So what will it be… cup of tea, coffee, or voyage of discovery?

WHEN the advert first came on the television, I immediately thought: Oh. Now, this is either the sign of a really good advert, or, inversely, a really bad advert. It shouldn’t be too obvious, then again, nor should you be scratching your head thinking, “what was all that about?”

The animation was rough and textured like The Snowman and featured a red-haired girl in a rowing boat, who is suddenly caught up in a dreadful squall. Waves are crashing over the bow and she loses one, than the other of her oars. Clinging to the centre of the boat, she is clearly in mortal peril. Then, suddenly, the boat is netted by a passing flock of seagulls. (Now I’ve heard of pods of dolphins coming to the rescue of seamen, and, one presumes, seawomen – Flipper never having struck me as one who would indulge in sexual discrimination – but never have I heard of Larus argentaqtus proving particularly charitable, unless it comes to liberating chips from the obese.)

Anyway, the seagulls lift the boat clear of the raging ocean then dump her down in calmer seas, which allows her to sweetly trail her hand in the waters before being washed ashore. The blaring soundtrack was one of those weepy ballads girls favour after having been told by their latest beau: ‘Welcome to Dumpsville. Population: You.’ It was Charlene Soraia’s Wherever You Will Go and at this point I’d already thought, “This has got to be for a feminine hygiene product. That’s it, the sea is a cunning metaphor for monthly mood swings.”

It was just at that point that the doppelganger appeared. That’s right, the girl with the red hair and annoying scarf strolls on to the sandy beach where she is greeted by an exact duplicate. Was this, I wondered, The Island of Dr Moreau? Had I missed major advances in DNA technology, not to mention the collapse of all medical ethics permitting the sale of clones, whose organs one can happily harvest. “That’s it, the sea is a metaphor for cancer and look, here is your own personal cure.”

Then came the surprise twist, the girl dissolves into her doppelganger and somehow acquires a cup of tea. On a deserted island? Starbucks, I’d grant you, but tea? The whole advert was, it turns out, for Twinings, designed to accompany its new advertising slogan: “Gets you back to you.”

I was left shouting at the screen in a manner usually reserved for crucial plot twists in costume dramas. Had Michael Winner been in the room he would have been forced to utter the line: “Calm down, dear. It’s only a commercial.” Frankly, I was disappointed. You wouldn’t get that with PG Tips. No. They understand that what sells tea isn’t existential maritime disasters, but monkeys, either of a knitted variety or elegantly dressed in drag. Is it any wonder that the whole industry is enduring a storm in a tea cup with sales dropping, loyal fans ageing then shuffling off to that great tearoom in the sky, while only 4 per cent of under 25s brew a regular cuppa?

The fact is that despite the cup of tea being viewed as the great British tradition, it has long since been superseded by the cup of coffee. Today, tea accounts for 37 per cent of all hot beverages consumed in Britain, a drop of 0.2 per cent in the past year, while coffee accounts for 53 per cent, a rise of 3.3 per cent. In one way the historical balance has been corrected, because coffee was popular in Britain a century before tea even arrived. We owe our parliamentary form of democracy to the political debates that were as scalding as the brews served in the great coffee houses of London.

Then tea, belatedly imported by the East India Company in the 18th century, became such a social phenomenon that the public put down their gin and rum bottles and picked up the teapot, leading to a boom for potteries such as Wedgewood and a bust for the government, who began losing income from the taxes as sales of gin and alcohol slumped. In order to wean the public off this fiscally irresponsible brew, the government slapped a tax of 125 per cent on imports of tea and, at a stroke, created a generation of tea smugglers. Try to imagine our feral youths whispering from under their hoodies: ‘Psst mate: 25 grammes of Earl Grey?” It took the wisdom of William Pitt the Younger to lower the taxes to a more reasonable 12 per cent and for the Duchess of Bedfordshire to create in 1841 the one culinary institution to which I still regularly doff my hat – the afternoon tea. Anna Maria Russell could not quite bear the long gap between lunch at 1pm and dinner at 7pm, or that “sinking feeling” as she described it so she began to indulge in a small repaste at around five o’clock or teatime and soon friends were invited to join her.

What is interesting is that Twinings new advert is clearly targeted at women, (and if one was to be uncharitable, ladies who see their long-term future with a ginger tabby). As the company explains on its website: ‘We’ve created this really quite extraordinary piece of animated advertising to metaphorically explain the hectic lives that women today lead and how taking just ten minutes each day to reconnect with yourself can have such an impact on the rest of your day.”

So why is tea more usually associated with women and coffee with men? At first I thought it was the iconography of coffee drunk around a camp fire by cowboys, or Agent Dale Cooper of the FBI hankering after “Damn fine coffee” in Twin Peaks, the 1980s TV series created by David Lynch, who has since gone on to release his own brand of coffee. In fact, it is not the inherent machismo associated with coffee as the liberty that tea brought to women. In the 17th and 18th centuries, ladies did not frequent coffee houses which were strictly for men and the women who attended to them, however when in the 1860s the first tea shop opened in Britain, here, at last, was an establishment that women could frequent without stain on their character.

Today the character of tea remains feminine, for it is viewed as taking one’s troubles away, of calming one down or easing the stresses of the day, actions that are still more closely associated with women than men. It is interesting that in times of crisis people still reach for the kettle, despite the fact that this is an act of impotence – there is nothing else we can do, so let’s have a nice cup of tea. Within hours of the riots breaking out in England, a Facebook page had been set up entitled Operation Cup of Tea, which urged would be rioters to forego the possibility of a five-fingered discount on a pair of trainers and a plasma TV followed by the probability of jail, in favour of a quiet night indoors with a brew. Within 24 hours, it had more than 100,000 members.

I don’t know if tea has reached the tipping point, if Britain’s national drink will now be left to stew in the pot, before eventually being tipped down the sink by the ungrateful latte sipping relatives of its last eccentric imbiber. At the current rate of decline it will be at least 150 years before we reach that bleak day, and so until then mine is weak, no sugar.