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.
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