By late 1992, Frank the plasticine tortoise was already such a revered advertising icon that British Telecom (aka BT) saw fit to appropriate his electric (not gas!) powered charms into one of its own campaigns. Sandwiched somewhere between the Maureen Lipman and Bob Hoskins eras of British Telecon's advertising history was "Get through to someone", a series of adverts (at least seven in total) about the importance of everyday connections and communications. Each installment follows a different protagonist grappling with some form of overwhelming uncertainty, ultimately remedied with a simple telephone call - in one case, the mother of a university fresher fretting about how her daughter is coping in her new environs, until her daughter gets in touch to reassure her that things are hunky-dory. Before then, the mother looks to the television for a source of diversion, but every single item being broadcast reinforces her paranoia about the world her daughter is currently being inducted into, one of derelict kitchens and rambunctious rugby players. Failing to offer comfort is Frank, whose off-hand remark about how nice it is to come inside to warm abode after you've been freezing to death outside conjures up bleak, blue-tinted visions about the horrors of student accommodation - in which Frank's hyperbolic observation is snipped out of all context and echoes off the mildew-stained walls as the unremitting proclamation of doom. I gotta say, this freaked me out something nasty as a child. Like everyone else, I only ever knew Frank as an entirely genial presence, as a wide-mouthed tortoise who was apparently a proficient athlete off of screen (there was something vaguely sinister about the backdrops to his world, and those of all of the Creatures Comforts spots, but we'll get into that another time). BT's appropriation felt like a rotten bit of sabotage, a subversion of everything the Aardman tortoise stood for. They gave Frank a dark undercurrent by twisting his words, honing in on some grimmer subtext that would otherwise not have crossed my mind, and creating an association I was never quite going to shake. From now on, whenever I saw Frank in his regular presentation, I was going to have Sam the university fresher and her pallid, shivering form lurking somewhere within the same train of thought, reminding me of the chilling alternative to the perfectly-heated utopia the claymation reptile extolled.
That one upset aside, I'll admit to being inordinately fond of the "Get through to someone" series. In many respects, they are the perfect encapsulations of early 90s banality, but they're my kind of early 90s banality, brimming as they are with a beguiling nostalgia for a time when mobile phones were still the ugly toys of the business elite and all long-distance communication between friends and family was conducted via landline (and the occasional phone box), and when ads signed off with upbeat leitmotifs, this one delivered by harmonica. There are a so many details that are honestly catnip to me - the warm guitar strums, the overstuffed mise-en-scenes. Above all, I like how they mix the hokey prosaicness of each featured scenario with a prevalent sense of trepidation, so that the most everyday of banalities become portents of some impending catastrophe. Take what happens at the opening of the Sam spot, before Frank even enters the picture. We get an early indicator of the conflict in store with an overheard BBC announcer informing us that, "That was the last program in the present series." Ostensibly an entirely non-threatening detail designed to segue into a reminder that the Open University is starting in 25 minutes, and then on into the protagonist's own memories of having left her daughter at the university doors, its implications are frankly apocalyptic. The world the protagonist knew has reached a natural end; the television she turns to to fill the companionship void offers only a frightening portal into the new world she fears might be emerging in its place. The specific mention of it being the last program in the present series indicates that renewal is a possibility, but by no means a given, underlying the protagonist's uncertainty as she awaits confirmation that her bond with her daughter can be re-established and endure. The uneasy in-between state in which she's currently mired is amplified by the ad's somewhat exaggerated visual choices, imbuing it with an unsubtly that seems as cartoonish, in its way, as the one inhabited by the claymation tortoise athlete. In particular, there's the manner in which that framed photograph of Sam looms prominently over her mother's shoulder, as if to say, "In case you don't get it, she's feeling her daughter's absence." And there in between lurks the telephone, that vessel of communication that cold restore the ostensibly ruptured connection.
In truth, the creature that perplexes me most within the Sam spot is not Frank, but the clownfish seen swimming about above the BT logo at the end. It strikes me as significant that this final arrangement always showed the two conversing parties in boxes against a dark abyss, with the BT logo as the all-important connective tissue in between. Above it, some seemingly incidental detail from earlier within the ad was privileged with that same connective status, indicating that it was to be seen as somehow symbolic of the relationship being fortified and upheld by BT. This is the angle from which I really want to delve into this series - to assess them not merely on the strength of their paranoid fantasies, but on how much sense we can discern from their symbolism. In this case, the most prevalent symbol is Nemo there. Not only are fish seen in the aquarium the protagonist's husband is tending to as the ad opens (it was a common practice for each individual ad in this campaign to open with some close-up of an object tangential to the featured narrative), but the protagonist herself has them on her sweater. I can't quite make out the full design, but it looks to me like a school of fish swimming around...hmm, is that a jar of peanut butter? If so, then that's strange. From a narrative perspective, the husband's preoccupation with the aquarium accounts for why he's unreceptive to his wife's present loneliness, but since fish images are all over the place, obviously they stand for a little more. A bird motif would have made immediate sense, but perhaps been a little too on the nose, even for a set-up as unsubtly laid out as this. Fish, though? They require more work.
Two suggestions spring to mind. First, it might be a reference to the idiom about being a small fish in a big pond, with the protagonist projecting her own insecurities about the wider world onto Sam as she takes her first step into it. Both characters have their obvious vulnerabilities in the wake of change, and both are ultimately going to cope with these. Second is that it's not the fish per se that's of significance but the water. We refer now to the protagonist's second paranoid fantasy, which involves Sam making a literal splash with a bunch of rugby players in a swimming pool. As a kid, while the kitchen fantasy was always clear to me, I never had a clue what was supposed to be so upsetting about this one. Now it's obvious, water being the cliched metaphor for sex it is, that this is a family-friendly means of conveying the protagonist's anxieties about Sam getting it on with the entire student rugby team. In a broader sense, water indicates intimacy, both physical and emotional, and the scope of prospective human connections Sam has just opened up to, which the protagonist fears but which in actuality is something to be celebrated. At the end when Sam rings home to assure her mother that all is right in the world, we see how the affinity between Sam and her mother is still going strong, even as potential new avenues are suggesting themselves. She tells her mother that the food is great (we never had any paranoid fantasies about the food Sam was eating, but apparently it's the first thing she's asked about), that the university has central heating and that she doesn't much care for rugby...only for that last remark to catch the bemused eye of a rugby player standing adjacent to the communal telephone, and Sam to respond with a giddy flicker of the eyebrows that spells trouble on the horizon. It isn't presented as anything to be afraid of, though. Far from portending the incoming apocalypse, the end of a series merely signals that something else will be arriving to fill the vacant timeslot. Will it be a worthy follow-up? All you can do is stay tuned.
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