When did Christmas adverts become so unbearable?

When I was young, I dated a man who wasn’t in advertising, but had lots of friends who were. Because I am witty, at some point during dinner — usually when dessert was being laid out with a platinum credit card — one of them would say: ‘Have you ever thought of working in advertising?’ I remember feeling real indignation, like someone had spat in my spritzer. I don’t care that Salman ‘Naughty, but nice’ Rushdie and Fay ‘Go to work on an egg’ Weldon started out that way; I had no intention of ending up in such a venal profession. So intense were my feelings that when, as a Bright Young Thing in the 1980s, I was asked to be one of the fresh faces which re-launched Croft Original in the style mags, I wrote a really rude letter back. I could kick myself now. Imagine all that free sherry.

I don’t believe that advertising is evil. It helps keep a free press going, including this magazine. I don’t subscribe to the late, great Bill Hicks routine: ‘By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing: kill yourself. Seriously though, if you are, do. There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. You are the ruiner of all things good. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage.’

I do believe, however, that the advertising industry needs to stop kidding itself that it is in any way helping civilisation. We’re now so concerned with fake news and social media conspiracies that the industry has been let off the hook in recent years. Make no mistake, though. These agencies wouldn’t know a principle if it stuck itself right up their noses.