If, as we've established, one of Aardman's claims to being a very British institution is the obvious appreciation displayed by its most famous characters for the joys of the traditional English teatime, it seems only natural that they would make the transition into selling tea, having already animated campaigns for everything else under the sun - most famously its "Creature Comforts" campaign for the Electricity Board in the early 1990s.
Back in January 2002, PG Tips attracted some media attention when they announced that they were finally retiring their long-running Chimpanzee Tea Party ads after more than 45 years. By then, the chimps had been going long enough to have secured a record as the UK's longest-lived advertising campaign - despite increased concerns about the ethics of a campaign which revolved around making chimpanzees exhibit highly unnatural behaviours while dressed up in human clothing, for an entire generation of tea drinkers, PG Tips just wasn't PG Tips unless it was being rattled at you by an ape in a dressing gown. A new millennium was dawning, however, and cultural taste was finally shifting. The formal reason for the chimp ads getting the boot was that contemporary twentysomethings weren't responding to them, dismissing them as this antiquated circus show that their parents were weirdly besotted with. Hence, the T-Birds were conceived as a way of making the brand more accessible to the Friends generation, with the intention of moving away from the family sitcom stylings of the chimp ads and into the flatshares of 21st century Britain. The new campaign followed the slice of life adventures of a tetrad of anthropomorphic avians living underneath the same roof and facing everyday problems that modern young people could relate to - crummy apartments, dodgy roommate applicants, neighbours angling for their precious Tips teabags, etc.
The original advert introduced three of the four birds - Maggie, a London pigeon, Pete, a Geordie starling, and Tom, an Irish owl. Maggie and Pete have a tendency to butt heads and get into flaps over the most mundane of life's problems. Tom, by contrast, is stoic to the point where he could be mistaken for idle, but the fact that he's an owl, that eternal companion of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, is our subtle indication that he's actually the smart one of the group. Sure enough, it's usually Tom who has the answer whenever things look overwhelming - that is, to pull out the teabags and encourage his friends to have a "PG moment". I get the coding behind making the character who directly endorses your product an owl, although it must be said that Tom feels vaguely out of place in this particular dynamic, in that he's so much stouter and brawnier than the other birds and I'm constantly reminded of the fact that he's a bird of prey and would therefore be feasting on the smaller birds he's shown cosying up with.
The first two ads had an arc that showed the T-Birds moving into their apartment and acquiring a fourth tenant, Holly the blue tit. Holly was chosen over numerous other applicants because she shared the T-Birds' love of PG and didn't seem too strange (although from my perspective Holly is the kind of garrulous roommate who would unquestionably drive me mad. Should have gone with the guitar-strumming chicken). After that, the ads became more episodic, showing tiny snapshots of the T-Birds' day-to-day lives. Which frankly weren't that interesting, although I suppose that was the whole point. Once you get past the fact that the characters are birds, there's not a lot to these ads and what little there is is kind of mundane - which I suspect was a deliberate tactic in order to keep within the notion that the birds faced only relatable, everyday problems (certainly, nothing encapsulated the banality of 00s living quite like Maggie's suggestion that they deck out their new living room in Aztec Sunrise). Tone-wise, the ads were clearly going for genial over laugh out loud funny, presumably to simulate the calming effects that drinking tea is touted to have on the drinker; the results are entirely agreeable, although the witty visual panache of the Creature Comforts and Scotch Tape Skeleton ads is largely lacking (for one thing, the ads seldom, if ever, do anything interesting with the central concept of the characters being birds, to the point where they may just as well be humans).
The prosaic nature of the ads could be the reason why, despite the initial media interest, the T-Birds never really left much of a dent in popular culture and the campaign proved relatively short-lived, lasting out until only the middle of the decade. The first characters to displace them as PG shillers were Aardman's own Wallace and Gromit, who had a new feature film to promote and ran a tie-in offer with PG where you could get your own Gromit shaped-mug complete with thermostat feature (Gromit's nose turned red when you put the water in; it was way cool). After that, PG Tips decided to go the simian route once again and enjoyed success with a rather bizarre case of mascot recycling - they acquired Monkey, a puppet character who'd served, briefly, as mascot for the ill-fated ITV Digital before the service went bust in 2002, and even went so far as to reunite him with his former co-star, comedian Johnny Vegas. Monkey had more luck in his second lease of life, and continues to endorse PG Tips to this day.
Honestly, my main takeaway from the T-Birds series is that the other birds are kind of jerks to Tom, despite his being at the top of this particular food chain. I am not one to indulge in dark, morbid theories about innocuous characters, but I occasionally entertain the idea that the ads came to premature end because Tom finally tired of having to stick the kettle on every time the other three blew their tops and scarfed the lot of them down whole. PG moments are all well and good, but sometimes an owl's just got to be an owl.
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