The commercial assault on our childhoods continues with the shocking news that Paddington Bear is ditching his marmalade sandwiches in favour of Marmite, otherwise known as the Devil’s personal lubricant.

According to The Guardian, the peripatetic duffle coat-wearer will decide it’s time to “try something different”. Instead of just using an inside toilet instead of woodland, he only goes and tries a Marmite-and-cheese sandwich, declaring it “really rather good”.

He then throws a piece of the yeast-infected butty to a bird, who sensibly recoils and flies off, only to cause a chain reaction that ends with a taxi crashing into a shop and a policeman being hit with a watermelon. Paddington is subsequently led off by said policeman.

No doubt DDB London, the advertising agency behind this epicurean fiasco, has a series of follow-up ads during which the arrested bear's paw-prints are taken, thereby alerting the authorities to his dubious immigration status.

Future ads presumably will show Paddington in an immigration holding centre, smearing himself with the foul vitamin B-heavy extract in a dirty protest, with the whole nightmare series ending with the bear being hooded and bound and shipped back to darkest Peru courtesy of a redirected CIA rendition flight.

Let's just hope reports that other Marmite campaigns are likely to feature Winnie the Pooh and the three bears turn out to be a load of Goldilocks.®

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