Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes? (aka Look Who's Talking)

It's interesting how little time The Simpsons wasted in bringing Herb Powell back for his shot at recovery. He was only the second "guest" character to return in a starring role, the first being Sideshow Bob in "Black Widower", and even then Bob had wait two whole seasons before being considered as viable sequel material. Herb was brought back after only one season - in his case, it's evident that the production team knew straight away, after finishing "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", that they wouldn't be leaving his story there. They knew they had yanked just a little too hard on the feel-bad chain, something confirmed on the episode's DVD commentary, where it's noted that James L. Brooks had felt uneasy about the ending and suggested that a line of dialogue be added to indicate that Herb would land on his feet; the writers had toyed with this idea, but ultimately decided to save it and use it as the basis of its own episode. Hence, we had "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" (8F23), which first aired on August 27th 1992, one of the rare Simpsons episodes to debut in a summer slot (your typical Simpsons season begins in September and wraps up somewhere in May). This led to some confusion as to whether "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" was to be seen as the delayed finale for Season 3 or the early debut of Season 4; Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood of I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide had it grouped in with the latter, but subsequent official sources have clarified it to be part of Season 3. The August air date was down to a scheduling experiment that Fox subsequently discarded; they'd attempted a similar trick the previous year, by having Season 2's "Blood Feud" premier in July.

It's also interesting to compare Herb's return to Bob's, which landed only a few episodes ahead of it in Season 3's running order, in terms of where each episode ultimately leads us. "Black Widower" saw Bob slide ever more despairingly down the path of corruption, affirming his enmity with Bart and locking him into a vicious cycle that would continue ad infinitum. For Herb, the gamble of choosing to reassociate himself with the Simpsons actually paid off. He was restored to his former glory, and able to exit with his dignity and his prosperity intact. Bob's sorry story was just getting started, but for Herb this has remained his character's coda; even with the series still in production and various other vintage characters being dusted off for the sake of perpetuation, Herb has yet to be mined for his threequal potential. Technically DeVito did return to voice Herb for a third time in a Season 24 episode, "The Changing of The Guardian", but only as a voice heard on an answering machine recording, and it's such a brief and inconsequential moment that (much like the second occasion on which A. Brooks technically voiced Jacques, in Season 15), a lot of viewers tend to overlook that it's there. In terms of in-the-flesh appearances that enable us to hang out with the character in any meaningful way...well, I wouldn't completely rule it out (DeVito's still working, and if they'll bring Jacques back after sitting on him for 33 years then there's got to be hope for Herb), but I think it's very unlikely his book will be re-opened at this stage. Which takes us into one of the biggest mysteries regarding Herb - why did he completely disappear from this point onward? "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" might not suggest any immediately obvious routes for sequelisation in the way that "Black Widower" did, but it does leave the door open for Herb to continue to be a part of the family's lives. You'd think that, in 30 years, he might have popped in to say hello at least once. Despite departing on good terms with his biological clan, there's been little to no evidence that he's even maintained a relationship with them thereafter. Are we to assume that all of this stuff is just happening off of screen?

In the end, Herb might have been stunted by much the same problem that Ruth and Laura Powers had in establishing themselves as long-term presences - when you enlist guest voices in the roles, it's inevitably going to limit how often we'll be seeing them. And in Herb's case, there's been some backstage gossip indicating that the reason he did not return is because DeVito didn't want this to be an ongoing gig and was unenthusiastic about being asked back a second time. I can confirm that nothing is said of this in the episode's DVD commentary. There, Nancy Cartwright asks point blank if Herb's going AWOL was down to DeVito not wanting to voice him again; she gets a predictably waffly response from Al Jean, which acknowledges that, "He might not have", but appears to indicate that they never brought Herb back because they couldn't think of a good enough reason to do so (Jean claims the show would never bring back a character gratuitously, but your mileage may vary on that). Rather, the origin of said gossip turns out once again to have been Hank Azaria, who was quoted in a Times Union article in 1994 as saying that he thought DeVito regretted coming back and wanted to get it over with (note: I have not read said article, so I'm going to do the unthinkable and assume that the Wikipedia citation is accurate). As with Azaria's public smearing of Christopher Collins, a pinch of salt is required (Would we know for a fact that DeVito's lack of enthusiasm was down to his not wanting to do the show? Might he just have had something else on his mind at the time?), but he offers a more compelling explanation than Jean's for why we never saw Herb again. Still, if it is true then it certainly isn't reflected in DeVito's performance - he's on every bit as fine a form here as he was in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?"

The title "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" would appear to cement a pattern for a hypothetical series of Herb episodes (one I would fully expect to be discarded if Herb were to return today, mind), whereby each episode titles take the form of a question openly directed toward a brother, and each is evocative of the despairs of the Great Depression. "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" was derived from the 1941 film Sullivan's Travels, specifically the title of fictitious book about the Depression that John McCrea's character spent the picture looking to adapt (said fictitious book would later inspire the title of the 2000 Coen brothers film starring George Clooney). "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" is lifted from the song "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?", which was composed by Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney for the 1932 musical Americana and reflects the perspective of an honest hard-working man brought to his knees by the economic crash (the title was also used for a 1975 documentary by Philippe Mora). In both cases, the question could just as easily be asked by either brother of the other. In the original, the question is initially implied to be Homer's - in fact, Homer explicitly asks it during his first act quest to locate his half-brother, but once we've met Herb it seems just as pertinent to his own lifelong desire to figure out where he belongs, a question he ultimately regrets asking. With the second installment, the title alludes most obviously to Herb's goal of convincing Homer to lend him a monetary sum to fund his latest endeavor (and to his impoverished state in general), but also to Homer's desire for Herb to spare him a little clemency. That both titles reference the Depression indicates that the social and economic divide between the two brothers is to be seen as a particularly tender spot in their dynamic. In the original, Herb provided a window into the rich and successful man Homer could have been under different circumstances. "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" offers an intriguing reversal on that scenario, so that Herb becomes a haunting impression of how much lower Homer could potentially have sunk; his homely lifestyle now seems positively luxurious compared to Herb's lot. We catch up with the former motor CEO to find him living in abject poverty - he's now a hobo, and he spends his days swapping tales of former glory with his fellow transient (Mickey Mouse whorehouse gag, blah blah blah, now belongs to Disney, blah blah), eating out of dumpsters and being shunned by anyone higher up the ladder. Homer, meanwhile, has just been surprised by a cash bonus of $2000 from the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant - it's actually a paltry settlement, to brush off any legal liability on Burns' part for what prolonged exposure to nuclear radiation has done to Homer's fertility, but Homer hasn't read the fine print and has been hoodwinked into thinking he's receiving an award for outstanding achievement in the field of excellence. At least he's sharp enough to demand an award ceremony from the deal (which itself must have cost Burns more than $2000; Joe Frazier's fee alone would have been a tidy sum). Tensions are ignited when his downtrodden doppelganger appears at the door, demanding retribution for the American dream he personally took from him. Also, Hands Across America features somewhere in the backdrop.

 Hmm...

I say it's intriguing, but I also think the decision to make Herb a hobo somewhat wrong-foots "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" as a sequel. There's a tremendous irony in that the episode was purposely conceived to take the sting off of "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", and yet it retroactively makes that ending (and by extension the events of "Old Money") seem even more mean-spirited - there, Herb lost his business and his mansion home, but there was nothing to imply that he was going to end up this badly off. As per the DVD commentary, writer John Swartzwelder just has a thing about hobos and will take whatever excuse he can find to work them into a narrative, so here we are. Likewise, the decision to make Herb a hobo who looks to have stepped right out of a second-hand vision of the Depression era (complete with Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp as one of his associates), while further underscoring the thematic intentions of the title, results in a distinctly caricatured, borderline "cute" depiction of poverty that has few pretences of engaging with the realities of what homelessness looked like in the 1990s. It's not that I require Herb to have a drug habit and be dying of tuberculosis, I'd just prefer that his impoverishment arc was handled with a marginally less cartoonish touch.

I should emphasise that I do really like "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" I greatly appreciate its existence, and its essentially warm intentions. After brutally destroying Herb in his debut episode, they brought him back just to give him a second chance and allow him to regain everything that he'd lost. How lovely is that? It is, though, one of those episodes in which I've found more and more to criticise every time I watch it. Compared to "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", which holds up really well, there are a couple of distinct shortcomings here that mark "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" out as a lesser sequel. The first is that the storytelling is considerably less economical than in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" By now we were deep into the Jean-Reiss era, which means there's a lot of farting around in lieu of narrative progression. It genuinely surprised me to hear Cartwright remark on the DVD commentary that this was one of those episodes where a stash of great material had to be left out due to time constraints (she tells us that the original script was 53 pages long), because the final product reads as the exact opposite, ie: an episode with a lot of dead space it's struggling to fill due to the narrative not being especially well-developed (you know, like "Cape Feare"). Why else would you have an award title as long-winded and convoluted as The First Annual Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement In The Field Of Excellence and have the characters repeat it over and over? I get that the awards ceremony, as gratuitous as the entire sequence is, is intended to be its own bit of ridiculous bombast, but there's a truly baffling moment where Bart later says the award title in full, and if they were really that strapped for time then they could have fit at least two whole other jokes in there. Same goes for that sequence where Homer tells Lenny and Carl that his life couldn't possibly get worse, then waits in knowing anticipation for the next story beat - it's amusing, but a deliberately inefficient use of time from an episode that purportedly had little. There's also a rather glaring narrative cheat in terms of how Herb finds his way back into the Simpsons' lives - he learns that Homer has come into money on picking up a discarded copy of a Springfield newspaper, which one of his fellow bums just happened to be using for cover. While it's never specified exactly where Herb is at this point (is he still living in Detroit? Is that the city we see in the backdrop during the scene with the mother and the baby?), he's clearly not anywhere near Springfield, so what are the odds that a local paper detailing Homer's story would happen to find its way out to him? The episode makes the shrewd call to brush past this quickly, so quickly that you might not notice it at all - but now that I have, I fear it will bug me for all eternity. Let's just call it fate and move along.

The second problem is that Swartzwelder, as talented as he is, doesn't write Herb nearly as well as Jeff Martin did before him. He captures Herb's angrier, chipped-shouldered side just fine - without his workforce, he doesn't get the same opportunities for contemptuous outbursts as he did in the original, but he gets to chew out his brother enough times (there are even a couple of instances of physical violence, which is further than Herb went in the predecessor). What he doesn't nail, which Martin's script conveyed so beautifully, are Herb's more kiddish qualities. Balancing out his temperamental nature in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" was that Herb was so distinctively a child at heart. Despite his success, he carried himself with the vulnerability of a lost and wounded child who'd never figured out his place in the world, and though he'd dedicated his life to business and board meetings, what he really wanted to do was to hang out at the zoo and watch cartoons all day. Herb connected so well with the Simpsons children because his own inner child was so alive and kicking. "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" doesn't ignore the particular affinity that Herb had with the younger members of the Simpsons clan - in fact, his efforts to regain his fortune are based around his bonding with and understanding of Maggie - but, gorilla mask aside, there's less of a sense of him behaving like a kid himself. It could be that his time on the streets has knocked those qualities out of him, which is fair enough, except that Swartzwelder replaces them with a hackneyed jingoism that doesn't seem entirely consistent with his characterisation in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" Sure, Herb had lived his American dream, but he also had an outward, Frank Grimes-esque bitterness about how weighted against him the system had been. There's an extent to which Swartzwelder's script seems content to uphold Herb's redemption as a fairly uncritical celebration of the glibly patriotic sentiments he espouses - ironic, then, that it's named after a song expressing a stirring disillusionment for how the people who'd helped build America were abandoned by it in a time of economic hardship. Herb runs into one major roadblock, when he concedes that a mere idea isn't much use without the funding to get it off the ground, but otherwise getting rich again comes very easily to him (considering how hard clearly had to fight for it the first time around). The world below the poverty line becomes a dumping ground for corporate failures (where Herb is rubbing shoulders with a pimp busted for copyright infringement and the inventor of New Coke), and you only stay there if you've opted out of corporate consumerism's rules. Herb's wild idea is to create a device that translates a baby's cries and gargles into perfectly comprehensible speech, so that any parent can respond directly to their needs. He seeks out the Simpsons not only because he knows they've got the cash to spare, but they also have the baby to hand. Which is a point in this episode's favour - any story that finds a significant part for Maggie to play is a rare and precious thing.

The baby translator itself is one of those plot details that just seems tailor-made for viewer nitpicking. The production team even admit on the commentary that, if anyone were to successfully make such a thing then it would be a game-changing invention, so it's weird how it, like Herb himself, is completely forgotten after this one episode. Besides, how would Herb, whose background is in automobile design, not child psychology, be able to single-handedly decode an entire baby "language"? At the very least, he would surely have to study a wider range of subjects than Maggie, and the process would take years, not the 30 days the script implies. But whatever, we get some nice moments between Herb and Maggie (I particularly love Herb singing her one of his former company's advertising jingles as a lullaby) and the real attraction is obviously in getting to hear that baby talk translated into the most absurdly articulate and deadpan of announcements (and not to mention, into DeVito's gruff voice).

Somewhere at the sidelines of Herb's baby translator journey is a deeply despondent Homer. Homer really wants Herb to forgive him. But he also really, really wants a chair. Truth is, Homer was miserable before Herb showed up. At the start of the episode, Bart and Lisa accidentally destroy the beloved couch on which he'd forged so many cherished TV-related memories, and even getting his award ceremony and dubious cash prize does little to cheer his spirits. He's still mourning that prosaic item of furniture, speaking of it to Joe Frazier as though he was going through a relationship break-up. Then a vibrating chair with the tantalising product name "The Spinemelter 2000" catches his eye, and Homer decides that he's ready to love again. He tries out the chair, leading into an inspired interlude that recreates the Star Gate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), emphasising not only the chair's space age qualities, but that it represents the next major step in reclining evolution. As kismet would have it, the chair's price tag is $2000, but Marge is reluctant to blow all of the money at once on a luxury item, pointing out that they could make better use of it by replacing the faulty washer and dryer downstairs. This is probably the cleverest aspect of Swartzwelder's script, conveying a more quietly critical view of consumer society. Homer's world of material comfort stands in direct contrast to Herb's world of desperate poverty; so long as his ass is well-cushioned and the TV is on, he doesn't have to deal with the harsh realities going on beyond his doorstep. Hence the delightfully cynical evoking of Hands Across America, a charity initiative held on 25th May 1986 to raise money for the homeless and hungry, in which an attempt was made to create an unbroken human chain spanning the United States. The event has been roundly mocked as a failure - as is reported here, there were large gaps in certain states (shockingly, nobody wanted to be standing out in the desert in late May), the amount raised was $15 million, considerably less than the $50 to $100 million target, and obviously it did little to solve the issues of impoverishment overall. As with a lot of these charity initiatives that were fashionable in the 1980s, there's a sense it was more about the people involved than the people it was purportedly helping, a superficial stunt that was not actually looking to get to grips with any of the root causes of poverty, and instead sold a feel-good image of everyone uniting to take on the ugliness of the world - an observation that recently inspired Jordan Peele to turn HAA into a symbol of horror in his 2019 film Us. In this flashback, Homer is not involved in the chain, presumably because he cannot bear for his butt cheeks to part ways with his couch, something that ostensibly marks him out as more a passive observer than a participant, but it's not like anyone else in that room is effectively doing anything different. The destruction of Homer's couch foreshadows Herb's arrival - his sheltered lifestyle is about to be disrupted by a harrowing reality in which he is directly implicated. Both his past dealings with and likeness to Herb mark the problem out as his responsibility, one that he cannot ignore when it's right under his roof and threatening intermittently to punch him in the nose.

Despite Marge's misgivings, Homer still has is heart set on acquiring the Spinemelter, and his big dilemma arises when he has to choose between propping up his world of vapid material luxury and giving a needy individual a second shot at life. Ultimately, he does right by his brother, and while Herb purposely withholds his forgiveness until his fortune has been successfully regained, by the end of the episode their goodwill has paid off. Herb is transformed into a wonderful Wizard of Oz, thanking the family for their support and hospitality by fulfilling each of their individual desires - a new washer and dryer for Marge, a book club subscription for Lisa, a lifetime NRA membership (somewhat questionably) for Bart, and the promise of "something nice" for Maggie. Homer directly evokes Dorothy's dialogue when he he observes that there probably isn't a vibrating chair in Herb's bag for him - tellingly, acquiring that chair is being equated with going back to Kansas, so that he can return to a state of normality and not have to deal with the dangers outside of his comfort zone. Homer is clearly disappointed when it looks as though Herb only intends to extend him his forgiveness and to re-accept him as his brother, but is elated when Herb reveals that he bought him the Spinemelter anyway. Ideally, Herb would like for the restoration of their brotherhood to be regarded as the bigger prize, but he recognises that Homer's mind isn't working that way, and by relenting and fulfilling his silly yearning for that expensive chair, he's really procuring his own release, confirming both that he accepts his brother for the carnally-driven loafer that he is, and that he's well and truly over his grudges.

As for what's next for Herb, I'd like to think he'd have used his regained fortune to help the impoverished, after his own experiences below the poverty line - starting, I would hope, by going back to assist that group of hobos he was previously settled with. But I guess we'll never know. Neither Herb nor his amazing baby translator have graced our screens again. Come to think of it, I'm not sure that the Spinemelter 2000 has either. Surprisingly, the one aspect of this episode that has enjoyed a miniature legacy is the kitschy bird knick-knack that Homer acquires from Herb as part of their agreement. It was later seen in the Season 7 episode "King Size Homer", where it had a significant impact on the plot direction, and later still in the Season 9 episode "Das Bus", where one of Bill Gates' goons unfortunately destroyed it. A sad and unceremonious end for such an underrated series icon.

The greater question concerns whether or not there was really anything more left to do with Herb after his second episode, and to be totally honest...yeah, there was. There actually is a loose end regarding his character that "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" never acknowledges, which is that Herb never got to meet his biological father. It's strange, really, because if Herb was living with the Simpsons for several weeks, then you'd think the opportunity might have come up. Did Abe never call in at the Simpsons' house within that time? Did the family never offer to take Herb to see Abe at the Retirement Castle? Are we to assume that all of this stuff was happening off of screen? The obvious answer is that the writers couldn't think of a way to integrate Abe into this plot, so they got around the question by ignoring him altogether. Perhaps if they'd chopped out a couple of utterances of that overwrought award name, they could have squeezed him in. But alas, the prospective meeting between Abe and Herb may just have to sit it out for this lifetime.

On a more meta level, I facetiously like to think that the reason Herb has never returned or potentially even maintained his relationship with the family is because Herb himself was smart enough not to get involved with the Simpsons after this. Having recovered his fortune and gone out on a happy note, he decided to leave it there - why do anything to risk undermining that? Frankly, just flirting with a return was dangerous enough - as demonstrated by what was on that answering machine recording I mentioned in "The Changing of The Guardian". It was just a throwaway gag that you could easily ignore if you please, but Herb said that he was broke again. Ah well, we've established that the guy is a survivor, and for all we know his life since has been a perpetual cycle of downfall and recovery, as gruelling as anything Sideshow Bob's had to face. Maybe there is no benefit in having to see any of that onscreen - as delectable a character as Herb is, and as interesting as it might have been to see how his place within the Simpsons clan would have functioned from here, there is something very sweet and gratifying about the final image we have of him being his redemptive embrace with Homer. Truly happy endings with the Simpsons universe, where everyone gets what they want and there's no lingering bitterness on any sides are an even rarer and more precious thing than episodes where Maggie gets to star (think of just how acidly things were resolved in "Black Widower", to which this ending is an appealing antidote); maybe it's only right that Herb's story has gotten to remain in the purity of that moment.

Living In The Bottle: The Trial (One Foot In The Grave)

Of the pentad of bottle episodes that emerged during the run of BBC sitcom One Foot In The Grave, "The Trial" stands out as the obvious outlier. The other four more-or-less adhered to a certain set of narrative rules, laid out by the first of these efforts, "Timeless Time". Victor and Margaret would be mired in some uncomfortable situation where time had been brought to a complete standstill, Victor would openly muse on whichever of life's assorted annoyances was bugging him most in that particular moment, intermittently pushing Margaret to breaking point along the way, until finally their testiness dissolved into mutual melancholia, as they reflected on past heartbreaks and scuppered ambitions ("The Beast In The Cage" being the only one to do so without delving into any specific, hitherto-unspoken-of instances from the characters' backstories). The seemingly mundane framing scenarios - a sleepless night, a bank holiday spent seated in a traffic jam, a stretch in a waiting room where every other client seems to be called before you, an evening in a prolonged blackout - become clever metaphors for life's broader trials and aggravations, and close deliberately without resolution, other than Victor and Margaret quietly acknowledging that their only recourse is to grin and bear whatever lies ahead. Each episode did its own thing to differentiate proceedings ("The Beast In The Cage" added supporting player Mrs Warboys to the dynamic, while "Threatening Weather" has apocalyptic undertones that seemed to knowingly anticipate the impending end of the series), but the basic structure was not immensely different. "The Trial", which aired on 28th February 1993 as part of the fourth series, makes the most radical deviation from the formula, by removing one key element - on this occasion, Margaret does not have to share in Victor's entrapment. This one deals with Victor being stuck indoors whilst on call for jury service, having been sent home to await further instructions on when he'll be needed. Margaret, meanwhile, is out of the picture, presumably working in her day job as a florist, although it's never explicitly stated where she is. Most bottle episodes were basically two-handers, focussing on the dynamic between Victor and Margaret and emphasising that they were fundamentally in all of these hardships together (however reluctantly on Margaret's part) by virtue of their union. But this time the hardship was Victor's to bear, and Victor's alone.

The result is the only episode of One Foot In The Grave in which Margaret never appears. Even the Comic Relief sketch from the same year, "The Bath", which consisted of Victor musing on more of life's inconveniences from within the tub, managed to incorporate Margaret somewhere, by way of an answering machine recording. But what's more surprising is how little indirect presence Margaret has; Victor mentions her in precisely one scene, when he realises that he can't find his flannel because Margaret has tidied it away, purportedly so they'll always know where it is, which in practice only makes it harder for him to find. It's a rare moment in which we get to see Victor grumble about Margaret's annoying tendencies behind her back (the reverse happens a lot more frequently throughout the series). Otherwise, "The Trial" plays almost as a glimpse into a parallel reality in which Victor lives alone, and doesn't have Margaret to act as the neutralising straight woman to his continual carping. And make no mistake, that is the real entrapment. Victor is stranded not merely inside his own house, but inside his own head, having nobody to play off of except himself. Tempting though it will be to file this one in the Index of Conflict as a Man vs. God narrative, it's really a case of Man vs. Self. Well perhaps. Man vs. God is certainly the narrative Victor perceives throughout - he sees himself as perpetually at the mercy of some divine judgement, cruel and arbitrary in its retribution, and with a particular interest in sabotaging his day. It's an opinion he expresses early on, in his churlish observation that the storm clouds currently cluttering up the sky only appeared as he was starting to unwind the flex on his lawnmower. And in its opening shots, the episode certainly invites the viewer to share in his paranoia that there may be darker forces conspiring around him; in lieu of the opening sequence with the tortoise stock footage (which would disappear from the bottle episodes from this point onward) we're faced immediately with those ominous, rumbling clouds, followed by the curious foregrounding of a crow perched in a tree branching overlooking the Meldrews' house, that cliched symbol of foreboding.

That crow is, incidentally, the only living being glimpsed onscreen for the full 28 and a half minutes other than Victor himself. "The Trial" is really a full-on monologue, in which Richard Wilson is presented with the challenge of having to carry the action entirely by himself, something he accomplishes with utter aplomb. That's not to say that Victor doesn't get ample opportunities to butt heads with anyone else for the duration, but always from a distance - he gets into multiple heated exchanges via telephone, in which we're only privy to what's being said at Victor's end. And a familiar character still manages to worm their way into the happenings. Margaret may be uncharacteristically absent, but Mrs Warboys puts in a surprise (though not to Victor) contribution, ambushing him with a telephone call to fill him in on the boring particulars of her recent visit to Cork (in her case, her muffled but unmistakable voice can be momentarily heard coming down the line). Intrusions from the outside world are sparing, and there's a sense to which they might even offer Victor some relief from the monotony, a chance to direct his loathing outward rather than inward. One such interlude yields the episode's most enduring visual gag, when Victor opens the door to his downstairs toilet to reveal that a yucca plant he'd had delivered earlier has been inserted directly into the pan, in an all-too literal reading of Victor's instructions on where to leave it. Victor likens the unseen young delivery man to Frank Spencer, the notoriously accident-prone hero played by Michael Crawford in 1970s BBC sitcom Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, an observation that's not without irony given that Frank and Victor don't strike me as altogether dissimilar creations. Both are sitcom leads renowned for their characteristic attire, their perfectly quotable catchphrases, their inability to keep any new source of employment for long and, most crucially, their tendency to be on the receiving end of a deluge of outrageously improbable mishaps. Both are accustomed to grappling with chaos wherever they go, and they invariably do so badly. Victor's obviously a whole lot smarter and Frank's a whole lot sweeter, but both men are united in each being their own worst enemy. ^[1]

Unlike Frank Spencer, whose flaws were ultimately mitigated by his unrelenting innocence, Victor has a reputation for being rather a nasty character, and that's always seemed unfair to me. Victor could unquestionably make things a lot easier for himself if he learned to rein in his temper a little, but then who wouldn't be tempted to completely blow their top if they went to use their toilet only to find a yucca plant protruding out from it? There's an extent to which Victor is merely the product of a universe that is every bit as chaotic and inconsiderate as he perceives it to be, the classic figure of the sane man who to an insane universe must appear insane (as he himself points out, just look at the outcome of the 1992 general election). "The Trial", being the OFITG installment that forces Victor to look the most relentlessly inward, is our most extensive study into where one interpretation begins and the other ends. He holds himself to account for a couple of instances where he recognises that his rage was disproportionate, and ponders if he might just be the villain of his own story. The episode builds up Victor as a ridiculously paranoid individual, only to tease us with the parting implication that, actually, they might just be out to get him after all. The viewer finally becomes the juror, and is left to make their own verdict.

The title of the episode has multiple meanings. Most obviously it alludes to an event that should be happening within the narrative, but isn't. Victor murmurs that this is his fifth day of being on call for jury service, and he hasn't even set foot inside a courtroom (side-note: I was summoned for jury service myself once, and my experience was the same as Victor's - I would show up only to be sent home every day, and never even saw that jury box). The implicit suggestion is that the process of waiting and having nothing to occupy one's mind other than the most menial of distractions should itself be a trial. For a while, that looks to be the central joke, but the title suddenly acquires renewed significance come the third act, when Victor perceives himself as being put on trial by a higher power for his most recent misdeed. It's also a reference to Franz Kafka's 1925 novel The Trial, the dystopian tale of a bank clerk apprehended on a charge that is never specified and forced to navigate a labyrinth of head-spinning bureaucracy (in Victor's case, that labyrinth is largely his own self-inflicted concoction). David Renwick's script immediately makes us mindful of this allusion, by having Victor evoke another of Kafka's works, The Metamorphosis, in the very first sequence. It's likely not a coincidence that, whilst on the phone to a switchboard operator, he sardonically introduces himself as "Victor Meldrew the talking cockroach", a nod to the nightmarish premise of Kafka's novel, in which the protagonist awakens to find he has been inexplicably transformed into a giant insect and is placed under house arrest by his mortified family. (The more pedantic viewer might point out that, in Kafka's novel, the form Gregor acquired was never explicitly identified as a cockroach; it is, nevertheless, the interpretation most favoured by popular culture.)

Victor's in-universe reason for likening himself to a cockroach is that he feels that the switchboard operators have been treating him like an insect; aside from adding shades of the Kafkaesque to his ostensibly mundane predicament, it functions as a cunning bit of foreshadowing, the third-act crisis being directly informed by Victor's erratic reactions to the creepy crawlies infiltrating his abode. Early on, he spies a daddy long legs on the lampshade (note: the term "daddy long legs" can refer to multiple species, depending on which part of the world you're in, but in the UK it's a crane fly) and while he's keen to evict the intruder, he does so with an evident level of care and compassion, making an effort (albeit an unsuccessful one) not to break any of the insect's legs while handling it and, having cast it outside, following it long enough to observe it finding alternative shelter by limping into a discarded Lucozade can. Later, he notices a woodlouse crawling across his kitchen floor and gloatingly squishes it. There's no discernible reason why one house pest should have warranted such a humane response and the other found itself on the receiving end of Victor's meanest impulses, other than that they happened to encounter Victor at slightly different points in his immurement. This is something that Victor himself openly reflects on, and he's disturbed by the arbitrariness of his own judgement. This paves way for the climactic conflict, when Victor projects that arbitrariness onto the wider universe. If he would choose to punish a woodlouse with death for the crime of crawling across his kitchen floor, then why wouldn't some higher power, to whom he must appear as small and insignificant as a woodlouse, choose to punish him with death for the crime of disproportionately punishing a woodlouse? Victor openly notes that he is not a religious man, but he is too fundamentally suspicious an individual to not suppose that there must be some kind of malicious conspiracy going on around him, its basis in the cosmic. The murder of the woodlouse is the misdeed for which he specifically believes he's being tried, although one senses that this is the culmination of a whole lifetime's worth of rash responses to minor annoyances that he realises, with hindsight, could have been handled better. (Such uneasy introspection is anticipated by a sight gag where Victor manages to spread ink from a leaky biro all over his face before noticing, two minutes later, how ridiculous he looks in the mirror.) Also prodding him into his repentant despair is a passive-aggressive missive pushed through his door by a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses to whom he was recently rude. "May the Lord have mercy on your soul", they tauntingly close, which conjures up notions of a death sentence.

The twist, then, is that Victor ends up becoming the defendant in a trial of his own making. But it doesn't stop there. He also becomes the jury, judge and executioner (he is, after all, the only person around to play any of the parts), and it's that final role he seizes with by far the most relish. Why does Victor become so convinced that he's been sentenced to death? He notices a mole on his stomach that he swears wasn't there the last time he looked and panics about what that might mean. The viewer, of course, is unlikely to share in Victor's paranoia, which is blatantly over the top. Earlier sequences have already established Victor as a hypochondriac, prone to browsing through his medical dictionary and construing the most minor of ailments as an indication of something much nastier ("Colon tumor! Often no symptoms in the early stages...exactly what I've got!"). Victor appears to settle upon a rational line of action, and rejects it - he notes he's seeing a skin specialist next week and can discuss it then, only to conclude that he'll probably be dead by next week. He's now so committed to the narrative that he's getting what he deserves for his incorrigibility that his first inclination is to lie down and take it. "I've had a good life," he muses, before taking a moment to register what he's just said, and throwing the universe's verdict bitterly back at it. "I'VE HAD A BLOODY AWFUL LIFE!"

It strikes me as significant that the incident with the woodlouse, followed by the missive from the Jehovah's Witnesses, comes after Victor's aborted attempt at writing a letter to his brother Alfred. Alfred was previously introduced in the Series 3 episode "The Broken Reflection", where he was played by Richard Pearson. While it's not a requirement to have seen Alfred's prior appearance in order to understand "The Trial" (which does a perfectly succinct job, on its own terms, of illustrating that communication between the brothers is strained), it probably does help to know the full background. As per "The Broken Reflection", Alfred lives in New Zealand and he and Victor seldom have any face-to-face contact. In that episode, Alfred came to visit Victor, and while Victor was initially hostile to the intrusion, he came to realise that a lot of his disdain for Alfred was rooted in the reality that they were actually very alike. This prompted Victor to treat Alfred with a newfound tolerance, which unfortunately came too late; Alfred happened upon a dictaphone recording in which Victor had unwittingly expressed his prior dislike and, figuring he wasn't wanted, returned to New Zealand. "The Trial" perhaps lessens the sting of that ending, in confirming that Victor and Alfred have since reconciled and maintained a relationship by postal communication, even if Victor still struggles in relating to Alfred. While Alfred has no physical presence in "The Trial", the structure of the episode seems to place their relationship curiously at the centre, suggesting that Victor's failings toward his brother are indicative of his broader failures as a human. It's in his indifference toward Alfred that Victor goes down his dark path, turning away from the task at hand and noticing the woodlouse. It's also Victor's second attempt at writing to Alfred, on the premise that he doesn't have much time left, that yields his salvation - in his last letter, Alfred had sent an old photograph of the six-month-old Victor and, on studying it more closely, Victor realises that the mole in question was actually on his body the entire time. Perhaps it has less to do with Alfred in particular than the notion that, in reaching out to another, Victor is momentarily escaping entrapment in himself and whatever distorted perspective of reality it's concocting, prompting him to take a more objective view. As with Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter, the solution turns out to have been under Victor's nose (or, more accurately, under his navel) all along. Come to think of it, that corvid seen at the start of the episode might even have been an allusion to Poe, in sly anticipation for how this pickle would ultimately resolve.

Victor rejoices his deliverance, albeit with the backhanded observation that he was "sentenced to death and I managed to get off with life". It gives him, momentarily, a renewed perspective on life. "I'll never be rude to another Jehovah's Witness for as long as I live", he declares, before pausing and upping the ante: "I'll never be rude to anyone again." We know that this much is beyond Victor's reach. Like his earlier resolution to add healthier variety into his junk food diet of chocolate, crisps and chips cooked in fat with OK fruity sauce, it's well-intentioned but doomed from the outset to failure. The two failed resolutions are cleverly linked, in the episode's final, revolting discovery. Prior to discovering the mole, Victor had been musing about a baker in the local supermarket who had recently lost his toupee. Having at last settled on a nourishing lunch option he would actually enjoy (beans on toast), Victoria slices into a loaf of bread, only to find that terrible missing toupee concealed inside! Whereupon he gets on the phone to the supermarket manager and starts blowing his top once again; just to make it plain that he's relapsed into the same old cycle, the language used mirrors that of his earlier call to the garden centre. The question is, can you blame Victor for his reaction? After all, finding a misplaced wig in your intended lunch would be an even more disconcerting experience than finding a yucca plant lodged in your toilet. No matter how sincerely you had vowed to mend your ways, you would totally go to pieces. Is it therefore fair to suppose that Victor is actually the villain of his own story? The episode closes with deliberately mixed signals on that front. Victor, for whatever reason, cannot resist trying on the wig himself, if only to confirm, on glancing in the mirror, how ridiculous it looks. He reaffirms himself as a fool and seemingly embraces that identity for the sake of getting his momentary catharsis against the supermarket. And yet the final shots of the episode have us panning back out of the Meldrews' house and back into the torrential downpour outside, suggesting that Victor might well have been the victim of a cosmic prank and that an Old Testament deity is raining its unabating, gleefully disproportionate wrath down upon him. Or is the wrath all Victor's, an utterly proportionate response to a chaotic universe that gets the Victor Meldrew it certainly deserves? (Which probably shouldn't apply to that harmless woodlouse, mind). As with all of the series' bottle episodes, it ends without clear resolution. Victor is still under house arrest, and the jury still hasn't returned.

PS: I don't get Victor's jab at Robert Mitchum, since he was in some riveting thrillers (really, Victor, you were bored by The Night of The Hunter?). There is something intuitively sound, however, in his bracketing of the Dudley Moore Trio with the six-legged menaces with which he won't share a bathroom.

[1] Fun fact: Richard Wilson was in an episode of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em ("Wendy House").

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #51: The Robinsons Gang Is Not A Real Gang

If grotesque puppet creations are your personal nightmare propellent, then the UK television of the early 1990s might have been rough going for you. Call it the Spitting Image effect, but between The Winjin Pom, Dizzy Heights and The House of Gristle, there wasn't much escaping the horrors in latex. Ad breaks were of no refuge - for a good stretch of 1991 (and later 1993) you were likely to run into the Robinsons Gang, a bunch of creepy critters who were perpetually on the move, and always sipping from their cartons of branded fruit juice. The accompanying slogan assured us that "You Get More *slurping sound effect* With Robinsons Flavours", and I presume the intention was for this assortment of colourful puppets to act as embodiments of all the fun and variety of the Robinsons range. What it more aptly reflects is the overstimulated frenzy of a sugar high, and potentially something a lot harder. Among the campaign's numerous head-scratching details was a bus ad, in the premier installment, telling us to "EAT GRASS", and with no other leads on what that particular command had to do with anything, I'm going to go out on a limb and interpret it as a pro-drugs statement. It fits in just as neatly as anything else about the Robinsons Gang.

The set-up was simple enough - the Robinsons Gang was comprised of species with particularly lyrical and/or pun-friendly names, and a narrator would introduce us to each of them and whichever flavour had their favour by way of a wordy, fast-paced, repetitive ditty. So, we had the Boa Constrictor on The Bus, who slurped apple and blackcurrant, apple and blackcurrant, the Manic Gannet on The Bike, who wanted apple and strawberry, apple and raspberry, and so forth. Whichever mode of transport the gang was riding, the ads were able to incorporate ominous signage denoting the locations, "Somewhere, Nowhere, Anywhere, Everywhere" - implying that nobody in this universe had any idea where they were headed, and were possibly indifferent to such particulars. The trip itself was what they lived for. The lyrics were often designed to be as aggressively disorientating as the images - we hear, for example, that the Three-Toed Chameleon drinks apple and raspberry, apple and raspberry, but had actually wanted orange, pineapple and lemon, only the powers that be, according to the Chameleon herself, couldn't make it fit the song (except they just did; see how this thing is screwing with you?). These swirling affairs always climaxed with a lone dissenter, who conspicuously lacked a Robinsons of their own, saying or doing something to bring the revelries to a halt. In the first ad, we had the Hammerhead Shark, who leaned down from the top deck of the bus and threatened to eat the driver, a Pig, apropos of nothing. Neither juice nor grass would apparently satiate him; he was lusting for the driver's blood. This abrupt-as-heck murder threat confirmed what I'd intuitively always known on being plunged into the Robinsons' world - that brewing below the surface of this hyperstimulated rabble was some frightful menace and sooner or later it was all going to end in tears. The seriousness of the Shark's malicious declaration is left open to question. The Pig's initial reaction is to run squealing, yet his goofy antics thereafter would suggest he's figured that the Shark is only kidding. The violent manner in which the shark keeps pounding on that highly malleable streetlight, however, was doing little to reassure me.

Either way, the Pig evidently made it out in one piece, for he was seen again in the follow-up ad, a further surrealist nightmare in which the gang had exchanged their bus for a tandem bike that accommodated multiple riders, with the swine once again in the front seat, and left the city to discover a sprawling, equally mind-bending rural landscape. The Hammerhead Shark did not return (his pugnacious antics on the previous ride possibly got him expelled from the gang), but there were several other familiar faces, including the Boa and the Chameleon, along with some new recruits. In an especially bizarre touch, both ads featured a flesh-and-blood lady, suggesting a merging of realities in which the outright freakish is coexisting with the perfectly mundane. In the original, she was riding the top of that bus with all those monstrous puppets swarming around her comparatively delicate frame; as a kid, I'll admit I was somewhat concerned for that woman's safety, although I now think it would be cool if the intention was for us to interpret her as yet another member of the Robinsons Gang. Alas, the second ad clearly pigeonholes her as a nonplussed bystander - there, she's not taking part in the bike ride and is positioned passively in the foreground, perhaps awaiting the bus from the first installment. In place of the Shark, the gang was menaced by an Iguanodon, whose intentions were certainly more benign - he simply wanted to join in with the bike ride. Like the Shark, however, he took the chaos a step too far and pushed things fatally out of whack, leaping onto the rear of the bike and exerting enough force to send the rest of the gang flying. For myself, that Iguanodon's intrusion was no less unsettling than the Hammerhead's.

To my knowledge, those were the only two ads in the Robinsons Gang campaign. A few of the gang members never received formal identification by way of shout-outs in their respective ditties - among these unnamed recruits were a duck-billed platypus, some kind of burrowing critter in a hard hat, and I don't know what that purple thing behind them on the bike is intended to be (Portuguese man o' war?). It was not, however, the last we'd be seeing of the gang, as both ads were later recycled in 1993, with completely new audio. The frantic ditties were dropped in favour of a more conventional theme song, the lyrics of which were nowhere near as wordy, although the thing was still catchy as hell, and easier to hum along to. The final punchline of each ad was also altered, to have things circle back more explicitly to the exalted product. Now, the Shark and Iguanodon's respective actions were motivated by a craving for Robinsons, as their targets were accused of either concealing or stealing the coveted juice (the Shark asks the Pig what he's done with his Robinsons, the Iguanodon tells the others to come back with his Robinsons). I'll admit that these revised versions went down a whole lot better with my younger self, since they amounted to less of a sensory overload, although with hindsight there are certain details that I suspect might have become even more heinously baffling. If you hadn't caught the campaign during its earlier round, then without the benefit of the bison/basin wordplay, would you have understood why the gang had an anthropomorphic bathroom sink (with eyes and, potentially, guts) of all things random and unholy?

Inside No. 9 '22: Wise Owl (aka Bird of Prey)

Content warning: child abuse 

Earlier this month we bid farewell to the BBC series Inside No. 9, a show that could be aptly described as the modern-day successor to Tales of The Unexpected, but with plenty of personality and devilish ingenuity all of its own. Like ToTU, it was comprised of half-hour stand-alone comic dramas exploring the meaner side of human nature, typically with some kind of ghoulish twist at the end. Creators Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, who'd previously collaborated on the gleefully grotesque cult comedies The League of Gentlemen and Psychoville, tended to star in each story, although always as different characters; occasionally they took a backseat, and at least one episode, "3 by 3", did not feature them at all. The one major constancy was that every episode took place in a venue that in some way pertained to the number 9. Usually this denoted the house or apartment number, but Shearsmith and Pemberton also liked to think outside of the box in terms of how to work in that titular number (for example, in one episode, "Diddle Diddle Dumpling", it referred to the size of a shoe that formed a pivotal plot detail). The genre of the series was also perpetually shifting - some episodes were flat-out horrors, others were surprisingly tender tales of human vulnerability. One of the thrills of the series was entering into each weekly 9 and never knowing exactly what you would find. Besides the 9, there were really only two guarantees - a) every episode contained a "hidden hare" (literally an ornamental leporine slipped somewhere into the mise en scene) and b) the toilet and its related bodily functions always featured to some capacity, usually as a revolting observation on the side. Actually, I can't claim to have gone through the entire series with a fine enough comb to say for certain that the latter applied to absolutely every episode, but I feel confident in saying that episodes devoid of shit, piss or fart jokes were a whole lot rarer than episodes where nobody dies, and those constituted a slim minority. Shearsmith and Pemberton may be creative geniuses, but their trains of thought never seemed to venture far from out of the toilet bowl. And that's grand - the toilet has long served as a beautiful shorthand for everything ugly and forbidden about the human psyche, the matters we'd sooner flush into oblivion and not give a second's thought. We might recall the specific ground that Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho broke in 1960, with its unusually prominent focus on a flushing toilet.

Psycho, most appropriately, was given the tip of the hat quite a few times throughout Inside No. 9. One episode, "Private View", opens with a "Psycho moment", where a popular guest star is introduced and abruptly killed off. In "Merrily, Merrily", a character who mentions having studied psychology is met with the plebeian response, "Yes, I've seen that. Where she gets stabbed in the shower..." And of course, it's hard to not have the Bates in mind through much of "Death Be Not Proud", watching David's morbid relationship play out with his own gruesome mother (itself transplanted from Psychoville); they are gleeful caricatures of the very archetypes the Bates helped cement in popular consciousness. The most substantial of all these Psycho homages, though, occurs in the series 7 episode, "Wise Owl", which was directed by Louise Hooper and first broadcast on 1st June 2022. Its protagonist, Ronnie Oliver (Shearsmith), is an obvious counterpart to Norman Bates, albeit one who lurks in a suburban home in Rochdale (numbered 9, of course), rather than an isolated pocket of the Californian highway. He is yet another socially maladjusted figure who practices taxidermy, has a thing about birds and mentally has never escaped the shadow of the parental figure who dominated him throughout childhood. The particulars of the plot, however, are less evocative of Hitchcock's film than of the Richard Franklin-directed sequel, Psycho II (1983); Ronnie, like the middle-aged Norman, has returned to face his childhood demons following a lengthy period of hospitalisation. There are also echoes of Stephen King's Pet Sematary, with Pemberton playing Derek Blenkin, a client who tasks Ronnie with resurrecting the deceased pet of his five-year-old daughter, an albino rabbit named Ferrari. Like King's protagonist, Blenkin is hoping to delay a conversation about death with his daughter, confident he can pass the stuffed rabbit off as living by telling her it's always tired. His concern for his daughter's feelings is comically undercut by his desire to secure to the cheapest possible option, suggesting to Ronnie that he might leave off the rabbit's legs if it will spare expenses.

Now that the series has formally concluded and I've seen every installment, I have few qualms in declaring "Wise Owl" my personal pick of the bunch. It is, in my eyes, an unmitigated triumph. Given my fondness for all things Psycho, the Bates allusions alone might have been enough to get it into my good graces. But what really elevates this one to such immaculate heights is that it doubles as Shearsmith and Pemberton's affectionate tribute to yet another subject near and dear to my heart - the public information film. Shearsmith and Pemberton were clearly hotly attuned to the impact that such films had on the legions of tender young minds raised on their sombre teachings, tensions that lingered well into adulthood. They wove a beautiful, smartly-observed little horror yarn from that idea, one powered by a rich plethora of creeping disturbances but also an undercurrent of genuine pathos. "Wise Owl" is centred around a fictitious series of public information films that existed in a parallel version of the 1970s, an era that boasts particular infamy for the array of shocking and psychologically scarring educational films that found their way onto UK television screens, a lot of which played like miniature horrors and were specifically intended to be seen by younger viewers. The decade has, in recent times, acquired quite another infamy, as an era in which certain celebrated public figures were able to commit sexual offences with impunity. In a few cases, those infamies have intersected, with some of the most memorable PIFs of their day featuring since-disgraced figures who were then deemed credible as the voice of reason. There was a time when "Teach Them To Swim" was considered such a gentle and wholesome PIF, up against the barbaric likes of "Lonely Water", but now it's every bit as cursed, if not more so. Such apprehensions haunt "Wise Owl" to the core.

"Wise Owl" opens with an animated segment, a faux PIF presented with all the grain and crackle of a 1970s artifact. A brother and a sister (the voices of Dylan Hall and Isabelle Lee Pratt, respectively) are out playing with a kite. The boy, the older of the two, states that he's been asked by his mother to keep guard of the situation, something he immediately blows by demanding a go with the kite, causing it to fly away and get caught against a pylon. The boy thinks it's a perfectly a sensible idea to climb the pylon and retrieve the kite, but is stopped by Wise Owl (voice of Ron Cook), a friendly talking strigine, who advises him of the dangers and why he should not mess with electricity. The sequence beautifully nails down the qualities that made these vintage PIFs so indelible to the children who had to accommodate them amid their regular teatime viewing - in particular, that haunting sense of childhood innocence on the cusp of some awful, irreversible disturbance. The danger the children are in is made all the more stark with the knowledge that it is the little girl's sixth birthday, and the kite that lures them to that dreaded pylon an item of particular excitement for being her present. As a pastiche of a 1970s public information film, it plays itself almost entirely straight, to the point where I could have bought it as a genuine specimen of the era. The only part that doesn't quite ring true is when Wise Owl retrieves the kite himself by blowing in its direction, providing a facile solution to the problem of the girl's lost present, so that the character goes from being authoritative to super-heroic. For now, a pivotal dynamic is established. Wise Owl is the voice of reason; vigilant, trustworthy and benevolent, a parental surrogate who can be counted on in the absence of adult supervision. The boy is foolish and courts disaster. The girl is innocent and helpless.

The look and the tone of the "Wise Owl" animations was blatantly inspired by the "Charley Says" series, in which a young boy named Tony was prevented from making stupid decisions by a cat named Charley (who, unlike the Owl, couldn't speak English, only a discordant garble of purrs and yowls, which Tony inexplicably understood). Two of the Charley shorts are recalled directly at later junctions in the episode - the one where Charley stopped Tony from playing with a box of matches, and the one where he stopped him from going off with a sinister figure who'd approached him in the playground with the (undoubtedly false) promise of taking him to see some cute puppies. There was, however, never a Charley short devoted to the dangers of scaling pylons - the inspiration for the opening sequence (and the use of an owl in general) looks to have been drawn from the 1978 film Play Safe, where a cartoon robin was lectured by an owl on the dangers of electricity, citing grim examples of children who met horrible fates by playing too close to live wires and substations (including one particularly infamous interlude with Jimmy and his Frisbee).

As Ronnie goes about his business inside the house (which includes a harrowing moment, the story's analogue to the Psycho shower scene, where he contemplates suicide by climbing into a filled bathtub with a mains-powered radio), his routine is interspersed with further animations starring Wise Owl and the children. But unlike the opening sequence, both contain obvious disturbances to the formula, suggesting a breakdown of the security Wise Owl supposedly upholds. In the second PIF, the boy and his sister are enjoying a day at the beach. The sister goes off with their mother to paddle in the waves, while the boy, left alone to dig sandcastles, is approached by a strange man who offers to show him a starfish. He nearly accepts the invitation, but is once again saved by the interventions of Wise Owl, who advises him that the man's intentions might not be as friendly as his appearance (which is really not at all friendly, since he's literally a looming shadow in a trench coat and fedora; he actually looks a lot like the stranger in that illustrated edition of "Eddy Scott Goes Out To Play" I covered a couple of years ago). As a pastiche, it doesn't play itself quite as straight as its predecessor, with the added bit of blackly adult humor in the stranger's upfront observation that the boy looks "nice and shiny". It's also a little more on the nose with its nightmarish imagery - unlike its "Charley" equivalent, in which the playground prowler gave up the instant he was called out, we here get the extra sordid detail of the stranger's dark, gangly hand reaching out to seize the boy, prompting a violent response from Wise Owl, who swoops in and bites the hand. With the boy spared, Wise Owl turns and delivers the relevant lesson to the camera: "Don't be a Twit You! Always stay safe with your mummy and daddy! Wise Owl knows best!" The sequence doesn't end there, however. It rounds off with an unsettling epilogue, where Wise Owl flies away, leaving the boy alone once more, shaken and crying out for his mother.

An even more disturbing subversion occurs in the third film, which takes place, once again, on the girl's sixth birthday. Impatient for their mother to arrive home and to light the candles on her cake, the children retrieve the matches themselves from the mantelpiece. But on this occasion, no Wise Owl appears. No cat named Charley either. No voice of authority at all, in fact. The children are simply left to their own devices. The boy, ever the instigator of disaster, strikes one of the matches and holds it close to his face, smiling at the camera while the little flame dances ominously atop the head. We then cut back to Ronnie, who is studying his reflection in the bathroom mirror, stroking back the greasy curtain of hair around his ear to reveal the cluster of burn marks obscured underneath. It now becomes apparent that Ronnie and the animated boy are one and the same. The sequences we've seen are conflations; Ronnie has remained so subjugated by the Wise Owl and his teachings into adulthood that he's obliged to filter his own childhood memories through the form and imagery of the character's PIFs. Although Ronnie is now in his 50s, he is still identifiably a child, and lives his life according to the rules laid out by the Wise Owl. Safety consciousness is baked into his psyche, to an obsessive degree; he responds to a buzzing fridge by unplugging most of the house's electrical appliances, removing all the light bulbs and retiring in the darkness. He also makes a point of never talking to strangers. When Blenkin shows up at his door, he accepts the rabbit but avoids engaging with him on any conversational level. The girl who appears alongside him in the animated sequences is identified as his sister, Joanne, and before long we've discovered the terrible reason why it seems to be perpetually her sixth birthday in his memories. It's a date that will forever haunt Ronnie, the day when the kind of catastrophic, worst-case-scenario nightmares outlined in public information films spilled over into his reality. It seems that Ronnie really did attempt to light the candles on Joanne's cake without adult supervision, and it all went horribly wrong. Ronnie was burned and Joanne did not survive. Ronnie has lived with the guilt ever since.

A common theme throughout the animated segments is the absence of the children's mother, and Ronnie's apparent inclination to make bad decisions when left to manage his own welfare and/or his sister's. In the present, Ronnie receives a video call from his mother (Georgie Glenn), who still worries about the possibility of Ronnie doing something stupid on his own. She reminisces about a childhood pet of Ronnie and Joanne's, a cat named Mimsy that was eventually evicted on account of Ronnie's allergies. She then asks Ronnie if he'll be coming to see her on Monday for an important family anniversary. Ronnie responds by referencing that other parental figure whose whereabouts have, up until now, remained unaccounted for. "Will Dad be there?", he asks. Her answer suggests that he is elusive and doesn't involve himself in family matters. "You know what he's like." Ronnie may be without parental oversight, but watchful authority is omnipresent through the eyes of the various stuffed cats, lambs and badgers that adorn the shelves above and are ever peering down on him (in that regard, they fulfil a similar purpose to Norman Bates' stuffed birds). Explicit note is made of the fact that there are no owls in the macabre menagerie, although Ronnie gets a nightmarish visitation from something even more grotesque (and darkly comic), in the form of a monstrous man-owl hybrid that steps into the living room during the night, head rotating and genitalia on full display.

The following morning, Ronnie begins work on stuffing Ferrari the rabbit, and we get a fourth "Wise Owl" PIF, only by now the pastiche has given way into full-blown parody. In this sequence, Ronnie and Joanne are mourning the death of their pet cat, when Wise Owl appears and instructs them on how to preserve their beloved friend forever, guiding them through the taxidermy process in lurid detail. I mentioned that some level of bathroom humor was a requisite for every episode of Inside No. 9, although "Wise Owl" is actually one of the mildest examples on that front. All we really have (besides the toilet's inevitable showing in the backdrop of the bathtub scene) is Ronnie's mother's recollection that Mimsy "had a way of looking at you...like you were muck on its shoe". We do, however, get plenty of uncomfortable gross-out bodily humor in watching this cartoon cat be skinned, its eyes gouged out, its body incinerated and its tanned hide stretched across an artificial skeleton (in Ronnie's words, "Like putting a sausage into its skin"). The cat is, troublingly, identified as Mimsy, although I don't take to mean that the cat was actually killed and stuffed in real life. Rather, an allusion is being drawn between the childhood pet and childhood innocence; once dead, it cannot be restored to what it was. We know that, despite Ronnie's declaration at the end of the PIF that Mimsy is "good as new", that a stuffed animal is in no way the same as a living pet. Blenkin's plan to pass the stuffed Ferrari off as a live but perpetually tired rabbit is obviously doomed to failure, a facile attempt to mask over a painful reality. How doomed, however, comes as a bit of a shock. As the PIF ends, we see the end-results of Ronnie's real-life taxidermy session, revealing a pronounced difference between himself and his Hitchcockian counterpart. Norman Bates was, among other things, a skilled taxidermist. Ronnie is anything but. The body of poor Ferrari the rabbit gets absolutely desecrated in his hands. In death, the creature is afforded no dignity.

Unfortunate, because it's right at this point that Blenkin reappears at the door, wanting to get Ferrari back in the same condition in which he left him. He seems much more agitated than on their previous encounter, having learned from speaking to a neighbour that resident taxidermist Mr Oliver is a man in his 70s, and he might have entrusted his daughter's pet rabbit to an imposter. Naturally, he's horrified on seeing what's become of Ferrari. While he's absolutely right in asserting that any child presented with Ronnie's "Franken-Rabbit" would have nightmares, it's hard to imagine how his tactic of giving his daughter a preserved rabbit hide would have worked out any better in the long run. Ronnie, then, is only an amateur taxidermist, and he is not the regular occupant of this particular no. 9. That is one of the story's twists. It is not made explicitly clear why he accepted Blenkin's job and attempted to stuff the rabbit himself, although it seems that he does, at heart, only ever want to do the right thing and please people. His disinclination against interacting with strangers was potentially overridden by the knowledge that the innocence of a small girl, not much younger than Joanne, was hanging in the balance. But he isn't able to protect her from the bleakness of the world, any more than he was Joanne.

Later that evening, the regular seventysomething Mr Oliver returns home, having been away on business for the weekend. He is of course Ronnie's father, Wilf, and he's played by Ron Cook, who is also the voice of Wise Owl. That is yet another of the story's twists. Just as Ronnie and the animated boy are one and the same, so too are his father and Wise Owl the exact same entity. Wilf really was the voice of Wise Owl in the series of public information films that existed in-universe, and Ronnie has never been able to separate them in this mind. Wilf was not expecting to see Ronnie. "You'll have to give me money for that window", he states, indicating that Ronnie has forced his way into the property. He speaks with a distinct lack of affection for his son, dropping the first casual reference to Ronnie's having been institutionalised for much of his adulthood ("Did they have a telly in...where you were, or were you not allowed?") and unrepentantly acknowledging that he maintained no contact with him within that time. He never visited Ronnie; when asked if he received any of Ronnie's letters, he takes the opportunity to berate him: "I couldn't read half of them. Your handwriting's shocking!"

Even before Wilf shows up in the flesh, his animated counterpart has undergone a significant degeneration, transmuting from the benevolent voice of reason to an increasingly sinister being with each new appearance. Take that moment in the second PIF where he bites the stranger's outstretched hand. Within context, it's ostensibly framed as a heroic action, but it calls attention to the owl's potentially vicious nature, underscoring that central irony that Ronnie is receiving advice about avoiding predators from an animal that is itself a predator. True, you could lay the exact same charge against Charley the cat (in his own "Strangers" PIF, he reduces a fish to a skeleton in the blink of an eye), but a cat's domesticated, and not a critter it seems particularly unusual to depict hanging around with small children. An owl's a creature of the wilderness, which is suggestive of a whole myriad of unknown and hidden dangers. His instruction on not talking to strangers seems like sound advice to give to a child, but has a darker echo in a later sequence, when Ronnie recalls being asked by his distraught mother why he lit those matches, and is again visited by Wise Owl, who simply tells him, "You mustn't say anything." The message Ronnie is being fed is that silence is his only recourse. Even Wise Owl's catchphrase, "Don't be a Twit You!", while sounding amusingly plausible as the kind of trademark saying a character from a public information film would have, takes on harsher tones, in mirroring Wilf's evident tendency toward bullying and rebuking Ronnie. Cook's dual performance is terrific - as the owl, he's hauntingly convincing as an authoritative voice from yesteryear. As Wilf he's spookily mean, but not to a point that precludes the character's discernible wretchedness. When they merge together, the results are both unhappy and uncanny.

Since the "Wise Owl" series ended, Wilf (whose name is, incidentally, only a letter away from that of another predatory wild animal) has gotten intermittent gigs playing to the nostalgia crowd (most recently an event at a toy museum, which had him in the stellar company of "Ray Brooks, Nigel from Pipkins [and] one of the Bungles - not the scary one") but taxidermy is now his bread and butter. He tells Ronnie, "You'd be surprised how many people want to preserve something of the past, keep a memory alive. Freeze-frame of a happy moment." The taxidermy motif serves a string of purposes throughout the narrative. It is, most obviously, an allusion to Psycho, that classic tale of an abusive parent and their damaged offspring, but on that score it is also something of a misdirect. On our first viewing, knowing the series' predilection for gruesome and disturbing endings, we might suspect that this is building towards the shocking revelation that one of our two taxidermists, be it the professional or the amateur, has applied that same process to a human subject (as Norman infamously did with his mother), most likely the body of the long-deceased Joanne. But that revelation does not come. Instead, the taxidermy is used fundamentally as a metaphor for what Wilf has done to Ronnie, in keeping him perfectly preserved, forever a child under the Wise Owl's rule, only a shell of what he might once have been. With hindsight, the macabre instructional film on stuffing Mimsy the cat becomes a grisly allegory for the violations Ronnie has endured at his father's hands; in the aftermath, it would be a flagrant pretence for either Mimsy or Ronnie to be described as "good as new", with Ronnie's botched job on Ferrari the rabbit signifying a more honest representation of the ugly realities. And intensely ugly they are too. Ronnie reminds Wilf that Monday will be the 44th anniversary of Joanne's death; if she'd lived, she would have been turning 50. He's come to Wilf because he has questions regarding what really happened on that fateful day. There follows a replay of the earlier "Matches" PIF, only this time the live action Ronnie is intermixed with the animated Joanne, suggesting a puncturing through of the illusion. Ronnie recalls that she'd received a doll, a tea set and a kite (there's another predatory bird). "Wise Owl" is revealed to have been present after all, only now he is depicted as the abusive and negligent figure that Wilf was in real life. Joanne wants to light the candles herself. Ronnie tells her that she shouldn't, but is shouted down by Wise Owl, who mocks Ronnie for needing to ask permission for everything and tells him to grow some balls. Joanne is left without supervision while Ronnie is ominously ordered to follow the predatory bird upstairs into the bedroom, with the reminder that "Wise Owl knows best". Ronnie was conditioned to always follow his father's instructions, much as he was conditioned to always follow the teachings of the Wise Owl. Wilf abused both of those authorities at once, creating a climate in which the innocence of both of his children was prematurely snuffed out.

With that in mind, we can see how the scenario in the earlier "Strangers" PIF was really being turned completely on its head. The danger lay with the supposedly safe authority figure all along. The message never to talk to strangers becomes an admonishment against ever reaching out to the outside world for help, against Ronnie being able to vocalise what he was going through. This is a chilling inversion of the alleged purpose of a public information film, in which the authority's words are clearly designed to protect its own interests and not the subject's.

The story climaxes with a reversal of this dynamic, as Ronnie holds his father at knife point and forces him to accompany him upstairs. As he goes, he has one more flashback to Joanne, now a flesh and blood child (the girl who plays her is not credited), cheerfully lighting the candles on her cake, the last time he ever saw her alive. He takes Wilf to his childhood bedroom, and confronts him on why he allowed him to take the blame for the fire. Wilf responds that he had his career to think about, morbidly observing that for a renowned PIF voice-over's daughter to die in a fire of his causing was "not very on brand". Ronnie insinuates that Wilf betrayed his trust in him, and the Wise Owl, to which Wilf responds, "That was only a game. You enjoyed it." He then attempts to subdue Ronnie by evoking the lexicon of the Wise Owl: "Don't be a Twit You. Give your old man a hug." Ronnie looks as though he might comply, but instead raises the knife and slashes through an adjacent pillow, causing feathers to violently spill. Wilf hits back with the threatening reminder that such behaviour could potentially get Ronnie reinstitutionalised, assuring him that if he stops now then he won't say anything. Ronnie responds, "But I will", and goes his own way, clear in his mind over what he needs to do next. He's going to go to his mother and tell her everything. Wilf makes a further effort to dissuade him, by slipping back into the persona of Wise Owl ("Wise Owl won't let you...and we must always do what the Wise Owl says, mustn't we?"); in a deliberately on the nose detail that straddles the border between the unsettling and the just plain absurd, he does so with several feathers still hanging off of his body. The spell is broken, however. Ronnie no longer answers to the Wise Owl, having seen him for the wretched fool that he is.

It's tempting to conclude that "Wise Owl" was conceived as a measured response to criticisms of how the series had previously depicted trauma victims and characters with mental illness, which is to say, as ready to kill their abusers and liable to hurt others; for examples, see "Tom and Gerri" (which is a really good, really tense little character piece, although the ending might not please everyone) and "Thinking Out Loud" (for myself, the low point of the series, for a myriad of reasons). In that regard, Shearsmith and Pemberton aren't necessarily offering up anything more egregious than any number of horror-based media, which has an ingrained tendency towards treating the psychologically troubled as outcasts and objects of fear and suspicion (for all of its merits, Psycho is absolutely included; the film's title alone is a dead giveaway) ^[1] - although, correct, by the 2020s we really should be doing a whole lot more to challenge those preconceptions, and "Wise Owl" feels like a refreshing step in the right direction. To an extent, it is another exercise in rug-pulling from a series smart enough to use its own perceived formula to its advantage. In establishing Ronnie as an obviously mentally ill protagonist and coding him according to such a familiar archetype, it engenders a deliberate set of expectations, only to subvert them - in addition to the aforementioned misdirect with the taxidermy, there's also a fake-out moment where it looks as though Ronnie intends to stab his father, when in the actuality he's going for the pillow. But more than merely surprising, it reaches a genuinely affecting and cathartic resolution, one that eschews brutality and shocks in favour of conveying a sincere sense of Ronnie finding a way forward from his traumas. The cycle of horror and despair does not ultimately claim him. As he walks away at the end, we have every reason to believe that a more hopeful future lies ahead.

"Wise Owl" concludes with one final animated sequence, in which Ronnie the boy leaves the house and, freed from his father's toxic influence, takes his first real steps toward adulthood; in doing so, he visibly transforms from a boy into a man. The traumas that have dogged him for most of his life have not entirely receded; Wise Owl continues to follow him, and to berate him with the usual cry of, "Twit You! Twit You!" But he's merely an irritating speck at the back of Ronnie's head, not the dominating figure of the past, and Ronnie is fully capable of dismissing him. "Get stuffed!" Ronnie retorts, and keeps on walking.

 [1] For an example of how persistently accepted such ideas still are in the modern horror landscape, you might look to film critic Mark Kermode's rather tone-deaf response to a listener's charge that the 2022 film Smile perpetuated those very stigmas. I'm only bringing this up because I was somewhat taken back at how he brought Psycho into the conversation, to make the case that Smile shouldn't be singled out, without acknowledging that Psycho was made a whopping 62 years before Smile. You might very reasonably have expected attitudes to have moved on since then.

Never Say Pink Furry Die (aka Save It Till The Morning After)

Some Aardman productions are so obscure that they didn't even see the light of day in celebrations of the studio's obscurities.

The 2000 home media release Aardman Classics gave a comprehensive overview of the Bristol-based animation house's output pre-Chicken Run, but by no means a complete one. The DVD edition came with a booklet, Insideaard, offering a handy breakdown of the studio's filmography, and if you studied it extensively, you were going to pick up on a few glaring gaps here and there. The lack of Morph or Wallace and Gromit was self-explanatory, since this was intended as a showcase for the studio's assorted one-offs and oddities, with the Creature Comforts pieces as its obvious selling point. Other notable omissions included the preliminary Rex The Runt shorts (assuming you weren't counting Ident), the preliminary Angry Kid shorts, and any of the studio's advertising work outside of Creature Comforts. Also predominantly overlooked was the studio's music video credits, the only featured example being the quirky visual accompaniment created for Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares For Me" in 1987. From a representational standpoint, the absence of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" (easily the most esteemed of Aardman's music video collaborations) seems hard to justify, but maybe there was an issue with licencing. The most mysterious of the snubbed items was a 1989 piece entitled Liftin' The Blues, credited to David Sproxton; to this day, the film continues to elude me, but I have gathered that it was an aviation documentary, which sounds intriguingly out of Aardman's wheelhouse. I fear that its hefty 52 minutes running time might have immediately precluded it from making this compilation, however. A more head-scratching omission would be the 1992 short, Never Say Pink Furry Die, which running at just shy of 11 minutes you'd think they might have squeezed into the mix. I wonder what the story was there? Was the implied sex scene considered a notch too ribald for the family audiences? It's not as though Aardman Classics was an overwhelmingly kid-friendly release anyway, what with the psychological horrors of Stage Fright and the apocalyptic visions of Babylon.

Never Say Pink Furry Die came about during the era when Aardman was regularly allowing its younger talent to create their own projects for Channel 4 - it's how Nick Park, Barry Purves and Richard Starzak were able to get their names into the limelight. This film's creator, Louise Spraggon, doesn't seem to have stuck with Aardman in the aftermath, which is a shame - partly because it is nice to see an Aardman project fronted by a female talent, but also because, while bedevilled with all the roughness of a first effort, it has promise, and I would have been interested to have seen how Spraggon's craft might have developed from here. The claymation visuals look considerably less refined than much of its contemporaries, but I quite like the homespun qualities, particularly the crudely-sketched, predominantly plain environments, which seem warmly nostalgic for the stop motion Paddington series from 1976.

The first thing to be said about the set-up of Never Say Pink Furry Die is how reminiscent the central dynamic is of Wallace and Gromit. Once again we have a master/pet relationship in which the pet is visibly the brains of the operation, although in this scenario both characters are equally non-verbal. The plot follows a young woman who wakes up with the mother of all hangovers, on a Friday the 13th that, most inconveniently, happens to be the day she's scheduled to get married. She's supported through her morning preparations by her far more organised feline companion, who clearly has a greater determination to get her to that alter on time...I don't know about you, but I don't think that exactly bodes well for her future union with her unseen groom. The matter gets thornier still - nestled within the woman's cleavage is a most peculiar item, the titular pink furry die, stoking hazy memories about possible misspent passions that unfolded the night before. We get flashbacks depicting her on what I presume to be her hen night, only there doesn't seem to be anybody out celebrating with her; either her friends have all ditched her at the bar, or she's henning it up by her lonesome. There is, in fact, only one other character in the full short besides the central duo, and they don't show up until the climax. Such is the paradox of Never Say Pink Furry Die; at times it seems so very busy and stuffed with details (the array of food packages, shrivelling Venus fly traps and half-eaten fry-ups on the kitchen unit, the records and magazines strewn across the bedroom floor), whilst being pervaded by so much dead and strangely empty space. Which takes us into its obvious shortcoming - the pacing of the short is listless to a baffling degree. There doesn't seem to be much urgency in how the narrative progresses, which isn't exactly ideal given that our antagonist is a ticking clock. What plot there is could have been told in less than half the run time, but there are long stretches focussed on giving a slice of life glimpse into the daily living routine of this woman and her cat, with the ostensibly pressing matter of the wedding rising to the surface only intermittently, whenever the cat glances at his wristwatch and a ceremonial leitmotif obligingly sounds. Otherwise, it's almost comical just how lightly the wedding seems to weigh on the narrative, never developing into anything other than a vague motivation for the characters to (just about) keep moving. We don't get much indication that this woman's heart is really in it - to the extent that she might just as well be going to a friend's birthday party, not the supposed happiest day of her life. Or is her terminal indifference all part of the joke?

For as long as it takes for the narrative to get to the point, the ending comes oddly abruptly, and this is where the tone of the pieces shifts into something flagrantly more sinister. We never get to the wedding, and by the credits it's honestly hard to say if the characters are even headed there at all. Given the groom's total lack of corporeality, the betrayal that's ultimately felt comes not so much at the closing revelation that it was the vicar with whom our protagonist knocked boots the night before (presumably the same vicar who's going to oversee her wedding ceremony, though it's not made explicitly clear) than at the fade-out, for abandoning us at this point in the story, and in the company of such a skin-crawling individual. When the vicar enters the picture, to assist the main duo with their broken-down vehicle, he is an immediately unsettling figure, with his eyes obscured behind his glasses, although deceptively, his initial function is to dispense quirky sight gags, with his car boot-ready alter, cross that doubles as a spanner, and unintentional substitution of petrol with holy water. Once the woman and cat have joined him in his van, and the furry die has been slotted back into its proper place, along with the last remaining fragments of clarity as to what went on that fateful night, it comes together less like a wacky comedy reveal than a moment of genuine squeamish horror. The general emptiness that's pervaded the film up until now - the seeming lack of anyone in this world besides the protagonist, her cat and this mysterious third party - suddenly feels treacherous, as though the predatory vicar has been closing in on this woman the entire time and she has unwittingly been all alone in his presence. The final arrangement, which finds the duo stranded in the vicar's ever-accelerating van, suggests a situation hurtling ever more critically out of control. The closing image codes them as having entered into a twisted symbolic marriage, bound by their mutually scandalous secret, with the license plate of the towed vehicle trailing behind in the style of "Just married" signage, while Peter Brandt's hazy background score feels evocative of a nightmare unravelling. I don't know if I'd go so far as to conclude that the vicar has literally kidnapped this young bride and her cat, but it does seem evident that their tribulation is just beginning - that, despite the increased speed, they aren't getting anywhere fast, except ever deeper into the whirlwind of chaos.