So, the clocks have gone back and plunged us into near perma-darkness, Halloween came and went in a haze of badly carved pumpkins and cheap plastic tat and Bonfire Night is just a mere smouldering, cordite scented memory of mindless thuggery and terrified pets. That now means of course that the marketing men can hurl Christmas in our faces with gusto. And oh boy have they already made a cracking start.

Christmas adverts account for about 90% of the ones we’re currently seeing on TV and one of them in particular has already managed to get right up my nose to the point where it is uncomfortably close to piercing my frontal lobe.

I speak, of course, of the Tesco Christmas advert.

What a monstrous pile of rotting household garbage they’ve dished up for us this year. A whole minute’s worth of the most detestable shash you can think of. But, in case you’ve been fortunate enough to not yet see it, I’ll fill you in on the gory and thoroughly unpleasant details of this affront, nay assault, to decency.

It’s basically a faux party political broadcast where the supermarket in question have branded themselves as The Christmas Party. See what they did there? A play on words. So clever. I can’t help wondering what overpaid, hipster lickspittle came up with that absolute gem.

Yes, I am being sarcastic. Well spotted!

Having established this the ad then goes on to display tables groaning with food, decorations and presents galore whilst an annoying voice over tells us that thanks to good old Tesco we can all have a wonderful Christmas this year and still work to a budget. Prices of £25 for a Christmas dinner are freely bandied about as if that should make all those strapped-for-cash families, who rely on food banks and the Salvation Army to survive, drop to their knees and weep with festive joy crying out “Gawd bless ya Mr Tesco, sir.”

And of course, as always, the streets are shown to be four inches deep in snow which we know is an extremely unlikely event. But lets, for arguments sake, assume that it does snow and we get that most longed for of yearly wishes, a white Christmas, is it really going to bring us as much joy as the grinning/gurning actors in the advert.

Sadly no.

Simply because every time we get snow in this country we collectively soil ourselves and spend the two or three days that it’s here clearing the supermarkets shelves of bread, beans, rice, pasta, salt, tea bags and toilet paper in a contagious and widespread panic, imagining the UK will turn into some kind of frozen Siberian wasteland where we’ll all be found dead from starvation and hypothermia in the Spring.

But I digress.

The fact that the snow in the advert is so obviously fake makes it even worse. A bearded and somewhat dishevelled man in his dressing gown and slippers is shown standing in the street with his neighbours, querying when the bin men are coming. When he finds out it is that very day he begins to rejoice and prance about in the fake snow like a… a… a moron, for want of a better word.

This is then followed by a bizarre dance routine involving wheelie bins. Wheelie bins? Really? That’s so Christmassy. The sight of a wheelie bin is always guaranteed to make you want to fill up with tears of nostalgic yuletide cheer.

NEWSFLASH! Wheelie bins have a tendency to reek!

No longer will the fragrance of cinnamon, clementines, ginger and cloves remind us of Christmas. No, wheelie bin interior will be the next big aroma on the market, thanks to Tesco. I can see it now. Wax melts scented with wheelie bin interior? Wheelie bin interior pot pourri? Wheelie bin interior essential oil? I’d better write it up now and fire my idea off to Yankee Candles before someone else thinks of it.

But despite all this the worst is yet to come. For what have Tesco chosen as the musical backdrop to this tacky and tasteless celebration of excess? A nice carol? Something classical? Jingle Bells even? No, they’ve given us The Final Countdown by 80’s hairspray heroes Europe. This is not the final countdown, oh no, this is the final straw that well and truly breaks the camel’s back. Keyboard driven, generic hair metal that contains the words “We’re heading for Venus” being used in a Christmas ad.

F*** me sideways!!!

I mean, if you’re going to use rock music (and I am a huge rock music fan by the way) in a Christmas advert, then please, at least, use Slade or Wizzard or even that awful Christmas song by The Darkness. Yes, they’re all overplayed to death and quite dreadful but at least they all have the word Christmas in the title and lyrics.

I feel physically ill now, just at the thought of this monstrosity, so in conclusion I’ll just say that this years Tesco Christmas advert is a strong contender, alongside last years John Lewis crash-landed alien one, for the worst ever in the history of television.

And I shop at Tesco occasionally as well! Makes me want to burn my Club Card and protest outside my local store.

Final Countdown and wheelie bins my Aunt Fanny!