Advertising: Go to L: Samuel's star turn for Barclays

Samuel L Jackson is always in a kilt now. He's joined the Brit pack. He's very black. He was in that bad British gangster film The 51st State. I couldn't do my whole two minutes on Samuel L Jackson. The important thing is that his cool dates from 1994 because he was in Pulp Fiction. Still, he's an interesting figure of a sort and he looks very singular.

In the new Barclays commercial – yet more banks – he wears a kind of pea coat in olive-green corduroy and a beanie hat (probably a Kangol; Samuel L did a lot for Kangol's black credi-bility in the US). I must say I was very taken with the pea coat, but then I kept thinking, isn't it a Civil War military design and where does Samuel L stand on all that? Is there a message in it, like those ghetto boys wearing Tommy Hilfiger's debased Preppie?

The Barclays commercial is striking because Samuel L's doing a sort of Player's Theatre picaresque audition number as he walks through a field (a big rough flat field, not exactly deep green and English). It's about going into a shoe shop and having this long dialogue with the assistant about this hundred-dollar pair of shoes "you can't put a price on the stars" and "cat got your tongue?" "'I'll take them, I said.' 'Too late, we're closing,' he said."

It's got the feel of a 1940s downtown New York drama-school monologue and it makes you think, is Samuel L really one of those arty old West Village types? This thought has never crossed my mind before.

It's an absolute gusher of engaging distractions; the coat, the dialogue, the field, the persona. So it takes a while to register that it's Barclays. Several gos, in fact. But it's not for a lack of them telling us. "Money speaks in many languages," they say. "We understand them all," they say. "Barclays – fluent in finance," they say. And they've got a shot of a bucking black bull to drum it in.

You remember it, of course – the power of personality, the curious archaic monologue form, the pea coat. And you wonder how it relates to Barclays. But given the state of the nation's feelings about retail bankers, the slightest spark of personality goes a long way. So what if they're right and it's something of a coup?

peter@sru.co.uk