A tasty morsel (and that's just the crisps)

PETER YORK ON ADS: No 167: WALKERS LITE

The question is, can Ulrika speak real Swedish? And is she doing it in the Walkers Lite commercial?

Walkers is on the borderline as an advertiser: a few more good things and it could enter the pantheon of the constantly watchable and the positively waited for, like Levi's and Virgin. This Bergman spoof is really quite funny, and Ulrika looks lovely in early 1950s-style long satin gloves. The joke is all about Brits and Swedes, posh and pop, high and low brows, and the relative desirability of sex and potato crisps. There's our Ulrika in this troubled haut bourgeois interior (in black-and-white, of course) surrounded by Chinesoid lamps with fringes and other "period" stuff. She's caressing the door edge and doing suggestive things with the brass handle, all the while murmuring these Scandivegian sounds at a deeply unmoved Gary Lineker, who's in white tie and profoundly sculpted beard, looking a bit like Abraham Lincoln. It's clearly not a 1990s companionable relationship.

And according to the subtitles she's saying something like "I feel something important exchanged between us tonight", while Gary walks away like a man who can't acknowledge his personal fluids.

But as he comes into stronger lighting the years fall away, we're back with World of Sport's favourite son and a confiding Gary tells us, in a decidedly north-of-Watford tone: "She's not wrong", while popping a crisp. The message is that New Walkers Lite crisps with 25 per cent less fat remain irresistable - certainly more compelling than Swedish babes who talk dirty.

Putting Ulrika - a successful crossover act if ever there was one (from Gladiators to Vic Reeves) - with Gary covers almost all conceivable constituencies. And you don't need to know the Bergman oeuvre to know that such films exist and are shown late on Channel 4 solely in order to be spoofed on "Friday Night is Comedy Night".