Virgin Trains Very Fast Chair Rewrites the Case for Rail Travel
Virgin Trains' Very Fast Chair is a 2019 UK television film campaign created by Anomaly London that reframes an intercity train journey as nothing more than a very fast, very well-appointed chair — complete with crisps, the internet, waiters and toilets — travelling at 125 miles per hour between destinations on the West Coast Main Line.
Published in the United Kingdom in June 2019, the campaign strips away every conventional cue of rail advertising and replaces them with a single, deliberately absurd proposition. Rather than celebrate infrastructure, punctuality statistics or route maps, the film dramatises the onboard passenger experience by literalising the metaphor: a motorised bench, six metres long and four metres wide, driven through open countryside as though the chair itself were the vehicle. The creative device is as simple as it is disarming, anchoring Virgin Trains' service credentials — Wi-Fi, food and drink, onboard staff — to the most human element of any journey: where a passenger sits.
Anomaly London served as lead creative agency on the campaign, having been appointed to that role earlier in 2019 following a competitive pitch, as reported by Campaign magazine. Director Keith Schofield brought the concept to life through production company Caviar, with principal photography completed in Ramsgate in April 2019. The campaign comprises a single film asset, lean by modern multi-platform standards, yet the concentrated format suited the televisual ambition of the work. Very Fast Chair went on to win a Thinkboxes Award in the May/June 2019 cycle, a peer-voted prize administered by Thinkbox recognising creative excellence in UK television advertising. Clapboard rates this campaign 71 out of 100.
Anomaly London identified a straightforward but underexploited truth at the centre of the Virgin Trains proposition. As Mike Whiteside, Creative at Anomaly London, put it: "The truth is more powerful than anything, and the truth is that a train is a 125mph chair with crisps and the internet and waiters and toilets attached to it." That observation, reported by Campaign Live, became both the creative brief and the executional logic of the Very Fast Chair campaign.
In the United Kingdom, the intercity passenger rail market was demonstrably healthy heading into 2019. Great Britain rail journeys totalled 1.8 billion in the year ending September 2019, according to the Office of Rail and Road's data portal at Dataportal Orr Gov Uk, reflecting sustained and growing consumer appetite for rail as a mode of travel. Passenger revenue increased 4.9% year-on-year in Q1 of the 2019–20 financial year to £2.675 billion, according to Assets Publishing Service Gov Uk, signalling that price sensitivity had not suppressed demand on premium intercity routes. Virgin Trains operated principally on the West Coast Main Line, placing it in direct competition with other intercity operators and with domestic aviation on routes connecting London with cities including Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool. Budget carriers and full-service airlines competing on those corridors had long emphasised speed and convenience; Very Fast Chair met that framing head-on by recasting the train's inherent seated comfort as the product itself rather than a secondary feature. Against competitors in the UK travel and leisure sector who defaulted to destination imagery and journey-time messaging, Anomaly's decision to foreground the chair — the physical experience of sitting — was a sharp piece of category differentiation that required no manufactured aspiration, only an honest and playful reading of what a train actually delivers.
Keith Schofield directed Very Fast Chair for Virgin Trains through production company Caviar, shooting on location in Ramsgate in April 2019. The physical centrepiece of the film is the vehicle itself: a full-scale motorised bench constructed to resemble a domestic sofa or waiting-room seat, scaled up to six metres in length and four metres in width and driven across open terrain to stand in for a high-speed train in motion. The construction presented genuine practical challenges on set.
Ben Robinson, Creative at Anomaly London, noted that assembling the build was more demanding than anticipated, stating: "it turns out it's quite hard to assemble a six-metre long, four-metre wide monster bench truck." That candid observation, cited by Campaign Live, points to a production philosophy that prioritised in-camera reality over digital simulation. The choice to build and drive a physical object rather than composite one in post-production gave the film a textural credibility that supported its comedic register: the absurdity reads as genuine because the object visibly exists. Schofield, whose directorial body of work spans music videos and commercials with a strong tradition of deadpan physical comedy, was a precise fit for material that needed to hold a straight face while being entirely ridiculous.
The creative team of Mike Whiteside and Ben Robinson at Anomaly London authored a script grounded in product truth rather than brand fantasy, allowing the film's humour to arise from the literalness of the metaphor rather than from exaggeration layered on top of it. Very Fast Chair was selected for the APA Collection 2019, a curated showcase of outstanding UK production craft assembled by the Advertising Producers Association, affirming the quality of the filmmaking relative to peers across the United Kingdom's advertising production industry in that year.
No verified performance data for the Very Fast Chair campaign is publicly available. No campaign-specific sales lift, revenue impact, market-share change or brand-tracking figures have been disclosed by Virgin Trains or Anomaly London, and no Effie, Cannes Lions, D&AD, The One Show, Clios or WARC Awards data has been identified for this work.
What is documented is industry recognition of meaningful weight. Very Fast Chair won a Thinkboxes Award in the May/June 2019 cycle, as confirmed by Thinkbox. The Thinkboxes are peer-voted by creative directors across the United Kingdom's advertising industry and are specifically calibrated to reward creative excellence in television — the medium for which this campaign was built. Selection for the APA Collection 2019, as documented by the Advertising Producers Association, adds a second layer of independent affirmation, this time focused on production craft rather than creative concept.
Structurally, the campaign is well-engineered for impact. A single, concentrated film asset with a clear mnemonic device — the giant motorised bench — is inherently memorable and repeatable across broadcast contexts. The comedic register lowers resistance and increases dwell time on the message, while the product-truth foundation ensures that entertainment does not displace information. In a United Kingdom rail market where Great Britain journeys grew 3.4% year-on-year in Q2 of 2019–20 to 449 million, according to dataportal.orr.Gov Uk, Virgin Trains was operating in a category already moving in a favourable direction. A campaign that made the brand distinctively likeable within that growth environment had structural conditions for commercial relevance even without disclosed metrics to confirm it.
Very Fast Chair is a 2019 UK television film created by Anomaly London for Virgin Trains. It reframes an intercity train as a 125mph chair with onboard amenities. The campaign dramatises this idea literally, using a giant motorised bench driven through open countryside to represent the passenger experience.
Keith Schofield directed Very Fast Chair through production company Caviar. Principal photography took place in Ramsgate in April 2019. Schofield is known for deadpan physical comedy in commercial and music video work, making him a precise creative match for the campaign's humorous, straight-faced tone.
Anomaly London created Very Fast Chair for Virgin Trains. The agency was appointed as Virgin Trains' lead creative agency in early 2019 following a competitive pitch, as reported by Campaign magazine. Creatives Mike Whiteside and Ben Robinson authored the campaign concept and script at Anomaly London.
Very Fast Chair won a Thinkboxes Award in the May/June 2019 cycle, a peer-voted prize recognising creative excellence in UK television advertising, as confirmed by Thinkbox. The campaign was also selected for the APA Collection 2019, a curated showcase of outstanding UK advertising production craft.
The idea treated a train as literally a very fast chair. Creative Mike Whiteside described the insight as: a train is a 125mph chair with crisps, the internet, waiters and toilets attached to it. Anomaly London built a six-metre motorised bench to dramatise this truth on film in the United Kingdom.
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