PETER YORK ON ADS: No 301: IKEA

Marriage break-up can be fun, because you get a new place; make a fresh start and make your life altogether more tasteful, less klutzy.

The three couples in the new Ikea commercial start out deeply klutzy, deeply suburban, very late Seventies/early Eighties, a little bit Good Life, a touch Wedding Singer. They're probably taken from unmemorable magazine ads of the period, re-rendered in that clever Twin Peaksy way. These people are ineffably funny, ineffably naff to modern advertising folk. To be precise, a dark-haired girl and her overweight green-tie- and-blazered husband at their wedding (pink balloons). And she's into adultery behind the bushes with a middle-aged Italian barber type with truly remarkable Continental-style knitwear.

A Home Counties suburban couple are holding a dinner party in their arid house for a Japanese pair. She's in a shiny blue cheongsam dress, he's in a V-neck with a pale blue undershirt. And they've got a Hostess trolley with bright green peas and orange carrots. And, in another lovely world, there's a Ford-driving manageress type with a streaked blond doughnut- do flirting with the poor man's Sacha Distel next door. In the living- room her husband's got a nearly built galleon from a kit standing reproachfully on a side-table. We're clearly setting up for get a life.

And our on-screen MC, of course, is a rapper. He's the acceptable face of rapperdom, not overweight, not too baggy, not obscene. In a flash Mr Cool's got these destabilised suburbans into Ikea and into backing-dancer routines. Hey, get real, say his lyrics, your relationship is burned: just pack up, ship out, find a place of your own, and, for all your new things, you know where to come.

This epic has taken 70 seconds. And there's more; in a 10-second coda we see the first sundered couple in the Ikea car park. She's been buying up the shop with the new Eytie boyfriend. They're all looking less formal, more modern lower-middle tasteful, and the wronged hubby's looking accepting, philosophical - in for a bout of personal growth.

She's two-timed, she's left you and now you're alone. Don't worry 'bout that - think about your home. Make a fresh start.

This one is tailor-made for column inches - it'll provoke the Victoria Gillick and co lobby on to Today and GMTV ("new commercial encourages marriage break-up"). Just like Ikea's notorious time and motion treatment which measured the cost of new office equipment against the price of an employee - and got the unions out against it. You don't need to buy so much airtime when you do it that way.