A child going into an actual shop and buying a vinyl? It will make you feel old and decrepit, and it’ll utterly bamboozle young people … but shut up – it’s Christmas!
T
he weird thing about tradition is that it has a tendency to long outlive its usefulness. Bonfire Night, once a way for the government to remind the public of its capacity to murder revolutionaries, has simply become an excuse to eat a jacket potato in a field. Church bells still ring on Sunday mornings, when it would be quicker and way more considerate to ping the congregation on WhatsApp. And the John Lewis Christmas advert is somehow still a thing.
True, it wasn’t so long ago that the John Lewis Christmas advert was a cultural institution; a teargas grenade lobbed into the television schedules to make viewers cry in the middle of The Cube. But now it is the year 2025, and things have changed. The John Lewis advert is a linear television commercial about a department store, even though the only way to describe either of those two things to a child is as a YouTube with no search function and an Amazon you actually have to walk to.
Nevertheless, this year’s John Lewis Christmas advert has landed – 10 days earlier than last year – and it is absolutely business as usual. A boy buys his dad a vinyl copy of the house banger Where Love Lives by Alison Limerick. The record causes the dad to be transported to a dancefloor, where his son greets him as a baby, a toddler, and finally as an adolescent. And then, through the sheer power of John Lewis, the song slows down into a sludgy plink-plonk cover version of itself.
