A new lick of paint for all those stickies

You know it's Christmas when you get the ads for the stickies. The drinks no one drinks otherwise. The girls' drinks. When I say girls you'll no doubt be thinking of the young women you know downing Becks straight from the bottle in Poo Na Na or All Bar Ones across the land; but I mean something slightly different here, I mean the Old Girls. Well they know it too, the sticky brand-owners, and they're dead keen to contemporise the imagery, bring new cohorts into the various sticky brand franchises, and so forth. They've laboured over the years to move the stickies from their klutzy old stories – monks stewing them up, South American adventures and so forth – towards more modern aspirational themes. They've tried the lot, from socially smart to high fashion to modern cool to make-and-do cocktail mix guides.

Tia Maria's been down a fair few tracks, but its main focus recently has been on black women. Did they have a Naomi Campbell ad? I can't remember. But they definitely had Iman, the African princess, as their rather grand poster girl. Well, they've scrapped all that now and gone straight for the universal catch-all cod sex, with a few concessions to the "dark" theme, in a kind of American Gothic. It's in a style – black and white of course – of the early Nineties, with a few special features, which I'll come to later.

So there's an American police car on a lonely country road, single driver. Inter-cut shots of beasty eyes and taloned ladies' fingers circling glass rims. He runs off the road to avoid a wolf caught in the headlights. So he just has to visit the isolated Bar from Hell. The locals are practically Mountain Men. And behind the bar there's his dark destiny. When I say dark here I should say she's not remotely black, but Hispanic, with maybe a lick – and huge lips. It's her talon that's been circling that glass.

Within two seconds there's very heavy eye-contact foreplay. He's regular model handsome but with a gigantic crooked nose. She's not looking at the nose, but further down. You'd think it was a lunch box or packet – as the Poo Na Na girls would say – review, but it's just as much his handcuffs. Then the Tia Maria bottle bursts into flames. And here's the special feature bit. It's all swirly-wirly filming at this point, but if you watch it on the convenient frame-by-frame video facility it looks to me as if there's a lady being handcuffed. Now isn't that like what they used to call subliminal advertising, the stuff that caused a moral panic in 1950s America and, so I thought, legislation to follow? What a sweet old-fashioned thing. Oh bondage, up yours.