When an employee once questioned the authority of the movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn, he replied that he would take 50 per cent efficiency to get a 100 per cent loyalty.

This is probably because he lived in a time before Scrabulous, which now makes a 50 per cent efficiency rate look like slave labour. God, Scrabulous is the crystal meth of the internet. It makes gambling look like embroidery.

If at any point in the past couple of months you’ve called a company to chase up an order, or make a payment, or to demand to know how exactly your blue-chip, guaranteed-return bank has managed to lend all its money to a man with only one functioning tooth, the chances are that whoever you were speaking to wasn’t listening at all. They were thinking only about online scrabble. I’m in the middle of a game right now. A rematch, in fact, after I took 78 points last night with “apatetic”, meaning “naturally camouflaged”. Damn, I’m good.

So it might, just might, be the case that we’re less efficient than we used to be. But we’re surely also more loyal. Our loyalties are now required by nearly everyone we come into contact with – our lovers, friends, pets, employers and, most of all, our supermarkets, which have little cards to prove it. Well, not from me they don’t, because no promise of money-off vouchers has been enough to shake my suspicion that someone somewhere will then be masturbating over my postcode. Which just can’t be hygienic, not least for the vouchers.

Obviously some of our loyalties are more deep-seated than others – usually the ones we’ve had for longest: to family, religion or (in my case) an ongoing commitment to engineer the downfall of girls whose names end –ey. This is why we are almost pathologically loyal to characters and books from our childhood. They were there before any of our other obsessions, so they take precedence. To paraphrase the country singer and quondam Mr Julia Roberts, Lyle Lovett: you can have my girl, but don’t touch my Henry’s Cat.

So in a way you have to respect Marmite for its barefaced grab at the nostalgia market this week. It has launched an advert where Paddington, pretty much everyone’s favourite bear-named-after-a-London-station, is seen to eschew his usual diet of marmalade for a cheese and Marmite sandwich. He offers some to a pigeon, which promptly retches in the street. Given that London pigeons are routinely seen eating leftover KFC in a sort of mutant cannibalistic ritual that seems likely to open the gates to Hell, this is quite some criticism. Marmite has done its best to win over a potentially unforgiving audience by producing an ad that looks exactly like the programme we all watched as children.

Even the scripts are written by Michael Bond, Paddington’s original chronicler, either because Marmite has paid him a truly vast sum of money, or because it is holding his favourite grandchild hostage.

Marmite would have us believe that there are only two reactions to its product – love it, or hate it (although this omits the third section of humanity, including me, who have never tried it, because the phrase “yeast extract” brings to mind not nourishment, but thrush. And that doesn’t make me feel hungry, it makes me feel itchy). There are probably only two responses to this advert though – you either celebrate it as a cheery call-back to a time when you were innocent/happy/young/getting ruthlessly bullied by a girl called Vickey.

Or you think they might just as well have sat Paddington in a window, put a red light behind him and waited for the punters to walk past. Certainly, it’s hard to believe that other bears from our childhood aren’t going to sell themselves to the highest bidder too. And where would that leave us? Rupert Bear binning his yellow trousers for the more lucrative Burberry check? Winnie the Pooh pondering his next meal of honey (sorry, hunny) before eyeing Piglet, licking his lips, and choosing English Provender Company apple sauce instead?

And it’s not just bears that are anyone’s for a £3 million ad campaign. I’m still trying to forget the recent Quaker Oats commercial, where Windy Miller appeared with a naturist Scandinavian uncle. I find nude Plasticine surprisingly troubling, given that I grew up in the Morph era. I now confidently expect to see the Clangers spurn the old-fashioned Soup Dragon in favour of a more convenient Cup-a-Soup.

I presume that Bagpuss is about to become a spokesman for eBay, since he has such extensive experience of a shop full of random, broken things. And First Great Western could only improve its almost legendary customer contempt if it paid for a few posters of Ivor the Engine. So long as it didn’t remove half his carriages, and drive him through a red signal, anyway.

It’s only a matter of time before the whole thing goes international. Yogi Bear will steal only Tesco’s Finest from hapless Jellystone picnic baskets, and Wile E. Coyote will shed his lifelong passion for ACME goods, and start shopping at Wal-Mart instead. Tweety-Pie will keep his eyes open for a bargain, not a puddytat, and the Hair Bear Bunch will be conditioning with L’Oréal. Because they’re worth it.

Natalie Haynes’s new novel, The Great Escape, is published by Simon and Schuster

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