The case for… Television jingles

Entering my teens in the golden age of DVD content, I believed that the rest of my life would be an unbroken conveyor belt of in-depth special features and directors’ commentaries for all my favourite films. Instead, it lasted roughly 15 years before streaming killed it dead. Into this bracket we can add FA Cup final club songs and movie trailers in which a gravel-voiced announcer describes the film to you: things that were such staples of our cultural lives that mentioning their absence to people now fills them with shock and horror at what’s been taken from us.

Here I’d add another endangered species to the pile: the jingle. Once so numerous in ads that dozens of them became playground chants, the much-maligned jingle has fallen on hard times. For every “Go Compare” or “Autoglass Repair Autoglass Replace” that remains frozen in aspic, there are a thousand more companies that would never think to contrive an inane music-shaped sting to worm its way into your brain.

Worse, some appear embarrassed by their vestigial jingles, replacing them with shorthand – the whistled echo of McDonald’s former “I’m Lovin’ It” leitmotif; the barely-there phantom of “Mmm, Danone”, which now accompanies notices for the French-Catalan yoghurt.

Short-form video has no use for such frivolity – such art! – when brands can now capture your attention with crash-zoom drone footage, or pay a suspiciously white-toothed influencer to open the very box in which their products are sold. Give me 1.5 seconds of music explicitly designed to burrow into my brain. Give me an asinine call-and-response slogan that barely fits in the space available. Return, I say, to pepper the sterile silence of this shinier, more vapid age. Come back, humble jingle – all is forgiven.