Black Earthling Boy Meets White Alien in New John Lewis Christmas Ad

John Lewis have just launched their Christmas. This follows their failed advert for insurance, in which a White boy in makeup dances around the family home wrecking it and spraying glitter and paint everywhere. That was widely criticised for promoting the trans ideology amongst children and for false advertising, as apparently the insurance policy being sold didn’t cover deliberate damage. In the new advert, a cute Black little boy sees an alien spacecraft fall out of the sky. He follows the contrail into the woods, where he sees a crashed alien spaceship and its humanoid pilot. The alien is White with white hair and rather feminine. The lad offers her some mince pies. The alien accepts them, and the two becomes friends. While fixing her craft the alien sets the electrics working so that the Christmas lights on a neighbour’s house suddenly come on, much to the neighbour’s annoyance. Having repaired her spacecraft, the alien gives the lad a peck on the cheek in farewell and flies off. The lad goes home to join his family for a festive meal, while looking into the sky. The sound track for the ad is a cover version of Phil Oakey’s ‘Electric Dreams’. I found this video of it put up on YouTube by the Guardian.

Alex Belfield has already posted a rant about it. He rightly points out that it doesn’t contain much in the way of Christmas imagery. There’s no Santa Claus, although it’s possibly a pine forest so there might be Christmas trees. There also isn’t much in the way of specifically Christian imagery either. I might be wrong, but there’s no nativity scene. It’s a very secular interpretation of Christmas. A decade ago there was controversy over what the Daily Mail and other right-wing papers and organisations described as a ‘war on Christmas’. They were angry because some local councils appeared to be deliberately omitting or playing down any mention of Christmas because they were somehow afraid it would offend non-Christian minorities. Birmingham council was particularly attacked for its reinterpretation of the festive season as ‘Winterval’. I’ve heard instead that, rather than replace Christmas, ‘Winterval’ was dreamed up as a marketing initiative by Brum’s council to create an inclusive festive season that would also cover the festivals of other faiths near Christmas, like Hanukka and Diwali. Also, from what I saw, most if not all of the calls for the removal of any public celebration of Christmas came not from the members of non-Christian religions, but from atheists and secularists like the National Humanist Society. The framed their arguments on behalf of religious minorities, while I think they were far more motivated by the rise of a much more militant atheism following the publication of Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I also think that the advert is secular simply from the sheer mechanism of capitalism, although John Lewis is organised as a partnership with its workers more like a cooperative. Capitalism and private industry exist to maximise profits. One way of doing this is seeking out new markets to you can sell your product to more people. About 15 per cent of the British population is Black and Asian, and many of the latter are non-Christians, like Hindus, Muslims and so on. Christians are now a minority in the general population. Hence John Lewis and many of the other firms advertising play down Christmas as a religious festival in order to appeal to a broader section of customers.

But Belfield also criticised the advert because he thinks that the alien in it is ‘ambivilacious’, his term for anything that is gay, non-binary, trans or generally sexually ambiguous. I can see what he means, though it seems to me that the alien is more like a pre-adolescent girl rather than anything more exotic and controversial. I might be reading it wrong, but it seems more like a tale of Earth boy meets alien girl in an innocent Christmastide romance.

Behind all this, I think the advert’s been strongly influenced by a number of pop songs and seasonal films. It reminds me more than a little of the Chris de Burgh song about a visiting spaceman at Christmas, which really is a Christian metaphor. ET with its friendship between a human child, Elliot, and a cute extraterrestrial, is another one, although it also has its differences. The most significant of which is, in my opinion, ET was definitely nonhuman and alien, while the alien in this very humanoid except for her suit and the colouring of her hair. It also reminds me of the seasonal children’s film, A Christmas Martian, a Canadian film that the Beeb screened one festive season over here when I was a sprog. Mercifully, the advert doesn’t seem to have been inspired by the truly dreadful Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, which was screened over here one Christmas in the early ’80s as part of Michael Medved’s season of terrible movies, The Worst of Hollywood, on Channel 4. But if the alien is sexually ambiguous, I suspect it might be due more to the influence of David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust than the trans movement.

Or it might come from certain aspects of the UFO phenomenon itself. Among the various aliens supposedly visiting Earth and abducting people are the ‘Nordics’. These are tall, blonde aliens, like Nordic White Europeans, hence the name. They are also sometimes described as having long hair and a feminine appearance. One of the early UFO contactees, Frank E. Strange, provides a picture of one in his book A Stranger in the Pentagon. Strange claimed that the US government has made a treaty with aliens from Venus. These aliens could provide us with a method of producing cheap, clean energy, but had been prevented from doing so by ‘certain interests’. If nothing else, this shows that people were looking for alternative energy as long ago as the ’50s and ’60s, and the ‘certain interests’ sounds very much like a veiled reference to the oil industry. The ‘alien’ in the photo to me simply looks like a blonde, glamorous woman and not like anyone who arrived here from Venus, or anywhere else. The veteran Fortean, John Keel, author of the books The Mothman Prophecies, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse and Disneyland of the Gods, stated that the Nordics were so feminine in appearance he wondered if they were gay. You can certainly wonder what was going on in Buck Nelson’s encounter with the Nordics on his farm. He was going out to his barn one morning when a group of four of them, all with long hair, came out of his barn, stark naked. They told him they from Venus, and explained the nudity by saying that they wore no clothes in order to show him that they were as human as he was. Well, they might have been Venusians, but it seems to me they may also have been a group of ordinary men. They may have been gay, and looking for a quiet place for their activities because of the legal prohibition of homosexuality in America at the time. Or they may have been pranksters playing a joke.

It also reminds me of a supposedly true UFO encounter that happened in the 1970s at Christmas. A woman was in her kitchen baking cakes when a groups of small, winged aliens came in. They greeted her and asked for some of the cakes, which she gave to them. They made a few more remarks before finally departing. This is one of the stranger UFO cases which makes me definitely wonder if the UFO phenomenon isn’t a more modern version of the ancient fairy phenomenon rather than anything genuinely extraterrestrial. This does not, however, mean that it isn’t still paranormal, as Keel and Jacques Vallee have argued in their books.

Back to the advert, it looks innocuous enough. While I can’t say that I like it’s secularism, this seems to be a response to the changes in British society rather than an ideologically motivated attempt to foster such changes. And the values it embraces seem wholesome enough. Black and White people come together across the gulfs of space and the Black lad is shown at home enjoying a family meal. This is, in my view, definitely good, as the breakdown in the British and western family has done immense harm to both Whites and Blacks.

If I have a criticism, it’s about the background music. The original song ‘Electric Dreams’ is a jolly, upbeat piece. It was, I believe, used in the 1980s SF film, Weird Science, about two teenage boys who create their idea of the perfect woman on their computer, who then materialises before them. Sort of like Beavis and Butthead meet Tron. And the perfect woman, clad only in bra and panties, says to them ‘What would you little maniacs like to do next?’ The version used here turns it instead into a plaintive ballad until the final few bars, more an expression of sorrow and loss than joy. But it seems to follow a general trend of reinterpretations of classic tracks. At the Commonwealth Games held in Scotland a few years ago the opening ceremony included a version of the Proclaimers’ ‘I Would Walk Five Hundred Miles’. This song is another upbeat hit in something very much like classic march time. But instead it was performed as another plaintive, soulful wail. I’m probably showing my age here, but is contemporary youth so depressed that they can only listen to depressing versions of great old songs? Or is it that the middle aged producers of adverts like John Lewis’ are so depressed, that they can only listen to depressing versions of upbeat hits and so are unintentional contributing to the psychological and spiritual anguish of the rising generation. A generation that has enough problems of its own.

Anyway, even if the advert is intended to sell people stuff rather than anything deeper, it’s a fun piece of trash culture with a bit of kinship to some genuine Ufological high strangeness. And that’s always good for a festive tale of the paranormal.

And here’s the trailer for Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, which I found on the DTFFmaryville channel on YouTube. In its way, truly a cinematic classic!

From 2013: Private Eye on Energy Miss-selling and Connections to Banks

One of the other scandals to have hit this country is overcharging and miss-selling by the energy companies. The majority of people in this country would like to see the power companies renationalised. It has, however, become the modern economic dogma that as much of the economy should be in private hands as possible, ever since they were privatised, along with gas and water, by the Tories. Nevertheless, public outrage has been so intense that Cameron recently made a few gestures towards getting energy prices. Much more optimistic is Ed Miliband’s pledge to lower electricity prices and to make sure that they stay down and affordable.

In their edition for 19th April – 2nd May 2013, Private Eye published this article on Scottish and Southern Energy’s miss-selling. They also revealed the involvement of senior bankers, including officials from the Bank of England, who should have been guarding against such fraud.

Energy Miss-Selling
Fried Rice

The shockwave caused by the record £10.tm fine for Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), punished by regulators for lying to customers about non-existent savings, has reached all the way to the Bank of England.

According to Ofgen, there was a “woeful catalogue of failure” by SSE managers, who allowed “a culture of miss-selling to continue. They weren’t doing enough to prevent sharp selling practices from their selling agents. They actually provided misleading sales scripts.”

All this is very embarrassing for Lady Susan Rice, SSE Group’s senior independent director, who has been on the SSE board since 2003 – and since 2007 has also been a director of the Bank of England where, somewhat alarmingly as a seasoned blind-eye turner, she chairs the audit and risk committee.

“Independent” directors are meant to ask uncomfortable questions that puncture “groupthink”. But this clearly didn’t happen at SSE, which caused “substantial harm” to its customers, Ofgem says. “Failings did not just take place on the doorstep but also in the management.”

Attempts to rein in misbehaviour were also ineffective. While “SSE terminated doorstep sales in July 2011, failure in telephone and in-store sales persisted”. SSE staff were given sales scripts which claimed that switching to SSE was “just like the government intended”. One dishonest spiel ran: “What I’m here to do today is show you a government thing called deregulation which results in your energy prices being lowered by doing nothing at all.” The false claims actually led to bigger bills for customers.

“Lady Susan Rice is, and will continue to be, a highly valued director on the Court of the Bank of England,” was the reply when the Eye asked if the SSE scandal meant she should perhaps resign from her Threadneedle Street Post.

Rice was appointed at SSE thanks to her other job as managing director of Lloyds in Scotland, which she fits in between sitting on Scottish first minister Alex Salmond’s council of economic advisers, chairing the Edinburgh Festivals forum and the city’s book festival, chairing the Chartered Banker Professional Standards Board and sitting on the Oxford Said Business School advisory council. Not to mention the National Galleries Scotland’s patrons committee and something called the Finance Group on Climate Change.

Busy bee Rice isn’t the only member of the miss-selling SSE’s board with a banking background. Chairman Lord Robert Smith was a director of Standard Chartered, which was fined $340m for money laundering in deals with Iran – and like Rice he has a government job, too; last May Nick Clegg announced that he would lead the government-funded Green Investment Bank. He is also chairing the 2014 Commonwealth Games Organising Committee.

Also paying less attention that he should have been as SSE was Richard Gillingwater, a director (£54,000 last year) since 2007. Eye readers will remember him as chief executive of the government’s Shareholder Executive when it oversaw the sale of taxpayer-owned development fund CDC’s fund management arm, Actis, to its former managers for a pittance. Gillingwater is now chairman of CDC itself and has just retired as dean of the Cass business school, teaching up-and-coming suits, er, how to run businesses properly.

In other words, the culture of miss-selling in the banking sector, which led to the collapse of Northern Rock, and the present global economic crisis, spread to the energy companies, on whose boards bankers sat. Contributing to the banking crisis was the fact that the ‘independent’ directors there, who were supposed to check miss-selling and misconduct there, did no such thing. They turned a blind eye, just as Rice turned a blind eye to miss-selling by Scottish and Southern Energy.

Deregulation has not caused energy prices to come down, just as it the deregulation of the banks did not lead to improved and responsible trading. Anything but. It’s time these sectors were cleaned up. And Miliband is a far better bet to do this, than either the Tories or their Lib Dem sycophants. They won’t do anything at all.