PETER YORK ON ADS No 287: RENAULT SCENIC

Why do I like the new Renault Scenic commercial quite so much? It raises no big issues, it scores no firsts and it won't win any prizes. And I've always wanted more than just a nice tune and a pretty girl. And yet. I must say I liked its predecessor, which used the same music from the Lightning Seeds and had amiable little scenes with groups of children and rugby players and - oh, all human life was there - piling in and out of the car in a sort of church hall/ school concert set up.

But I'm not normally a sucker for amiability either, so I found other things to write about. Add to that the fact that I have no idea what the adverts - either of them - are trying to say about the car (bags of room; can take a second family for those six-kids-between-us couples perhaps?) and it's a mystery.

This new treatment is a sort of Sound of Music spoof. Not auspicious. It opens on an aerial shot of a very grassy mountain, in, apparently the Austrian Alps, but it's bright and sunny and there's no snow. A blonde and three youngsters exit a green Renault Scenic just below the mountain peak and rush to the top against a thrilling blast of film music stings.

Cue Lightning Seeds. It's that "Oh, things could be marvellous, oh things could be fabulous" song, and it really works for its royalties. You remember it, you associate it with the car, it's cleverly syncopated to the action without any obvious tricks. It's a most efficient piece of music.

I should tell you about the car, of course, but it looks deeply unremarkable. One thing about it is that its metallised green paint is very precisely matched to the grass. The other is that it's rolling gently backwards, downhill. The blonde's been a bit careless about the handbrake and off it goes, startling the rabbits and the belled cows. The woman meanwhile - and she is quite pretty - is doing her little spoof dance, shimmying around in a rather nightie-like blue dress, the children around her as in a daisy chain.

It's a Eurovision sort of little dance, with a lot of hand signals. And it does bring Samantha Janus just faintly to mind. On she goes regardless, while the car drifts down, with a variety of forgettable copy points on screen - "new 16v engine", "built-in drinks cooler". That sort of thing - "these are the days and this is the life, so wake up cos this is the time".

But is it? The backward-drifting car conceit has no closure, as people say these days. No rescue, no humorous crash. Which arguably is just that bit unsettling, and clever anyway. You work it out.