Amidst the summer’s plethora of advertisements aimed at the moronic, desperate and gullible, an especially crass one stands out. Ralph Lauren have decided, for reasons best known to themselves, that their well-heeled and preppy customers need the unholy duo of the actor Tom Hiddleston and a computer-generated ‘Polo Bear’ to advertise their product.  

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Over a series of embarrassing-looking commercials, poorly scripted and indifferently filmed, Hiddleston has to spout dialogue along the lines of ‘Strawberries and cream are one of life’s great lessons in simplicity’, watched by a huge, mute ursine, who is as close to a more sinister-looking version of Paddington as he might be without Michael Bond’s estate being paid a royalty.  

I am not entirely sure as to which bright spark came up with the idea that what the Ralph Lauren brand really needed was the combination of Hiddleston and a bear, but now we have it, and social media has duly been flooded with videos of the Old Etonian and Cambridge-educated actor manfully attempting to give his bathetic utterances some kind of nuance and interest. It would have been a hard task for Laurence Olivier (who, lest........

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