Ad of the Week: elegant and idyllic, but Robinsons ad is a walk on the weird side

Robinsons’ latest ad elegantly captures those endless summer holidays, where kids pass the time kicking footballs and lobbing stones into rivers.

But, in a final twist, it’s revealed the two boys depicted here aren’t in fact mates - they’re father and son. Oddly, this makes the ad work better on second viewing, when you can spot the subtle paternal behaviour of one of the boys - though dad-lad avoids such fatherly classics as insisting his son eat his greens and complaining about pop music.

Fair play to Robinsons for giving dads some screen time, but the child-father thing is frankly a bit weird. And the ad’s slogan - ‘It’s good to be a dad. It’s better to be a friend’ - is deeply cringeworthy.