Sales Pitch (A Conversation Piece)

Early Bird and Palmy Days were both examples of Aardman's budding adroitness for taking real-life audio recordings and transforming them into something altogether weirder and wilder by significantly re-imagining the context.  Sales Pitch is right at the other end of the Conversation Pieces spectrum, with its straight approach to the source material and commitment to total realism, something which Peter Lord and David Sproxton dabbled with a number of times in the early years of the studio.  By the 1990s, Aardman's naturalistic streak appeared to have all but faded - the last of their projects to pursue this degree of thorough-going realism was Peter Lord's Going Equipped, created for the Channel 4 series Lip Sync in 1989.  Sales Pitch is a reminder of just how wonderfully engrossing this lost and heavily underestimated Aardman art was.  Unlike Early Bird and Palmy Days, which strove to be as zany as possible in their interpretations of their source material, the aim here was to emphasise the drama in the mundane, the complete and utter ordinariness of the setting and situation being precisely the point.  In this particular case, we follow a door-to-door salesman with a suitcase full of cleaning equipment as he spars off against an elderly couple and runs through what we suspect from the outset will be an unsuccessful sales pitch.

The film opens from the perspective of the elderly woman, who opens her door to find the salesman standing on her doorstep, dispensing some fulsome spiel about the present weather conditions.  Immediately, his garrulousness and excessive sunniness puts us on our guard, and yet as the film progresses he exhibits an increasingly underdog air that attains our sympathies.  He's an oily character alright, but his failure is so inevitable that we end up rooting for him all the same.  We watch him run through his routine, repeatedly countering the couple's insistence that they have everything they need with lighthearted jibes, anecdotes and the occasional bit of flattery, all while struggling to engage their interest in the rather unexciting gadgets he's looking to unload on them.  For their part, the couple are entirely amicable and address the salesman with good humour, but there's a definite sense that the verbal exchanges on both sides are little more than false pleasantries to disguise a mutually awkward situation.  To the couple, the salesman is at worst a pest and at best a mild diversion, and it seems a foregone conclusion that, despite the smoothness of his technique and his determination to persist with the pitch for as long as possible, he will not succeed in getting them to change their position.  He manages to get as far as taking them through the contents of his briefcase before his own interest begins to wither; at this stage, the couple are already starting to wander off onto tangents that have nothing to do with the products in question and more to do with the intricacies of their own lives (the husband refers to his friends' gambling routines while the wife arbitrarily brings up her aunt) and the salesman, sensing that he's commanded their attention as far as he likely ever will, makes his final apprehensive bid for their custom.  The discussion climaxes in an awkward silence that stands in contrast to the non-stop flow of dialogue that has filled the film until now, before the elderly couple finally reiterate what they've been saying all along - namely, that the salesman has nothing to offer them that they don't already have.  The situation dissolves with the salesman shaking hands with the couple and assuring them that they can still be friends, a gesture which barely disguises the underlying sense of defeat being suffered by the salesman, as reflected in his dejected expression upon leaving the property.

Sales Pitch imbues the scenario with a gentle visual wit that, compared to the surreal sight gags in Early Bird, remains grounded within the realism of the film's setting.  Humour tends to be subtle and is largely implemented through the mannerisms of the characters, which are charmingly rendered (I particularly love the wife swerving to avoid her husband's elbow as he goes into a particularly impassioned speech about the kinds of household devices being advertised nowadays).  There's an undeniable warmth to the film which resonates from just how "human" each of these plasticine creations are, with each minute character detail and expression enhancing our appreciation of the situation, and what it means to each of the figures involved.  The background ambience adds immensely to the authenticity of the scenario, and in one instance the film makes particularly deft use of the sounds of an aircraft flying overhead by having the wife's gaze wander up in its direction to indicate her lack of interest in the salesman's anecdote about some American tourists who were particularly eager customers of his.

The film also expands upon the physical environment of its three speakers by adding in a couple of silent characters: a neighbouring woman who eavesdrops upon the conversation and the couple's dog, who comes sniffing around the salesman's briefcase as he gets deeper into his pitch.  By twist of fate, both of these characters seem more interested in what the salesman has to offer than do his intended audience - particularly the latter, whose affection for a blue brush which was casually discarded during the course of the salesman's pitch provides the closing image of the film.  In an ending which feels at once comical and poignant, we see the closest that the salesman ever comes (albeit unwittingly) to finding an appreciative consumer for his wares - somewhat ironically over an item that he himself wasn't so much as prepared to talk up.

Availability:  Included on the Aardman Classics DVD, as part of the complete Conversation Pieces.  In the US, Sales Pitch was also included on the Lumivision LaserDisc release New British Animation: The Best of Channel Four.