The Hard Sell: Birds Eye Baked To Perfection Fish

It's been a year since Birds Eye first began selling frozen food via the sinister yet somehow resonant device of a polar bear, living in fridge freezers, telling people what to eat. And then telling them it doesn't see enough of them, like some kind of elderly, furry relative. But lately, things have taken a turn for the worse.

Setting aside the manifest ironies of having an animal whose habitat is threatened by climate change living in an electrically powered refrigerator, the bear has decided that its dietary advice has not been firm enough. No longer does the beast simply advise cooks that Birds Eye products might contain finer ingredients than other frozen foods; now the Arctic flunky is telling us to abandon fresh produce altogether.

"Hey Katie," says the bear (voiced by Willem Dafoe) before taking a big, Hannibal Lecter sniff. "Cooking fish, huh? Tricky." Katie, dressed smartly with a sophisticated dinner party on her mind, doesn't know where to look. She's vulnerable. "Here," says the bear, breaking the tension and pushing some oven-ready Birds Eye fish toward her like a dealer giving an addict a taste. "Perfect flaky fish in 25 minutes." She can't refuse. She is beguiled by the bear. So much so, that he returns moments later to successfully push her some prawns.

Such is the intensity of the connection between Katie and her ursine interloper that the dinner party she is in charge of has faded into the background. This begs the question as to what will happen when the other humans have gone home. Interspecies breeding, with a puppet? Tricky. But not as tricky, it seems, as cooking a proper meal. What have we become?