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| Gordon Ramsay's horrified reaction to Timothy Taylor's Landlord |
A middle-aged man stares in disbelief at the tiny cup of
coffee in front of him. A bewildered young woman stands before a cluttered
chalkboard menu, ignored by a disinterested barista. “I just want a coffee”,
says a frustrated fellow, sparking an increasingly absurd montage. One moment
shows a man being served hot water, coffee grounds and milk in three separate
glass containers.
The above are scenes from a McDonald’s advert, advertising
their coffee offering as a refreshingly simple, down-to-earth, unpretentious
escape from the confusion of hipster coffee shops. I find it irritating, and
perhaps I should – after all, it’s poking fun at people like me who care
somewhat about the coffee they drink.
Another of these ads, though, pushes me past irritation and
into the realm of indignation. Here, a stream of exhausted punters try in vain
to discover the secret of that most mysterious of drinks, the flat white. “You don’t know what a flat
white is?”, asks a self-satisfied barista with a well-kept beard and immaculate
canvas apron. Looking away in pity, he guffaws, “oh dear!” In the final
sequence, a dutifully smiley McDonalds employee finally unwraps the enigma, explaining that a flat white is “like a
stronger latte, just with less milk.”
“Why couldn’t those
attractive young coffee shop people just say that in the first place!?”, I suppose we’re supposed to scream at
the telly. But my response to this advert, especially having just watched it
several times in a row to write this, is hot-faced anger.
Yes, it’s just a McDonald’s advert. McDonald’s adverts are
patently absurd at the best of times; try this one, in which a fictional
food quality inspector assures us that they only use top quality chicken in their nuggets.
Or this, which plays on the timeless stock character of the young punk who
absolutely loves working in a fast
food restaurant. And actually, aside from anything else, coffee culture genuinely
can be a bit wanky and being reminded of that from time to time is probably
healthy.
But the impulse behind it is more sinister. This advert
plays on people’s insecurities, their fears of looking thick by asking
questions, their assumptions that they’ll be ridiculed if they dare admit that
they’re lost. It asks them to stay safe, accept an inferior product from an
unethical corporation, rather than risk the embarrassment of exposing
themselves by asking a perfectly reasonable question that any barista worth
their salt would be delighted to answer.
Deeper still, the notion of “just wanting a coffee” or, even
worse, just wanting a “normal” coffee disturbs me because it summons an image
of a dystopian world in which everyone drinks the same watery brown-grey slop. When people say normal coffee, they're really saying, "the kind I like" and, by implication, "if you don’t, then maybe there’s something weird
about you."
Anyway, there’s a point to be made about beer here,
somewhere. In a recent article in The Sun,
which I won’t link to because they don’t deserve the clicks, a collection of
baffled drinkers sample a range of craft beers, pulling exaggerated grossed-out
faces for the camera and grasping for poetic ways to express their distaste.
Never mind that they drank them straight from the bottle or
can. Never mind that the very fact of being asked to take part would have
prodded them towards rejecting these beers in the first place. What nags me
about this piece is that it demonstrates the same kind of safe rejection as the
aforementioned McDonald’s adverts.
This attitude is sometimes called reverse snobbery. Reverse
snobbery is certainly at play when simple things like a pale ale are dismissed
as ‘poncey’. And reverse snobbery towards beer can be frustrating for those of
us who love the stuff. It’s an inferiority complex that, we might think, denies
people the pleasure we get from great beer.
How, then, do we deal with this attitude? I’m not sure. It
probably involves making beer accessible, open, easy to digest. But I’m quite
sure we should avoid anything that
further divides craft beer from those who have decided, however arbitrarily,
that it’s not for them. Delighting in reverse snobbery by, say, composing
Tweets wearing negative reviews from the Sun article as a badge of pride seems,
to me, a little smug (craft beer already looks pretty smug from the outside). At
worst, it could be interpreted as ridiculing less ‘enlightened’ tastes.
So, to clumsily return to blasted advert that set me off in
the first place, I guess I’m saying that craft beer should be less like the
conceited hipster barista and more like the approachable McDonald’s employee. I’ll
reformulate that into a catchier slogan at a later date.
