OPINION: The incredible alien in the Airwaves chewing gum ad circa 2006

Now, let me be clear; I am no fan of Airwaves, that chewing gum that is profoundly mentholated in order to clear your respiratory channels.

But circa 2006, the brand did release a stupendous TV advert featuring a pot-bellied alien with antennae, who arrives on earth in a semi-spherical, super-illuminated, high-tech spaceship, probably from the furthest reaches of the galaxy.

He is welcomed by a besuited man in a hat (and an attendant congregation of bystanders), with a packet of Airwaves, who says grandly: ‘Welcome to earth. Please make yourself at home!”

He pops an Airwave and then goes about trying to get to grips with existence beneath this new and strange promontory named earth, while looking increasingly depressed, solitary, ‘alienated’, out of place, extraneous and deeply forlorn.

He sits in an armchair, masticating, imbibing, watching mediocre TV. He looks so crestfallen he can barely be bothered to manually deal with the remote control.

Presumably his home planet was much more exciting than this kind of low-voltage, low-stimulus carry-on.

He looks in the midst of profound existential crisis and angst as he then gets squashed up against passengers on the tube, so that his odd little face is squished against the window betwixt the besuited hordes.

He goes to play bingo on his own, looking as bored as if he were being made to watch paint dry.

He has a shower, only to then have to run downstairs, with a towel protecting his modesty, as the phone rings, but it stops as soon as he gets there and he kicks the table in frustration.

He tries to have a BBQ in the rain, to get work holding a sign pointing out the location of a golf sale, and to play tennis by himself, with one of those balls you tie to a post, and an inadequate racquet. He accidentally whacks himself in the face.

He tries to work out flat-pack furniture, which then collapses around him, and then he has the Damascene moment, sadly not available to humanity currently, wherein, having taken an Airwave, he ‘comes to his senses’, swiftly reboards his gloriously celestial spaceship and hightails it off earth and back, presumably far off, into the stratosphere, rather than return to what one can only conclude was an experience he would rather forget.

If only I had that spaceship...