How did contemporary culture become so dismal?

Watching the Christmas John Lewis ad, over and over, I’m struck by how much British life has changed – and not for the better. We’ve all become so tastefully downbeat, introspectively sentimental and utterly lacking in brightness.  

In the early 1980s, the big TV advertisement of the Christmas season was for Woolworths. I should explain for any younger readers that Woolworths was a kind of Amazon depot, except that you were required to go there yourself on your legs and search for what you wanted with your arms. 

The 1981 Woolworths advert was bright, gaudy and carnivalesque. A cavalcade of middle aged, distinctly uncool and definitively unsexy celebrities – two thirds of The Goodies accompanied by Anita Harris, and Windsor Davies and Don Estelle of recently defunct sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum – parade around the Woolworths wares attired variously as clowns, tin soldiers and thigh-slapping chorus girls. 

They are joined by geisha girls in kimonos, the likely influence of the recent number 1 hit ‘Japanese Boy’ by Aneka (the less said to younger readers about her, the better).