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I committed to Private View over a Christmas "lunch". "No problem, James – give me something to do, get away from the in-laws, ha-ha, ha-ha…"

Idiot.

I remember this feeling. Hazy memories of a Sunday night in January 1987, having watched darts all day; finally starting on an essay to the tolling of the morbidly cheery That’s Life theme tune, with its dogs at the bar with soda water, and Rantzen cackling at Doc Cox on his special sofa until Gavin and the other two make her get serious about the Ipswich conman with his bogus Hotpoint warranty scheme or until she gets arrested again for biting a timeshare operator. Or something.

And the homework goes on late into the night. That feeling. New Year’s Eve, eh? It was so important once.

Every format gets tired in the end. Even the Hootenanny. HOOTENANNY.

Still, more acceptable than the tiny competition winner on the other side. Mind you, Brian May looks good for her age.

Talking of tired formats…

Philips has made a "Music Map"! It lets you create location-based playlists! Based on what people are listening to RIGHT NOW in places such as Berlin, Brooklyn, London and San Francisco. I mean, ANYWHERE. Philips made "carousel" a few years back, by the way. Somewhere, it got normal again.

BMW joins in the déjà vu fun with an ad hot off the U-matics of 1987. Pin-up Neanderthal hipster’s curiosity gets the better of him as he successfully mounts a wild horse that unseamlessly cuts into a BMW, rewarding his spirit that "sometimes leads us to places we’d never imagined we would reach". If he’d lit up a Hamlet bareback on the stallion, I might have forgiven it.

Thinkbox, however, knows an expiry date when it sees one, reassuring us that this is the "third and final ad" in the Harvey trilogy. This stays true to the formula of The Hangover Part III, loosely resurrecting the ingredients of the breakthrough while getting less funny every time, relying on predictable montages with perhaps one moment to remind us why we liked the first one so much. The Rita, Sue And Bob Too steamy car window nearly does that. Nearly. But I can’t bring myself to care as much about Harvey’s new love interest as much as I did him being left to waste away in a pound. As a result, the whole "TV is a valuable medium" bit seems more than slightly shoehorned.

Apple has ruined my flow by wholeheartedly embracing a tired format – the "time-defying duet" (see Nat King and Natalie Cole, Sinatra and Bono, Barry/Paul Chuckle and Tinchy Stryder) – yet making me care/admire the tools of the company. Caveat: when I first saw this, I was feeling warm and Christmassy, and here was an ad that actually felt like Christmas as well as a good product demo. But in the cold light of New Year’s Day, it does lean on the side of Christmaschmaltz. But that’s the point, I guess.

So the king of the lucky acronyms, Chect – Childhood Eye Cancer Trust – wins 2015 so far by inventing a new format rather than resurrecting a tired one. Useful media for medical waiting rooms, with genuine utility; diagnosing potential eye anomalies using the new format in your pocket – the flash of your smartphone camera. I’d like this one to actually work. Imagine that.

Bonne année et bonne santé.

Thinkbox. Loved it… how could you not, right? However, in my opinion, animals and celebrities are sort of cheating. Sort of. It’s low-hanging fruit to get folks on your side. Throw in a song made popular by none other than Glenn Medeiros and only a monster could dislike this film. The vignette spot always gets me. It’s nearly the perfect medium for a lack of screen time and the execution was really great: familiar without feeling "seen before". The steamy window shot pushed it over the edge in a great way. The only "bad thing" is that I have no idea what the ad was for. I didn’t care because I was just smiling, but I don’t know if I’m supposed to find a date or adopt a dog… or have sex with an adopted dog. As a liberal, I’m pretty open, though.

Philips. I have a hard time watching any sort of screen footage so, creatively, this wasn’t working that well for me. But I did understand what the product is and it seems sort of good. So where Thinkbox failed me, this one worked for me as a piece of communication with nice music heavily featuring a low-pass filter sweep.

BMW. Great. Beautifully shot and thoughtfully narrated photographically. Casting could have been a bit less "model in a loincloth", but it’s totally forgivable. The opening "4000 BC" gives this piece a "once upon a time" quality that draws you in and that was smart. People are suckers for "once upon a time" - I am no exception.

The only thing that disconnected for me was the theme of "curiosity". By the end, that felt superimposed on top of a story of a guy who needed a horse – which has nothing to do with curiosity, does it? He wasn’t curious about the horse – he just wanted one.

It almost would have been better to have no voiceover and just allow me the room to make my own connection. Without the grafted-on theme of curiosity, I would have come to a much more clever conclusion – something along the lines of "the more things change, the more they stay the same".

For me, a better edit would not have had a voiceover and the super would have been something like: "MAN HAS ALWAYS NEEDED A SWEET RIDE."

Also, not their fault, but the weird music sting that the client made them put in there takes you out of it. Clients, man… they pay for stuff but, boy, do they know how to shit on the sofa sometimes.

Childhood Eye Cancer Trust. I love the utilitarian nature of this work. It reminds me of the difference between "clever" and "smart". Clever often ends up being self-congratulating, at least in its resonance, whereas smart reaches beyond the medium and enters people’s actual lives even just in a small way.

This does exactly that well. Congrats to those involved.

Apple. Beautiful execution and casting. When 30 opinions are involved, it’s tough to keep pieces like this from grinding the guard rail of cheesy and landing in a propaganda-ish place. They did a nice job of avoiding that here. The direction is gentle and the performances land in that "just enough" place. The worst version of this idea is readily available for a viewing and it’s nice to see someone get this right.