Peter York On Ads: Great song, great story,... shame about the car

The Second Life girl is distinctly Lara Croft-ish. It's harder for the men but Prince Valiant and Keanu Reeves are obviously important building blocks. The girls want to be foxy, the men want to feel free. Re-make, remodel usually means a future life where people are richer, better-looking and have a sexier, more adventurous time. All they want from any former life is their 20-year-old's skin.

But there's a mass of options and guidance for real-life life-changing. Look at those people on The Apprentice, for instance. You can't watch for any longer than it takes to get a grip on the clothes, haircuts and language that express the 2007 High Street version of an old, life-changing ideal: Mass Market Yuppiedom. Especially the language. It's where those airport self-help business books have ended up. They're after a Second Life, a Fresh Start too.

But what about altogether richer, luckier, more jaded people? People who really are thinking: "How did I get this beautiful wife, how did I get this beautiful car?" People who find themselves dreaming wistfully about an altogether simpler, more hopeful, less compromised world.

The High Street answer to all this is usually an updated Good Life one, something to do with the country and environmental redemption. It's all meaningless if the dreaming is about seedy, shared flats, 1950s council estates or the ratty end of Ladbroke Grove before gentrification.

But The Way We Were doesn't seem to work now. Its particular nostalgia doesn't do it for Baby Boomers forever looking for a new deal. Buy a wing of a country house. Or a house in France. Onward. The future can be managed. It's all rather admirable and American - miles better than the grin-and-bear-it world.

But there's a beautiful new Volkswagen commercial running that's on about precisely that kind of nostalgia. It's based on a reworking of The Platters' lovely old Fifties hit "The Great Pretender". The song is central. It dictates every scene. This particular great Great Pretender is a youngish corporate blowhard. He's footballer overdressed (shiny black suit, red shirt, dark red tie. Dark suit, V-neck T-shirt - all Nineties back-dated). There he is in somewhere vaguely sub-creative, inventing point-of-sale in Leeds, say, giving great presentation, smiling fit to bust, rushing along the corridor, high-fiving, glad handing, joshing, bantering. And consuming away like a Channel Five documentary about northern entrepreneurs. So he's buying more naff clothes, and working out in a huge deserted gym, looking completely demented. And he's got some sort of hairdresser Porsche-type convertible. In red.

It's set up to be sad, as in eating at home alone in his new apartment (key word in this milieu). The block, very wannabe LA, has revolving doors and a man out front who'll park the car if you throw him the keys just so.

The musical reworking loses the black bravura of the original in favour of something drabber and more modern. But, cleverly, it loses the baggage too. We're used to old music as borrowed interest - a bit of Nina Simone here or Billie Holiday there to authenticate a brand, give it tonal depth, but it's the words, the story they want for Volkswagen: "Oh yes, I'm the Great Pretender... laughing and gay like a clown... I seem to be what I'm not, you see... I'm wearing my heart like a crown... I'm lonely but no one can tell". It's all glorious. What exactly is he missing? What's he over-compensating for? The runaway wife and the twins? Totnes? Tom from the Shadow Lounge?

When he's going in those revolving doors, in that daft suit, with that overdone body language, he sees himself coming out in an Agnès B sort of greige suit with a plain white open neck. Talking nicely to the doorman. And getting into his old, simpler life. A life centred on his VW Golf.

The problem with this lovely conceit is that his old life doesn't look much - on balance I'd prefer the ghastliness of the new one. And the VW Golf itself - "the power of understatement" they say - looks like a boring blue blob.

Peter@sru.co.uk