Advertising: Middle England moves to France
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Your support makes all the difference.It's official. This year the Daily Mail reader's dream world is French farmhouse life. It seems like only yesterday – actually it was last summer – that the Mail was giving away English country cottages, but now it's gone all continental.
The Mail has good instincts for its readers' dreams (and for their massive swirling nameless fears too), so this must mean that having a place in France is now confirmed mass middle-class rather than just for the thoughtful arty-gentsia of Primrose Hill. All those ideas planted by Elizabeth David, Terence Conran and Peter Mayle ended up in daytime TV and mid-market women's magazines – and then "Win a French Farmhouse in the Mail", plus 10 years of free P&O ferries to get you there.
But, weirdly, the art direction and the choice of stock footage make this commercial look like a British Tourist Authority promotional film for travel agents. The Farmhouse itself looks just like ... Surrey. It's spanking new-looking, black and white half-timbered, standing flatly on a neat lawn with a British municipal flowerbed – all marigolds and snapdragons. No farm. We all suspect there's a great tranche of French life that's completely Cobham, but the people of Primrose Hill always tried not to think about that; they wanted it to be purest Jean de Florette.
But equally the opening shot here – a table out on the terrace, the Mail surrounded by Frog food – actually looks like an ad for Bowyers' new "Continental" range of meat products c. 1974.
So the Mail must reckon this is how its readers like their France: hygienic, convenient and orderly. They positively don't want the tumble-down randomness and pleasing decay, all that artless simplicity. Mike and Jayne want a different product from Piers and Lizzie.
I may be reading too much into all this – that's what I do – as newspaper competition ads have to be shot really fast and cheaply and so use all the stock footage they can. Every familiar image has to register clearly on first viewing because there's no time for subtlety and attitude to build up. It has to work in a week.
But still the farmhouse has got to be the one the winner actually gets, hasn't it? And I tell you, man, it's not funky. Anyway, the smart money, French house-wise, is shifting from farmhouse fantasy to those smart pre-war British Empire resorts. Think Deauville, Le Touquet, Biarritz. They're the new Southwold.
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