dramas set in the recent past, such as Quiz and Maxine, don’t even need to try to make anything look any different, aside from mobile phones and tech. A drama made in 2002 and set in 1982 would’ve needed to change almost everything. 

Some innovation, any innovation to this era of eternal, tasteful murk and mush, would be appreciated. Some life, some joy, and please God, some colour.