Christmas TV adverts 2016: Shrophire's favourite revealed in poll

Tony Blackburn winks cheekily at the camera, Henry Cooper slaps on the Brut, while Magnus Pyke gets very animated about his pocket calculator. Say what you like about Woolworths, but the late lamented retailer always pulled out the stops for its Christmas advertising campaigns.

With cast lists that would put Sunday Night at the Palladium to shame, nothing captured 1970s Christmas consumerism quite like Woolie's festive advertising. The sale was as hard as nails, with big-name celebrities delivering an endless list of special offers at breakneck speed. For everything from a steam-iron to a Dracula outfit, Woolworths was the place to be – at least if you could get to the till for all the television stars clamouring for bargains.

It is fair to say that Christmas advertising has come a long since the late 1970s. While in the days of Pickwick vinyl and Chevron cassettes the message was simple and clear – 'this is what we've got, and this is what it costs' – today's Christmas messages focus more on subtle, subliminal messages, designed to tug at the heartstrings rather than to provide information.

And, if our poll, on this year's Christmas ads is anything to go by, it seems that animals – and even vegetables – are a far bigger pull than endorsements from the rich and famous.

The latest John Lewis advertisement, featuring a Buster the boxer dog playing on a trampoline is by some margin the most popular Christmas advert by the big-name retailers in this year's poll.

The advert, which also features foxes, badgers, and other assorted wildlife trying out a child's Christmas trampoline, received 28 per cent of the votes cast in our online poll. And with so many cute animals on show, how could anybody fail to love it? Of course, in real life the foxes would probably be more focused on eating birds than playing on trampolines, but it is a heart-warming image which the whole family will love.

It is followed in our readers' poll by Aldi's slightly psychedelic Kevin the carrot advert, featuring an animated vegetable scurrying around the Christmas dining table before lying down and going to sleep on somebody's dinner plate. It received more than a fifth of the votes cast in our poll, but one does wonder whether it would go down quite so well after a few too many sherries on Christmas Day.

John Lewis's sister brand Waitrose also endeared many with its robin which battles against weather conditions, high seas, hawks and exhaustion on its migration path from Scandinavia to its preferred British garden in search of food, warmer climes and a breeding partner. The robin is supposed to be a metaphor for the journeys we all make to be with our families and friends at Christmas, and it certainly puts Chris Rea's version into context.

One place above the robin in the, ahem, pecking order, is a relatively new player on the scene, the internet giant Amazon. The advert features two elderly clerics, a Christian priest and a Muslim imam, chatting over a cup of tea. As it becomes apparent they are both suffering from back problems, they unwittingly buy each other knee pads from Amazon as Christmas presents for each other. Some love its message of friendship and inclusivity, others consider it a touch cynical. But either way it has got people talking, even if they do not remember the brand it is supposed to be advertising. It came third in our poll, with 18 per cent of the vote.

Celebrity appearances are pretty thin on the ground this year, with Tesco the only real major retailer to bother with them. Tesco has produced a series of four ads starring comedy actors Ben Miller and Ruth Jones in a variety of different Christmas scenarios, invariably ending with Jones barking "Bring it on!"

But catchphrases don't seem to be very popular at the moment – just ask anyone who has seen the Go Compare advert featuring the cockney cab driver who keeps shouting fantastic – and the Tesco ad scored a lowly one per cent in our survey.

Lidl seems to have evoked images the old 'bootiful' Bernard Matthews adverts with its campaign, set on a turkey farm. But while it looks idyllic enough, it appears to have enraged animal rights campaigners who have compiled a number of spoof versions on YouTube. And it only gets one per cent in our poll, proof positive that people don't vote for Christmas adverts featuring turkeys.

Watch the rest of our TV Christmas crackers: