As you all know, around this time of year I like to have a bit of a rant about the gaudiness that has become prevalent at Christmas time. Last year I, quite rightly, had a pop at Tesco for their frankly abominable Christmas advert featuring lumbering buffoons in Santa hats dancing in the snow with wheelie bins. This year though, I thought I’d take aim at the drinks industry.

Christmas, of course, is a time when the drinks industry do their best business of the year as we all tip alcohol down our necks with an almost feverish glee in the desperate hope that it will make us feel Christmassy.

I’ve nothing against that, not in the least, but what I do object to these days is the ever increasing fadiness in the drinks industry. It seems to me that its just one gimmick after another. They know that people just want the alcohol but it’s the tiresome ways that they constantly re-badge the stuff that gets to me.

Time was when you could walk into a pub and the fanciest drink available would be Babycham, which ladies in the 1960s, 70s and 80s would often consume with brandy. It was an expensive evening if your date chose that particular beverage as it was essentially two drinks rolled into one… For the price of two.

Other than that the girls would either have a half of lager and lime, a glass of enamel-loosening Liebfraumilch or possibly both if you were feeling flush and trying to cop off with her. The older lady would prefer a glass of sherry or a bottle of Mackesons and the middle-aged, more sophisticated woman would sip a Cinzano Bianco simply because Joan Collins was in the adverts and it sounded decadent.

Yes, there was a bottle of Noilly Prat on the shelf but no-one ever drank it for the simple reason that no-one, the bar staff included, actually knew what the hell it was.

Men would typically drink pints of beer, hand pumped not bottled, unless it was brown ale. Mixed drinks such as shandy or lager top were considered somewhat on the wimpy side and often frowned upon when drunk by anyone wasn’t driving or was over the age of 14.

And then… along came snakebite, and the game changed dramatically.

Somebody thought it would be a good idea to mix super strength cider with lager and as a result great seething pools of vomit soon began to appear on every street in Britain every Friday and Saturday night as the disgusting fad caught on and spread across the country like a foul-tasting plague. It wasn’t lager, it wasn’t cider, it was just an evil and ill-conceived hybrid of the two whose only guarantee in this world was to make your gorge rise.

Getting off your tits on cheap alcohol is of course seen as a rite of passage in this modern era. And who amongst us hasn’t necked supermarket own brand vodka with their so-called mates whilst talking utter bollocks and making complete twots of themselves in public? I know I certainly have. Thank God for the wisdom of the years, that’s all I can say on that one. You’ll understand when you get to my age kids.

But of course, it didn’t stop at snakebite did it? Oh no, those clever fiends in the marketing departments soon got to work and a whole new level of piss-artistry was introduced. The alco-pops.

I always found the alco-pops to be a particularly heinous invention when you take the time to consider who they were being marketed at. Let’s face it, they weren’t targeting middle-aged men or old maiden aunts were they? No, it was aimed at the young; the very young in fact. No longer did kids have to screw their faces up and gag and retch as they drank their vodka on the swings. Now it tasted like pop or cordial. A thousand fruity flavours to tantalise the teenage taste buds like never before.

This meant that our parks, beaches and other recreational areas were soon liberally strewn with empty WKD, Smirnoff Ice and Hooch bottles as teens the length and breadth of the land got shit-faced on sickly sweet concoctions that, whilst packing a punch, tasted just like Vimto.

But kids tire of things quickly and what one generation sees as cool and trendy the next sees as jaded and pathetic.

What on Earth shall we do? Cried the alcohol producers.

We know, said the marketing men, let’s rehash all the old drinks and fool everybody into thinking that they’re now in some way fashionable.

And so dear old Guinness became no longer the drink of the Irish, the unwell or old Fred at the end of the bar who had three bottles of it on a Friday night that the landlord had to blow the dust off first before he served it. Oh no, thanks to some very stylish advertising involving surf boards and more merchandise than you’d find at a Kiss concert, Dublin’s finest became the go to drink of the hip and trendy young things. Sales of the black stuff shot through the roof and everyone’s iron intake rapidly shot up as well.

But let’s not stop there said the marketing men. Let’s fart about with the Guinness. Yes, it’s a perfectly delicious drink on its own terms but let’s make it extra cold so that it has zero flavour and can hardly be enjoyed by anyone who isn’t an Eskimo, people will still drink it because the adverst tell them to and they listen to every word we say.

They can’t leave anything alone can they?

And so, having well and truly buggered up Guinness, they then turned their guns back onto cider.

Snakebite wasn’t trendy any more unless you were a biker from Croydon or an ageing skinhead fresh out of Wandsworth and something had to be done to get the stuff moving again.

The marketing men spoke and it came to pass that cider was turned into piss water.

Who wants the thought-provoking complexity of traditional scrumpy when you can have syrupy sweet Strongbow, which, like Guinness before it, underwent a quite extraordinary advertising campaign.

Didn’t just stop at Strongbow did it? Along came Woodpecker, Blackthorn, Magners, Thatchers and a whole host of others. And the worst of it was that it didn’t actually taste all that much like cider. It was just fizzy alcoholic apple juice that didn’t really taste of anything. You couldn’t even tell one from the other. They all tasted, and still do taste, the same. At least even with a blindfold on I could tell the difference between bitter, mild and stout. These “ciders” were all just one homogenous great lake of nothingness.

But again, as Britain’s drinkers continued to lose their sense of taste, in favour of utter blandness, the fad caught on and soon every pub in town that once had one cider in stock now had about half a dozen different ciders to choose from as the young men and women over-enthusiastically quenched their collective thirst on the stuff.

However, there were rumblings in the boardroom; the marketing men still weren’t satisfied.

Not everybody was keen on this new, bland cider and so they began to think of a way to make it more appealing to teenagers. The solution was staring them in the face. Good old alco-pops held the key, namely, fruity flavours. And so they made the cider taste like strawberries or blackberries or loganberries or whatever berries they could think of. And it came to pass that cider sales went astronomical.

Giddy with success and high on the smell of money, the marketing men pushed on. Cider became an international concern. We began to see ciders appearing from Sweden, France, New Zealand, Belgium and basically any country on Earth that grew apples. Some of which were almost unpronounceable. The nation had gone absolutely mad for shit cider.

And while our backs were turned and we poured the fruity cider down our throats, out of the blue Gin and Tonic became something much, much more than the drink that made Granny a bit tipsy at Christmas. It went stratospheric. Suddenly, there were more brands of gin on the market than there were off licences. There was a time when you could get Gordons and that was just about it. Now there’s gin distilleries popping up all over the place, including Japan. Come on, you’ve all seen the adverts.

Gin and tonic had gone, literally overnight, from being the beverage of grouchy ambassadors and their fragrant wives in the far flung reaches of the British empire, to become perhaps the number one drink in the country. There are now bars dedicated solely to the sale of it. I heard of one, I think it was in York or somewhere, that has over 1000 gins to choose from.

Now, Is it just me or does that sound ridiculous to you as well? I mean, don’t get me wrong, a nice G&T is a lovely refreshing drink and I often enjoy a large one, but hasn’t it all gone rather too far to the point of confusion.

And then, if that wasn’t bad enough, gin got the alco-pop treatment as well and soon the choice became bewildering with flavours ranging from rhubarb to quince and everything in between with the exception of burnt rubber. So far that is. The entire drinks market had finally lost the plot and gone totally insane. All within the space of about thirty years or so.

And in that time we’ve had urine-esque Mexican lager with a wedge of lime stuffed in the neck of the bottle, Fosters cut with lemon (Cut? Cut? What is it, heroin?), we’ve had unfiltered Stella Artois that looks like a glass full of dysentry, we’ve had revolting shots that come in all the colours of the rainbow and taste like battery acid mixed with treacle, vodka mixed with red bull, which is a bad idea from the start because then you have annoying drunk people who want to stay up and talk a load of bollocks all night, and we also had beer cocktails. As modern parlance would put it, W.T.F! The list is endless.

So what do we do now? Sit and quietly sip our crappy on trend drinks whilst we wait for the next big thing? Not me matey boy. A pint of real ale or proper Guinness or a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon or if it’s a special occasion a large Jack Daniels. Give me that and I’m more than happy.

I could go on and on about what they’ve done to good old-fashioned beer with the huge ever increasing influx of foreign brews with unusual and interesting names flooding the UK market, none of which are as good as our own, but I fear I’m going to make myself physically ill if I do continue.

All I will say is, stop falling for the bloody gimmicks, they’re taking the money out of your wallet and the roaring piss out of you with their sickly, sugary and addictive little drinks. Stop buying into it. It’s just one gormless idiot proof cash cow fad after another and the next one will be along very soon you can be assured of that. I don’t know exactly what it will be, probably alcoholic Bovril or rum and Domestos or Irish whisky flavoured with shag tobacco and talcum powder or something equally as stupid.

Oh, and whilst I’m on this subject, I mentioned pubs earlier but the sorry truth of the matter is that there are very few real British pubs left. They’ve all been rejected in favour of pubbing-by-numbers Wetherspoons and chic continental style bars where sun burnt Brits sit outside and sip there e-number-loaded drinks and cackle incoherently like Macbethian witches whilst imagining that they are in some way cool. A word of wisdom if that describes you – (sotto voce) you don’t look cool.

As those irritating kids from Grange Hill once so sincerely sang, just say no! Say no to the hype.

And don’t even get me started on the sizzling gut-rot poison that is prosecco!

Rant over.