ITV/Channel 4
Nescafé Original is best known as the stuff hogging crucial real estate in Poundstretcher, selling at £1 per 400 kilos because they can’t shift the unholy shit. Pile-it-high,-sell-it-cheap is a necessary evil but Nescafé seem to have stumbled upon a way to shift their EEC granule mountain by ingeniously repackaging it. Say hello to Nescafé Original 3-In-1.
Aimed at the “no hassle” generation – those too lazy to make a cup of instant coffee – Nescafé Original 3-In-1 contains the coffee (caked vending machine dregs), whitener (that stuff you haven’t touched since 1978) and sugar (shitty purified killer white sugar of course, certainly not demerara sugar, the only sugar that makes coffee drinkable).
If they’re after a younger demographic it seems odd to soundtrack the advert with Supergrass’s Alright – dating back as it does 16 years. A handsome young student comes down the stairs after the night before’s revelry. Two foxy brunettes eye him up – there’s embarrassment there, maybe some chemistry. Did he fuck one of them? Both of them? “We all know that after party feeling! Full of those memories of the night before!” says the voice-over. “Get the morning back on track with the great taste of Nescafé Original 3-In-1”.
Once the hideous hateful 3-In-1 is broken out and supped up, all awkwardness dissipates like whitener in bad coffee. All are joined in the great brotherhood of bitter Poundland ash aftertaste, boiling water uncooled by milk and shitty dribbling sugar. If you know any young people you know that they’re appalling soulless saps and this level of idiocy may very well work. By combining three things no one wants in a single packet and marketing it as an indispensable postscript to weekend hedonism, Nestlé provide a nice comic adjunct to their promoting of powdered baby milk in the Third World and unionbusting in Colombia. I’ll take as many of those deaths sachets as you have!