Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Recovery (aka Victim II?)

Here we have yet another "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" installment with some discrepancy over what we're to call it. I've seen both "Recovery" and "Victim" given as possible candidates, and while I'm not sure which, if either, is the official of the two, that last one definitely has the capacity to cause greater confusion, given that "Victim" is also the title sometimes ascribed to the PIF alternatively known as "Pier". As a title, I'd say it applies a notch more aptly to "Pier", where the dialogue makes it explicit that we're hanging with the victim of a drink driving accident, as opposed to the drink driver themselves. Here, I almost think it gives away more narrative information than is necessary. But then "Recovery" is itself something of a deceptive title, suggesting as it does a more optimistic outcome than the film has to offer. Which is another advantage as a title - it has a certain bitter irony that feels properly in line with the increasing sardonicism the series was slowly adopting.

"Recovery" might actually be the single most anomalous entry in the D&DWL canon, in that there's nothing within that's explicitly connected to either drinking or driving - outside of the closing title card, which supplies our only indication as to the narrative and moral weight we're intended to place on the scenario. We start out in a hospital corridor, making our way into a large room and gradually zeroing in on our protagonist, a patient undergoing physiotherapy to enable him to walk again.We get no further in our exploration than in the intense physical pain he is clearly feeling in present and, if not for the appearance of that familiar slogan at the end, would have no means of knowing just what kind of circumstances have brought him to the situation at hand. The film debuted at the tail-end of the 1980s, and is characteristic of that earlier wave of PIFs under the D&DWL banner, with their haunting austerity and emphasis on the deceiving mundaneness with which long-standing trauma is inevitably assimilated. It assumes a similar faux documentary approach to "Fireman's Story"; unlike most of those early entries it is not a monologue, although the protagonist does still acknowledge the presence of the camera by looking at it, briefly, in a manner that recalls the unspoken aggravation of the protagonist's final glance in "Pier". Compared to "Pier" and "Fireman's Story", in which the camera served as a confidant to the featured monologuer, here there is a sense of the camera as an intrusive presence, its closing in on the protagonist mirroring the pain as it swells and ultimately overwhelms him. Unusual about "Recovery" is this predominant focus on physical suffering, as opposed to emotional turmoil or bereavement, and use of narrative tactics all the more minimalist than those of its peers.

As part of this minimalism, "Recovery" favours a certain moral ambiguity, in choosing to withhold any information on the nature of the protagonist's involvement in the drink driving accident - it is not revealed if he was the drink driver, a passenger of the drink driver, or an external party unfortunate enough to have been caught up in the crash. The possible title of "Victim" notwithstanding, there is no indication within the film itself as to whether we're to view his suffering as a consequences of somebody else's bad choices or  of his own, and for the purposes of its particular message that does not matter. The point here is simply to illustrate how thoroughly and distressingly arduous a process it can be, following a serious accident, to regain an ability as ostensibly basic and as easy to take for granted as walking. The film does not attempt to influence our judgements or sympathies beyond the immediacy of the protagonist's struggle; the emphasis is on the anguish of our human frailties, and how universally harrowing it is to have to grapple against them.

On the surface, "Recovery" might actually strike you as one of the "happier" films in the D&DWL series (relatively speaking). The protagonist has survived and it is not specified that there were any additional casualties. Meanwhile, his injuries are evidently less severe than those of the crash survivor in "Pier", and his undergoing rehabilitation suggests the possibility of regaining a degree of the normalcy he experienced prior to his accident. This much is implied in the title "Recovery", and the dominant dialogue heard throughout the PIF is the repeated encouragement of the nurse, assuring him of how well he is doing. Yet the closing moments insist on disturbing that, subverting our preferences for a reaffirming conclusion, as the protagonist is finally overwhelmed by pain and blurts out what is effectively his only statement - "I can't!" This is how it ends, not with the triumph of overcoming a setback, but with the grim reassertion of physical limitation.

(Note: this upload is a mite truncated, missing out the beginning section in the hospital corridor, but the really hard-hitting parts are all there.)

Bart Gets an F (aka Well, Back To The Forecastle of The Pequod)

In the midsection of 1990, back when The Simpsons was culture's hottest new plaything, revered by zeitgeist and loudly denounced as a threat by various conservative commentators, its early propensity for boat-rocking could be recapitulated in a single item of merchandise - the infamous t-shirt in which Bart claimed to be an underachiever "And proud of it, man". The statement was deemed so inflammatory, and so contrary to the ethos of the American education system, that it was cited as the primary stimulus for a spate of bannings of Bart Simpson t-shirts in numerous schools across America. The nature of that shirt was really two-fold, communicating the anarchic spirit of the callow cartoon sitcom and its willingness to ruffle the feathers of the established order, while being symptomatic of the money-spinning sloganeering that threatened to brand the series as an obnoxious fad (of the kind The Simpsons would later brutally skewer in the 1994 episode "Bart Gets Famous"). Judging by the various little nods and in-jokes that were already working their way into the scripts by the show's second season, the writers viewed the explosion of Simpsons merchandise as a mixed blessing, treating it with bemusement but also anxiety. The series may have been becoming more confident and refined off the back of Season 1, but there was also a certain wariness that accompanied its rapid rise to fame, a cautiousness about the possibility that it could all come crashing down at any second. At first glance, "Bart Gets an F" (7F03), which had the honor of opening the greatly-anticipated Season 2, on October 11th 1990, appears to have been purposely conceived in an effort to put that contentious t-shirt slogan into a broader context; this much is explicitly denied on the episode's DVD commentary, but it's hard to believe that it wasn't an influence in some way -  there's a scene where Dr Pryor, Springfield Elementary's little-seen educational psychologist, appropriates the wording of the infamous t-shirt, transforming it into the judgement of a befuddled authority figure attempting to force Bart into a tidy little pigeonhole. It's a joke at the expense of the shirt, but also the people who didn't get the message of the shirt and insisted on turning its very existence into an exercise in hand-wringing.

Those looking to defend the controversial shirt would point out that, if you looked closely, the word "underachiever" was featured in quotation marks, in a box above Bart's head, and was not actually included in his speech bubble. As such, it would be wrong to interpret the designation as coming from Bart's own lips. "Underachiever" was the unhelpful and derogatory label, handed down by authorities who were less interested in understanding Bart than in compartmentalising him, "And proud of it, man!" was the defiant response. All that Bart was really conveying is that he was a survivor, ready to take whatever snap judgements were assigned him and to wield them against his detractors (not that the t-shirts could necessarily be read as meaningful indicators of the show's intentions - elsewhere on the commentary for "Bart Gets an F", the staff are surprised to note that Bart actually does say "Cowabunga!" in this episode, and that it wasn't just an attempt by the merchandising department to ride on the coattails of the Ninja Turtles). Bart did not actually aspire to be an underachiever, as anyone who'd seen the Season 1 episode "Bart The Genius" could have told you. There, we saw Bart take a sincere crack at completing a math test, before succumbing to the temptation to cheat, and pride was certainly not what he felt on being trolled by his precocious classmates during a lunch break. "Bart Gets an F" makes the theme pivotal to "Genius" even more pronounced - namely, the problem of how Bart is to survive, knowing that he won't survive by merely adhering to the rules the established system requires of him. An irony that's present throughout the episode is that Bart clearly is a child with a great deal of ingenuity and creativity, as he demonstrates with the assortment of wily tricks he pulls in the hopes of circumventing his situation and preventing his academic deficiencies from being exposed. But this is not the kind of ingenuity the system favours, and in "F" Bart is made to face the worst of his fears - that after one failure too many, he'll be caught out, branded as stupid and denied the possibility to ever be recognised as anything else. "F" deals with how much it hurts to be labelled; whatever profession Bart could possibly have to be proud of being called an underachiever is blatantly in self-defence.

Like "Bart The General", "Bart Gets an F" takes a universally relatable subject and humanises Bart by having him grapple with it. Who hasn't had their stomach absolutely wrenched by the prospect of sitting an exam for which we felt ill-prepared? Even the swottiest of us have little immunity to the examination blues, and the psychological scars they leave behind run deep. The last exam I personally took was in 2007, yet I still intermittently have nightmares about them to this day, and I know I'm not alone - it's the most cliched type of bad dream you can possibly have, next to being caught naked in public. Here, the test Bart is required to take is not in itself an especially major one, but there is an awful lot riding on it. Following a string of recent failures, Bart has been given an ultimatum; either he passes his upcoming history test or he'll made to repeat the fourth grade, something that Pryor admits upfront is going to be shameful and emotionally crippling to him. On this occasion, Bart has no choice but to do things by the book, the one thing he suspects may be beyond his skill set.

Bart's battle for survival was, appropriately enough, echoed in the concurrent fortunes of the series, for at the time that "Bart Gets an F" debuted, The Simpsons was facing an insurmountable challenge of its own. Keeping momentum going after the monster success of Season 1 was always going to be an uphill task, but compounding the matter was Fox's decision to move the show from its established Sunday timeslot to Thursday night, to compete directly against one of the heavy-hitters of the era, NBC's The Cosby Show. The media had an absolute field day in drumming up the rivalry between the brash young Bart and the reliable (now disgraced) Bill Cosby, with most camps expecting Cosby's sitcom to come out on top. They were right, too - although initial estimates had "Bart Gets an F" pegged as the ratings victor, the final results gave the edge to Cosby, and he continued to best them for most of the duration of their rivalry. On the commentary, the production team make it clear that they were opposed to the move, and a good chunk of their discussion therein is taken up lamenting the impact on the show's ratings. The ratings it did achieve were deemed strong enough by Fox standards for the series to endure, but The Simpsons didn't thrive in the Thursday night line-up as it had on Sunday. Mike Reiss goes so far as to question how much bigger the show might have been if the move had never been imposed. I'll admit that I was a bit taken back by that suggestion - after all, it's The Simpsons. How much bigger did it need to be? But I suppose it's important to keep in mind that, in terms of purely ratings, "Bart Gets an F" represented the absolute peak of the series' popularity. That, by no small means, can be attributed to the stronghold that Bart as a character currently had on zeitgeist. While "Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish" was at one time slated to be the season premiere, "Bart Gets an F" was ultimately moved to the front due to it being the age of Bartmania, and kicking things off with a Bart-centred story was deemed the best strategy. This was a good move - its failure to beat The Cosby Show notwithstanding, "Bart Gets an F" still drew higher ratings than any other episode in the series' history. More than three decades on and its status as the highest rated episode of The Simpsons has yet to be surpassed. In other words, it reached its zenith as it was barely getting started.

The series' remarkable longevity also means that there is an additional irony that pervades "Bart Gets an F", and which would have been totally non-existent back in 1990. The threat Bart faces is one of stagnation, which he visualises by means of a nightmare in which he is literally trapped in the fourth grade a good three decades or so onward, and still hasn't memorised the name of that dratted pirate from Treasure Island (his son, Bart Junior, has already surpassed him on that front). It is a patently ridiculous scenario, but it touches on a deeper fear still, that once he has been pigeonholed as academically challenged he will never transcend this, be it through his own inability or the weight of the stigma. There is a sense that this stagnation is already happening - while Lisa, who is a whole two years younger than Bart, has numerous A-graded papers adorned across the Simpsons' refrigerator, the height of Bart's academic career was apparently a picture of a cat that he drew in the first grade. His theoretical reward for defying expectation will be permission to progress, and to grow beyond his current status as the troublesome underachiever of grade no. 4 - a departure that will not be happening, due to the series' dependency on maintaining the status quo and keeping all of the characters in their allotted places. Sorry Bart, but you may in fact be doomed to repeat the fourth grade for all eternity. The only thing that has changed is that, sadly, Marcia Wallace is no longer with us, necessitating Edna Krabappel's removal from the picture. But Bart himself certainly hasn't gone anywhere, making his struggle in this episode effectively all for naught. This is the ultimate cruel joke that the Simpsons universe has insisted on playing on Bart, long after forcing him to miss out on the revelries of Snow Day. It's a cruelty that took some years to become truly apparent, and it grows more salient with each passing year.

The metaphysical futilities of the matter notwithstanding, Bart is a bright kid, but for some reason he can't knuckle down and memorise the information he needs to tick all the right boxes, even when his academic credibility depends on it. Colonial history just isn't as interesting to him as playing Escape From Grandma's House down at the Noiseland Arcade, and before he knows it the whole evening is gone. Part of the problem is that he clearly sucks at time management, which isn't so uncommon for a child of his age. We could certainly say a few things about how the school, while keen to chastise and stigmatise Bart for his repeated failures, doesn't seem to making much of an effort to otherwise engage him. But it seems to me that a great chunk of the blame rests with Homer and Marge, who could be doing a better job of overseeing all of this and ensuring that Bart is setting aside adequate time in which to study - or, heaven forbid, sitting down and attempting to go through a few of the details with him. Instead, Homer physically drags him away from an intended cram session to watch Big Gorilla Week on the Million Dollar Movie channel, while Marge's knee-jerk response is to optimistically insist that Bart is just a late bloomer (she does not actually believe this, judging by her openness to the possibility of holding Bart back a grade). It's not something that the episode makes an explicit deal out of, or even implicitly alludes to much, outside of a scene where Homer and Marge find Bart asleep atop his textbook and wonder why he keeps on failing, in spite of his good intentions. But why indeed.

The next morning, Bart wakes up ill-prepared for his test, but manages to feign a convincing enough case of amoria phlebitis for the school nurse to send him home. After a day of ill-gotten ice cream and television, his next step is to telephone Milhouse, who has sat the test, and quiz him for the answers - a fatal miscalculation, as we discover the following day that Milhouse himself did very poorly, although still well enough to put Bart in the shade. (Note: some viewers find it confusing that Bart manages to score worse than Milhouse by supposedly replicating Milhouse's answers - the current summary on Wikipedia puts it down to Ms Krabappel giving him a different set of questions, but this much is never stated in the episode itself. Personally, I would take Bart's poorer result as indication that he even managed to do a half-assed job of committing that ill-advised cheat sheet to memory.) This latest failure ends up being the straw that breaks the loaded camel's back, with Pryor being brought in to give his grim recommendation (surprisingly, for an episode so heavily centred around the school, we see little of Skinner throughout). Bart manages to convince the higher powers to give him one last chance to prove that he is capable of doing better than an F, but he doubts that he can do this by himself and recognises that he urgently needs guidance from an outside source. He starts by reaching out to Otto, the school employee who acts the least like an authority figure, and thus the one to whom Bart finds it easiest to relate. All the same, Bart is sharp enough to recognise that Otto's response, which is to assure him that being held back a grade is no big deal, is definitely not one he should be swallowing - his proclamation that, "I got held back in the fourth grade myself, twice. And look at me! Now I DRIVE the school bus!", merely feeds into Bart's concerns about never escaping the cycle. Instead, he turns to self-professed "natural enemy" Martin Prince, in the hopes that he can teach him a thing or two about academic prowess in return for a few pointers in improving his schoolyard reputation.

When Martin was introduced in "Bart The Genius", he was effectively the anti-Bart - whereas Bart was the perpetual rebel who lived to upset the apple cart, Martin was the kind of impeccably well-behaved child that authority figures can only dream of. Appealing to the higher-ups came as naturally to him as undermining them did to Bart. In "Genius" Martin's own outlook on the rivalry seemed to vacillate from sincere obliviousness (imploring Bart not to bear some simple-minded grudge against him for wanting to protect the school from vandalism) to knowingly relishing any opportunity to get one up on Bart (reminding Ms Krabappel that Bart is supposed to face the window during exams so that he cannot copy his neighbour's paper). The two of them were set up as so diametrically opposed that Bart forming an alliance with Martin and bringing out his latent rebel feels like it could have been used as the basis of a entire episode in itself. Here, it makes up only a small portion of the story, yet the episode still cranks a delectable amount of mileage from it, delving into Martin's character and illuminating a few hidden depths and vulnerabilities in just a handful of minutes. Bart wins the attentions of Prince by latching onto his Achilles heel, which is to say his flagrant lack of popularity among his peers. Martin has no social rapport with the other children, but has always assumed that they admire him from afar, and seems genuinely dismayed to discover that his prize-winning dioramas and years of service as a hall monitor in fact mean nothing to them. But even before then, there's a moment where he finds himself standing on the sidelines of a schoolyard ball game and seems to register how out of his depth he is amid the rituals of his fellow students, returning to Herman Melville's Moby Dick with the sad resignation, "Well, back to the forecastle of the Pequod." It's a great line, evocative of a sinking ship, suggesting that Bart and Martin, in spite of their polarities, are each mutually doomed for their respective deficiencies. It also calls attention to how many references there are throughout the episode to monstrous animals and their attempted conquest - the episode opens with Martin giving an impassioned analysis of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea, a text The Simpsons would homage more extensively at the tail-end of the season with "The War of The Simpsons". Ahab's hunt for the white whale and Santiago's battle with the giant marlin might be seen as indicative of Bart's own quest to reassert his pride and proficiency atop an ocean of despondency that's all set to drag him down into its depths. He is at war with the wayward part of himself that he just can't seem to tame into submission. Conversely, Homer's sympathy for the plight of King Kong knock-off Gorilla The Conqueror - "It's so unfair! Just because he's different!" (and speaking as one who always roots for the monsters in these things, his sentiment is greatly appreciated) - would appear to align Bart's struggle with that of the beastly entities themselves. He is the aberrant outcast the school authorities are intent on vanquishing for not conforming to their pre-determined standards, and he's headed for a metaphorical harpooning if he cannot change his course. His bargain with Martin is rooted in the assumption that the influence of the teacher's pet might lessen his own feral tendencies; instead, he ends up creating a monster out of Martin. After being coaxed into pushing a boy into the girls' lavatory, Martin develops a taste for schadenfreude and decides that what his life needs is more adrenalin and less academia. He runs off to the arcade with Milhouse, Richard and Lewis (those last two were still desperately clinging on to relevancy, but it wouldn't be long now), leaving Bart in the lurch on the night before the test. Bart's influence rubbing off a little too successfully on Martin is another plot development that feels as though it could have occupied an entire third-act conflict, but the episode cheekily allows it to settle itself - Martin is still a rebel by the end, apparently going so far as to emulate the behaviour he abhorred Bart for in "Genius", only for everything to have been conveniently restored to factory settings by his next appearance. We are living in a time loop here, after all.

The one tactic that it seemingly never occurs to Bart to do, but feels like it should have been obvious, would be to have asked Lisa to help with his studies. I mean, she's right there in the next room and I suspect she'd be far less likely to rescind on any agreement than Martin. From a narrative perspective she serves a different purpose, which is to provide an outlet for Bart's conscience - more specifically his underlying recognition that his efforts to bluff his way through life, while protractedly avoiding facing up to the real nitty gritty, are ultimately going to get him nowhere. Lisa is the only character who calls Bart out on his feigned case of amoria phlebitis; her exact words, "Everyone knows you're faking it, Bart", would appear flagrantly untrue, given that he has clearly fooled Marge, Homer and the school nurse, but they get at a deeper reality - one that, judging by his response ("Well, everyone had better keep their mouth shut"), Bart is all-too wary of. Lisa's astuteness comes up again toward the end of the episode, when, having been abandoned by Martin, Bart falls back on his very last resort, which is to put his hands together and beg for divine intervention - he asks the highest authority of them all to find a way of cancelling school so that he may have one more day in which to make the facts sink in. When he wakes up the following morning to find Springfield covered in a thick layer of snow and the school non-operational, Bart's first instinct is to rush outside and play with the other children, but he's stopped by his sister. She admits to having eavesdropped on his prayer session, and reminds him of why he asked for the day off in the first place. It's another classic Lisa moment in an episode where she otherwise barely features; she seems both perturbed that God has apparently deigned to answer Bart's lowly request, and indignant that he was all poised to squander the miracle on a day of sledding. Bart can see Lisa's point, so he retreats to his desk and attempts to get down to some studying. It doesn't go smoothly, because as would become rapidly obvious as the series went on, whatever higher power sits atop of The Simpsons universe is an absolute bastard. It hears Bart's pleas and appears to sympathise, but is, at best, insisting on testing him further, or at worst, looking to have a bit of spiteful sport at his expense. Bart gets his wish for an extra day's revision, all while the rest of Springfield gets to enjoy what is formally declared (by Mayor Quimby, making his debut appearance) as Snow Day, the funnest day in the town's history. All of our friends are there - Jacques, Kashmir, Bleeding Gums Murphy. Even Sideshow Bob is able to make the occasion. (The one character who is mysteriously absent is Herman; they actually flag this up on the DVD commentary, noting the skipped opportunity for a sight gag with Herman's missing arm disrupting the circle of townspeople linking hands.) The sequence where all these assorted Springfieldians unleash their inner children in the frozen wonderland is a beautiful one indeed, illustrating how rich and developed the supporting cast was already coming this early on in the series' lifespan. But it comes as an absolute punch in the gut to Bart, who does his best to shut it all out but is barely able to focus. There's no such thing as a free lunch, but did the Powers That Be not appreciate that Bart already has a serious problem with keeping his attention span in check? It leads to a genuinely harrowing moment, where Bart takes to repeatedly slapping his face, admonishing himself with the threat, "You wanna be held back a grade?"

The resolution to the episode has that characteristic Simpsons back-handedness. A more conventional sitcom might have ended with Bart not only passing his test, but passing with flying colours, thus upholding that trite assumption that you can do anything if you put your mind to it. "Bart Gets an F" insists on a harsher but far more honest answer, that it is entirely possible to try your hardest and still not succeed. The following day when Bart turns in his paper, he asks Ms Krabappel to mark it on the spot and spare him the uncertainty. She complies, and hands Bart back a score of 59, just one point short of a D-. Bart is so crestfallen that he immediately bursts into tears; we the people had seen precedent for Bart crying in "Bart The General", but it comes as a shock to Edna, who clearly isn't used to such unbridled displays of emotion from her least favourite student. Even when she tries to be sympathetic she can't help but come off as damning - "I'd have thought you'd be used to failing by now", she suggests, apparently amazed that Bart had ever expected he could do better. It's here that Bart's actual salvation arises, not from a triumphant display of academic mettle, but from his casual regurgitation of a random historical factoid - Bart professes to feeling empathy for George Washington for surrendering Fort Necessity to the French Empire in 1754, knowledge unwittingly absorbed during his ostensibly futile study efforts. Edna is impressed by his demonstration of independent learning and agrees to give him that urgently-needed extra point. She does of course have her own motives for wanting to bump Bart's grade up to a D-, since she wasn't exactly relishing the prospect of another year as his teacher. But we sense that she is genuinely happy to cut him some slack and will take whatever excuse she can get to do so, putting Bart in the clear and and incurring his spur-of-the-moment gratitude.

The punchline of the episode takes a similarly backhanded tone, with the family gathered around Bart as his by-a-whisker D- (and barely obliterated F) earns pride of place on the refrigerator door. Not only is his achievement framed, half-tenderly and half-facetiously, as no less monumental than any of the Lisa-procured A's with which it presently rubs shoulders, his admission that "Part of this D- belongs to God" would appear to posit this meagre accomplishment as being of enormous cosmic significance. Which it is. Earlier on, Lisa had offered this observation about Bart's supposed friends in high places: "I'm no theologian. I don't know who or what God is exactly. All I know is that he's a force more powerful than Mum and Dad put together, and you owe him big." For the purposes of this particular episode, I think we can answer Lisa's musing, which is to say that "God" is a higher being named David M. Stern, and he is indeed more powerful than Homer and Marge combined. It's important to keep in mind that whenever characters in fictional shows pray to God to intervene in their mortal affairs and change the impending outcome, they are in effect asking the writers to grant them a deus ex machina. Bart's closing words are an acknowledgement that, in spite of how heavily the odds seemed to be stacked against him, the universe was always fundamentally on his side - he and his family are its very nexus, and the Powers That Be are inevitably going to offer him a way out of whatever predicaments they thrust him into, even if they'll insist on wringing twenty-odd minutes' worth of laughs from his suffering in between. Having glimpsed the inherent cruelties of his universe, Bart feels at peace with it and assured of his place within. Just as well, because it's a relationship that could continue for some decades yet to come.

The First Snow of Winter (aka Blame It On The Weatherman)

When I think back on all the celebrity deaths that have occurred within my lifetime, there are few that left me quite so shell-shocked as that of Dermot Morgan. The Irish actor, who was best-known for playing the eponymous character in the sitcom Father Ted, died of a heart attack on 28th February 1998, just days before the eagerly-anticipated third series of Father Ted was set to debut on Channel 4. He was 45 years old. It didn't make sense to the pre-teen me. Back then, I didn't understand how anybody could die of a heart attack at age 45, unless they had some pre-existing condition or smoked twenty packs of cigarettes a day for years (which by all accounts Morgan didn't). It left me a little wiser as to the fragility of life, but it really ate a hole in me. As a result of Morgan's death, the broadcast of the third series of Father Ted was delayed by a week. Then when it did make it to air it ended up being the funniest chapter in the show's truncated* lifespan. I laughed so hard at Ted's "not a racist" gambit, at Pat Mustard's telephone dialogue and, of course, the kicking of Bishop Brennan up the arse. All the same, the knowledge of Morgan's passing cast a long grey shadow over the entire experience - Ted might have been funnier than it had ever been, but the world in general seemed a little less mirthful, and like a harsher, crueller place. When the closing episode, "Going To America", aired on 1st May, it brought with it a heavy sense of finality, not merely for marking the end of the series, but for the way it appeared to be putting a cap on a man's entire legacy (that montage they included at the end, it completely broke me). It's something I ruminate on regularly, and of which I feel particularly conscious now, in 2023, as we approach the 25th anniversary of Morgan's death.

Taking the sting off just a little was the news that the third series of Father Ted wasn't actually the last that Morgan had to offer. He did have one final hurrah on the horizon, coming up right at the end of the year - before his passing, he'd lent his vocal talents to a 28-minute animated film, The First Snow of Winter, produced by Hibbert Ralph and Link Entertainment, and directed by Graham Ralph. On Christmas Day of 1998, the BBC's gift to the nation (aside from the UK terrestrial premiere of Babe) was the chance to see Morgan's last ever role, in which he played a talking vole named Voley. And that's fantastic. Every actor should voice a cartoon rodent at some point in their career, and I'm glad that Morgan had his opportunity.

It goes without saying that Morgan's turn as Voley isn't half as well remembered as his tenure as Ted. But it's still a charming vocal performance that really highlights the breadth of the talent that we lost too soon. In Father Ted, Morgan played the eternal straight man cast away on an island of eccentrics, but here he gets to be the comic relief in an otherwise sombre story about lost children in an impassive world. Voley is that most likeable of figures, the neighbourhood kook whose quirky bearings conceal a barrel of wisdom, and Morgan plays him with a liveliness, warmth and charisma that provides our genial anchor throughout much of the narrative. (Note: when The First Snow of Winter was imported to the US, the cast was largely redubbed, and the role of Voley was played by Tim Curry; I've never seen the US version so I can't comment on how his performance compares. And with all due respect to Curry, I think I have way too much emotional attachment to Morgan's performance to even want to think about it being swapped out for anybody else.)

The First Snow of Winter tells the story of Sean (Miriam Margoyles), a young mallard duck living on the west coast of Ireland who is accidentally left behind when his family migrates for the winter. Sean, ever the rapscallion, flies too close to an aeroplane and is knocked out of the sky by the downdraft, causing him to break his wing and leaving him stranded at the mallards' summer nesting grounds. His mother (Sorcha Cusack) attempts to locate him, but sees a couple of fox cubs playing with Sean's feathers and leaves him for dead. Unable to follow and rejoin his family, Sean is faced with having to stay put and weather the wintery menace that a duck should ideally eschew altogether. The odds aren't exactly stacked in his favour, but he finds an unexpected ally in the form of Voley, who teaches him a few tricks in making the most of the remaining resources. With his new friend at his side, Sean assumes he's in with a chance, but then Voley goes and drops a bomb on him, in that he doesn't actually intend to stay with Sean for the duration; come the titular change in the weather, he's going to retreat into his burrow to sleep out the coldest months (questionable, but we'll get to that). Sean really is on his own in making it through to spring, and not helping matters is that he has an additional adversary in the form of the parent fox, who stalks him repeatedly throughout the film. What we have here is essentially an anatine version of Home Alone, only minus the sociopathy - it uses animal characters to play out that most perennial of childhood nightmares about being abandoned by the ones we love. One of the most difficult moments emotionally occurs when Sean asks Voley, "Am I a bad duck?", and Voley, misunderstanding the point being made, assures him that, "You do the duck thing very well". Sean specifies that he doesn't understand why his family haven't come looking for him, a question that Voley is spared from having to answer by the sudden appearance of the fox. Naturally, the viewer has access to knowledge that Sean doesn't - we know that Sean's mother did, in fact, go back for him but left because she had reason to believe that her son had been killed. But this doesn't quite allay the gloomy despair articulated by Sean - the realisation that his displacement doesn't much matter to the world at large, which continues to go about its business regardless. What Sean is inclined to interpret as karmic retribution for his childish misbehaviours (before the migration, one of his favourite hobbies was harassing the local flock of seagulls, and he was certainly never inclined to listen to his mother) is nothing more than the relentless flow of time marching on, indifferent to the plight of the individual, and it's inevitable that some of us are destined to wind up as debris along the way. It's a straightforward narrative, and ultimately all ends well, but it offers what I would deem to be two really harsh twists in the getting there, the first being Voley's aforementioned abandonment of Sean. The second is when Sean discovers that he wasn't the only youngster left behind - during the winter, he acquires the surprise companionship of Puffy (Kate Sachs), a young puffin who was also separated from his family early in the migration and forced to turn back. (I'll profess that I thought Puffy was a girl for most of the story, until Voley addresses the two birds collectively as "boys" near the end.)

If The First Snow of Winter has one major sticking point, it's that a number of the story's biggest plot points rest on some fairly wild inaccuracies regarding the behaviours of the species in question - the big one being that mallard ducks don't migrate away from Ireland during the winter, when the local mallard population actually increases due to the number of ducks migrating from Iceland to the British Isles. There's also the reason given for Voley's absence during the latter half of the narrative, when he claims to be going into his winter sleep; I reckon he may be pulling a fast one on Sean, considering that voles don't actually hibernate. There are very few mammal species within the British Isles that do - just bats, hedgehogs and dormice (although that last one isn't native to Ireland specifically). On a more minor note, Sean is wrong when he tells Voley that ducks don't eat acorns and berries - I don't know what The First Snow of Winter supposes mallards do eat, since we never see Sean feeding with his family, but they're resourceful birds that can eat a wide variety of plant matter, including acorns and berries (which does at least make it plausible that Sean is able to survive on a diet of pilfered squirrel food - his puffin friend, less so). Look, it's a cartoon, not a nature documentary, so I'm happy to give it some leeway on all of these issues, but it does mark the story out as being based on vague stereotypes and assumptions about animal behaviour (ducks fly south, furry things hibernate) rather than any genuine fascination for the critters in question, and that's the kind of thing that could so easily sink a picture of this nature, if we sense that its makers didn't care about the subject at their fingertips. Fortunately, The First Snow of Winter soars on the back of another passion, that being for the Irish landscape, which is rendered beautifully. The backgrounds have the kind of disarming painterly quality that could hang comfortably in any tearoom, but a particularly sizeable portion of the film's character is conveyed by the skies, which are soft, yet perpetually darkened, in a way that speaks to the sorrow hanging over the characters, whilst hinting at the hardship omnipresent amidst the ostensible serenity. Adding to the Irish flavour is the folk soundtrack by Mark Sayer-Wade and Tolga Kashif, and this seems like as good an opportunity as any to highlight by far the film's strangest sequence, when Sean and Voley engage in a stepdance routine that doesn't serve much of a purpose other than to further accentuate the Irishness of the setting, and to ensure that we go away with at least one really freakish visual etched into our skulls, when an entire flock of sheep gets in, seemingly involuntarily, on the action.

Given that Voley's vole-ishness serves no specific function within the plot, you could argue that his arc would have made a lick more sense if he'd been a hedgehog named Hedgy or Hoggy. But perhaps that would have telegraphed that the character would, inevitably, have to go into hibernation sooner or later. It hurts more if it's heaped on us from nowhere and we're left just as flabbergasted as Sean by the revelation.

There are no onscreen humans in The First Snow of Winter - they are mentioned by Voley when he talks about the importance of choosing a boat for shelter that won't be taken out to sea, but otherwise the only real sign of human encroachment on the characters' world is in the jet that sabotages Sean's flight. (There is a sequence that relies on extensive intercutting between the mallard family preparing for flight and the aircraft's take-off that not only lays the stage for the fateful collision but suggests a parallel between the species that underscores our kinship with the natural world, whether we're alert to it or not.) The jet has been rendered using computer animation, and while the mixture of 3D graphics and traditional animation inevitably seems a little crude now, it does help to mark the plane out as an alien force among the birds (as a fan of traditional animation, I also can't help but read into it an accidental allegory for the effect the rise of 3D animation was about to have on the industry as a whole). For the most part, the film's antagonism arises from the basic cycles of nature, the inevitability of change and the necessity of adapting and moving on, and this is something that Sean can only make peace with. Although his separation from his parents has come prematurely, Voley indicates that this is a rite passage to which all children have to face up eventually - when Sean states that he misses his mother, the vole responds, "We all miss our mothers." No season within our life is going to last forever, and the ability to roll with these changes and tap into our latent survival mechanisms is an invaluable one. When Voley tells Sean that he has to leave him, it's a difficult exchange, but there's no sense of betrayal about it - it's simply another part of that process that must be observed. It's when Sean's alone that he discovers his metaphorical wings and all that he's capable of, displaying initiative in seeking out alternative shelter inside a discarded boot when the boat Voley had chosen for him is destroyed in a storm. The telling sign of Sean's blossoming maturity is when he assumes the role of mentor and nurturer, in imparting all the lessons that he learned from Voley to Puffy. Sean may be doomed to remain physically stunted as a duckling over the course of the film, but by winter's end we can see the adult duck that's taken root inside of him. This doesn't preclude the obligatory happy ending in which he is ultimately reunited with his returning family, but from a narrative perspective there's a degree to which that's all gravy. What's important is that Sean has proven that he can survive on his own, and obviously things are never quite going to be the same again.

Adding a more traditional, tangible threat is the character of the fox, the silent menace that intermittently resurfaces in an effort to bring Sean's quest to ride out the winter to a premature close. To an extent, the fox's predatory leanings are just another part of this natural panorama, and our brief glimpse of the fox's own family comes as a reminder that there is more than one side to this story. All the same, they do manage to make the fox seem really, purposely mean; it's less anthropomorphised than the other characters, in that it doesn't talk, but there's still a sense of knowing cruelty to its predation, making its constant targeting of Sean seem less about biological need than something altogether more personal. This is particularly evident during the climactic confrontation, when Sean and Puffy are so overjoyed to have survived the winter that they momentarily forget about the fox and enable it to get dangerously close to them. If the fox were a truly efficient killer, it could have easily snuck in on both birds and taken them before they ever knew what hit them. The fact that it waits for them to turn around and notice it first rather implies that it wants them to know what hit them. But I suppose this leads me into my slight quibble with the fox character, which is to say that it is emphatically not an efficient killer. There are numerous instances in the story when it seems like the heroes only survive because the fox is painfully slow in going in for the kill, and that leaves me with somewhat mixed feelings about its overall effectiveness as an antagonist. On the one hand, the fox boasts my favourite character animation (courtesy of Odile Comon) of all the cast, yet it always seems to be deliberately holding back on its full rapacious energies; it never quite emerges as the all-out threat that it could be, and it's in the fox's bungling attempts to catch Sean that I'm most conscious of the fact that this is, when all is said and done, a family-friendly cartoon. But that's all minor carping.

The closest the fox comes to doing genuine harm is when it seizes and savages Voley, who has recently emerged from his winter sleep and intervenes in that final confrontation in a bid to save the young birds. The fox swiftly abandons him to chase after Sean, who discovers that his broken wing has healed, allowing him to fly safely out of the reach of his pursuer. There may, however, have been a cost to Sean's survival - he returns to the site where Voley fell to find him limp and unresponsive, and the film milks a few forlorn moments out of Sean's attempts to revive him, seemingly in vain, before revealing that it's all a great fake-out, and that of course Voley is still alive. A bit of a hoary old standard for getting half the audience in tears before giving us our desired happy ending anyway? Definitely. But that momentary gap where Voley doesn't respond to Sean genuinely hurt back in 1998, due to the knowledge that Morgan had already left us in real life. The First Snow of Winter might not go so far as to impart any direct lessons on the nature of death (a la The Snowman) but the subtext was there nevertheless thanks to that unfortunate occurrence from earlier that year. For those affected by Morgan's death, it remains an upsetting sequence to watch to this day.

Something I will forever appreciate about The First Snow of Winter, above all else, is that the very last diegetic sounds we hear as the credits begin rolling is that of Voley laughing. That Morgan got to round out his legacy on a note of such buoyancy is certainly heartening. And it reminds me that the laughter he left behind him has proven greatly enduring - Father Ted is one of those miraculous comedies that can be watched over and over with the gags and the performances never seeming to lose any of their freshness. Morgan might have left us too soon, but within the past quarter-century his ability to keep on giving has gone unabated. As ties in with the central message of The First Snow of Winter - things change, and there's little that can be done about that. But it's remarkable how life itself abides.

* Backstage whisper has been pretty firm that the third series of Father Ted was always intended to be the last, and that Morgan himself wanted to move on from playing Ted. But really, who knows how it might have panned out? Rowan Atkinson has repeatedly announced his intention to retire Mr Bean, only to decide that there's still more he wants to do with the character. Actors do end up changing their minds about this sort of thing.

Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Mates (aka ER)

"Mates" is another addition to the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" canon that, like "Arrest" before it, makes clever use of perspective to deliver a hard-hitting message about how a flippant decision can wreak terrible consequences. The grisliness of the featured scenario is again expounded by putting the viewer in the shoes of one of its participants - in this case, the passenger of a crashed vehicle undergoing emergency treatment, while his self-proclaimed "mate" (the drink driver, who has apparently gotten off with a scuff to the head) hovers on the sidelines, repeatedly interjecting in a futile effort to keep the finger of blame from settling squarely on him. Technically, this might qualify as yet another D&DWL monologue, since the driver is the only one who gets any discernible dialogue, although the arrangement still functions as a two-way conversation of sorts - throughout the film, the victim is heard breathing in what is, on the surface, an impassive bid to remain alive. As the ad progresses, the breathing itself seems to suffice as a response, imparting everything the victim needs to rebuke the driver's attempts at reconciliation.

I have a particular soft spot for "Mates", as it was the D&DWL installment that caused me the most discomfort at the time of the campaign's run - albeit through its print counterpart, not the TV ad itself. As a child, I attended weekly trampoline lessons at a local sports centre, and the trampoline was positioned so that every bounce gave me a tantalising glimpse of the upper level of the centre, which for a stretch had a noticeboard display dedicated to the evils of drink driving. Among the featured items was a poster showing a young man leaning over a disfigured body upon a hospital bed, while advancing the question "At least we can still be mates...can't we?" Behind him was the accusatory glare of a nurse, making it clear where our moral judgements were intended to lie. The face of that nurse, on which I fixated for many a trampolining session, still haunts me to this day. Back then, I interpreted that ominous "...can't we?" to mean that the victim's prospects of survival were grim, despite his mate's unsolicited buoyancy, although the outcome suggested by the TV ad is somewhat different. There, we learn that the victim is expected to pull through, but will lose the use of his legs, and this may not be the only irreparable thing about the situation.

I also give "Mates" props for being the most singularly terrifying PIF of the bunch - in terms of pure fear factor, the only one that gets anywhere close would be the film centred on Denise van Outen's lifeless eyes. I've already credited "Mark" with being the most visually arresting of the D&DWL films, but I'd rate a lot of the images we see throughout "Mates", while less overtly showy in their surrealism, as just as disturbingly weird in their own way. It is one heck of a freaky spot to watch, due to the high level of visual and audio distortion used to depict the victim's wavering grip on consciousness. The medical professionals tending to the victim fade in and out focus, their forms becoming vague and frequently inhuman. We understand that they are performing vital life-saving surgery upon our subject, yet their presence is of little comfort, their air being more of demonic torturers than of carers. There are repeated flashes of red throughout. As the film opens, the sounds of disembodied laughter are heard, inexplicably. At 0:13, the nurse to the right side of the screen has her face stretched into an uncanny smile (the accusatory glare she shoots the driver in the print ad doesn't feature, but this is just as sufficient for late night scares), and I don't know what's even going on at 0:14. The result is quite the distilled 30-second nightmare, in which our protagonist has awoken to a hellish reality - where, on top of everything else, their supposed best friend registers as little more than a loathsome intrusion, an imposing, overly-protesting blot upon their fleeting moments of semi-alertness. He becomes the Devil of own our private Hell - we'd seen a similar device used to illustrate the raw horror of the situation in "Christmas Pudding", in which the protagonist's entrapment in shock and grief was underscored by having her family cackle like demons as she received news of her boyfriend's demise, but it's played here with a greater sense of underlying bitterness.

Both "Arrest" and "Mates" are structured heavily around the abasement of the driver, but whereas "Arrest" invited the viewer to experience that abasement first-hand, by playing out its narrative from the driver's perspective and having every other participant get uncomfortably in their face, in this case the driver (who is unusually corporeal for a D&DWL film) is the impinging figure, albeit one with a crippling lack of authority. The effect of putting us in the victim's shoes, besides showing us what a terribly unpleasant experience it is to end up injured and in intensive care, is to have us ruminate on whether we would be inclined to accept his gestures of contrition, with the engineered gut response being that of course we wouldn't. He casts too pathetic and repellent figure, with his snivelling expressions of two-faced remorse, and he seems too unwilling to accept responsibility for what has happened. Of course, in that regard it's hard not to also think of the successive PIF "Mirror", in that both scenarios involve wounded passengers left with some form of lifelong injury brought about by the driver's drinking, and in both cases an element of victim-blaming creeps its way in, with the insinuation that the passenger is as much at fault for accepting the ride in the first place. In "Mates", it's noteworthy that part of the driver's defence is the assertion that "One of us had to drive". The implication there is that both of them had been drinking, so does that put them both at fault for failing to designate a non-drinking driver before embarking on their boys' nights out? That certainly seems to be the case that the driver is forwarding, but compared to "Mirror", which could be perceived as legitimising this stance, "Mates" has very little tolerance for the his attempts at shifting the blame. Here, the onus is bestowed firmly upon the driver, with the unsettling depiction of the surrounding medics arguably holding up its own mirror to the slack duty of care he provided his companion in attempting to drive him home whilst over the limit. Any possible ambiguity on the matter is roundly removed with the punchline of the film, where the driver, at distasteful proximity, asks the camera, "Still mates, aren't we?" The implied answer is "no". Drink drivers are nobody's mates.

Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Arrest (aka Police Station)

Let's start 2023 on a high note, by looking at the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" installment that I personally rate as the campaign's strongest - "Arrest" (aka "Police Station"), which made the television rounds somewhere at the dawn of the 1990s. Intense, compellingly disconcerting and with not a single wasted moment, "Arrest" is a fine example of the creative muscles the once-austere campaign was rapidly building, and its ability to hammer home an impactful message without resorting to the more obvious shock tactics suggested by the collision itself. In this case, we're taken on a tour of the inner passageways of a police station, in a manner that recalls the punchy immediacy of the opening of "Fireman's Story", only instead of sharing an emotionally intimate tea break with Ken Stott we're greeted by an endless parade of accusatory eyes, practically burning holes in our jackets with their ill-disguised contempt. The promise of a tea break does eventually arrive, once we've been sufficiently basted in the relentless spilling over of scorn, but odds are that you'll be left with very little stomach for it.

I noted when I covered "Jenny" that the earliest films in the D&DWL canon were less interested in exploring the direct consequences to the drink driver than they were in the suffering of the friends and family of the people they crashed into (and, where enough of them was left intact, the victims themselves). The drink driver remained a perpetual blank, an invisible phantom whose thoughtless deeds have left long and baleful shadows across all of the featured individuals, the implicit suggestion being that this loathsome boogeyman could well be you, if you did not keep your drinking habits in check. "Arrest" both turns the table on that and follows it through to its logical conclusion, centring specifically on the perspective of a drink driver undergoing questioning by police after causing an accident and leaving a young woman in critical condition. The drink driver is still given next to no corporeality (we get a fleeting glimpse of their hand and arm, but that's it), and that's because on this occasion the phantom perpetrator is very pointedly supposed to be you. "Arrest" puts you in the shoes of the driver and depicts their eye-view as they're ushered from one stony-faced official to the next, journeying ever more critically down the fast track to incrimination. We're given a bitter taster of the invasive discomfort the procedure, which sees us abandoning our personal possessions at the front desk, having our bodily fluids extracted by a laboratory technician (she's probably the nicest of the officials we encounter, in that she actually says "please", but no more familiar in tone than those police officers), and finally being read our rights when it becomes apparent that we aren't going to be awakening from this nightmare any time soon. 

Superficially, "Arrest" might strike you as the D&DWL equivalent of a parent forcing his wayward teenage son to visit a police station in the hopes that the mere sight of a holding cell is going scare him straight - it purports to show you what a frightfully intimidating experience it would be to be arrested for causing grievous harm (and ultimately death) by driving under the influence of alcohol, but I suspect that much won't come as a massive bombshell to most viewers. There is a frantic claustrophobia to the piece that deftly gets across the horror of the situation, but what makes the film so effective, I think, is the wall-to-wall disdain that it radiates - making it clear that, despite your passivity for the entire duration, you are never anything less than the villain of the equation. Like "Fireman's Story", it shows us that the professionals who deal with this type of trauma on a daily basis are human too, and how their familiarity with such matters does not preclude their ability to feel the emotional impact. Its greatest strength, though, is in how convincingly the anger of those police authorities translates into self-loathing on our part; by the end of the film, despite identifying with the driver's abasement for the preceding forty seconds, we emerge sharing the officials' infuriation for the devastation they have caused.

"Arrest" opens in the aftermath of the accident, the closest we get to the grisly incident being a momentary glimpse of the unconscious victim as she's carted away by paramedics. Like most of the D&DWL films, "Arrest" is light on gore (unless the sight of a needle in action makes you squeamish) and, while the ad does climax with us hearing second-hand that the injured woman unfortunately did not survive, it bucks the more common D&DWL trend of focussing extensively on the issue of bereavement. Who was the woman in question and who does she leave behind her? We get no insight into either. Rather, news of her death is slipped in to illuminate the exact point at which we've personally slipped over the barrier of no return. This moment is marked by a startling halt to the barrage of formalities, giving way to a few seconds of dead, empty space in which the entire world seems to hang in the balance. A particularly nice touch is the reluctant spectatorship in the form of those extras lingering about in the backdrop, close-up footage of whom is intercut with the unfurling of the slip of paper containing details of the woman's fate, and by extension our own. What is running through their heads at this stage is painfully obvious - whatever business has brought them to the police station at this time of night, they're just relieved that they're not in your situation.

The punchline occurs when the last of the police officers offers us a cup of tea, a gesture of civility which, coupled with his flagrant sardonicism in addressing us as "Sir", barely conceals the repressed primal urge to sock us in the jaw. Coming out of the grave series of rituals with which we've just been bombarded, it seems an almost glibly mundane proposition, the taunting token of a return to a normalcy that now seems entirely beyond our reach. But of course it's also a beverage, and in that regard it provides an ironic echo to a presumed moment from earlier on in our narrative, when we were first served liquor by an off-screen bartender. It was our craving for liquids and the reckless consumption of which that got us into this whole catastrophe; perhaps it's only fitting that we bow out with a nod to its voracity.