Warburtons turned to a Brit, Olivia Colman, to push its crumpets last year. But in a new ad designed to underline its heritage as it marks 150 years, it has cannily returned to Hollywood to secure the services of the movies’ most authoritative speaker: Morgan Freeman.

With his “velvet symphony” of a voice, Freeman takes us back to the brand’s birth, providing an amusingly daft alternative history of a bread-obsessed family. There are cameos for Colman and Paddington Bear, an “eighties montage” and some crumpetsplaining to a baffled Freeman, before we return to the theme of family.

“There’ll always be a Warburton behind this desk,” chairman Jonathan Warburton assures us at the end. That might not be the priority for viewers he thinks it is, but his brand’s witty, starry ads continue to impress.

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