The imminence of the Y2K engendered its share of anxieties, but what was really inescapable in those waning days of the 20th century was the overstated sense of cultural optimism. The transition from 1999 to the year 2000 wasn't just a time to raise a glass and to hang up a new calendar, but to contemplate the BOUNDLESSNESS OF HUMAN POTENTIAL. "Look how far civilisation has come and imagine what we could achieve tomorrow" was the mood of numerous contemporary campaigns. Seeing in the millennium would be a once in a lifetime event, the year 2000 the start of a bold and promising new era.
"What's It Like?", a drink driving campaign created by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) for the Christmas of 1999, was unmistakably a product of that premillennial grandiosity. On the one hand, it was designed to be a sobering counterpoint to the endless promotions urging us see in this new age in history by partying ourselves into a stupor, offering a grim reminder of what could go wrong on the very first day. It wasn't the Millennium Bug, but on a personal level its implications were every bit as apocalyptic - the possibility of causing some horrific life-changing accident as we slid back home in the early hours of January 1st. But even while imparting the usual lessons about human vulnerability, those inflated ideas about human potential had clearly gotten to DETR too, and had them as high as a kite. Watching "What's It Like?", it feels as though showing off and making some kind of artistic statement was on the agenda as much as convincing the public that a new millennium was not an invitation to let down their guard about drinking and driving. Compare it to "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives", in which the artiest piece on offer was the David Anderson-animated "Mark", a pastiche of Anderson's 1989 short "Deadsy"; there, the surreal visuals were nothing less than a ghoulishly playful means of delivering an exceptionally grim message, placing the narration halfway between a macabre campfire tale and a feverish nightmare. "What's It Like?", by contrast, has an air of thoroughgoing solemnity, its surreal visuals being expressionistic efforts to encapsulate the despair of its subjects. The results feel portentous, as if DETR's objective was to create less a series of public information films than of full-on arthouse vignettes.
Still, as the UK's last major drink driving campaign of the 1990s, a decade in which D&DWL had largely dominated, "What's It Like?" stands out as the last hurrah for a particular variety of PIF. Come the year 2000 and things were never going to be the
same. The THINK! campaign was already in motion and set
to inherit the mantle as the official face of British road safety. For
all of those expressionistic trappings, "What's It Like?" has more in
common with D&DWL, with its emphasis on
broken souls and long-term emotional consequences, and also its
willingness to incorporate flavour and creativity into the mix, ingredients that would become considerably scarcer under the THINK! regime. It reuses a familiar staple of D&DWL, the monologue, although the barebones authenticity of "Fireman's Story" was not desired here. Despite using a more artificial presentation than the Ken Stott PIF, the fiendish twist is that the testimonies in WIL might actually be genuine, or at least that's the conclusion we're being steered toward. "David", the most notable entry of the campaign thanks to its troubling mise-en-scene, included the ominous caption, "This is not an actor", in some edits, which could mean multiple things. It's a safe bet that "David" is probably not his real name, although I'm otherwise inclined to take the campaign at face value and accept this as a legitimate portrait of one man's irrepressible remorse. His performance certainly feels convincing, even if the arrangement has an obviously staged quality. Take that prison guard who's lingering in the backdrop - are they also the real deal? What are they there for, other than atmosphere?
The WIL campaign was comprised of four different segments, three of which focussed on the perspective of the perpetrator, opening with a title card posing chilling question "What's it like to kill someone?" Despite the luridness of this question, the featured individuals aren't murderers. As they point out repeatedly throughout, there was no intent, although in practice this doesn't change the fact that they were responsible for someone's death. The "David" PIF stands out since he's the only interviewee who is visibly imprisoned as a result of his actions. The other two, John and Terry, are featured in a more generic setting, the emphasis being purely on their emotional entrapment. "David" is clearly looking to put the fear of potential legal repercussions into viewers; its titular character actively alludes to it when he speaks of the impact on his family and his children's inability to comprehend the magnitude of what he's done. But the ultimate goal is to have those literal and figurative imprisonments blur into one - the symmetrical, coldly institutional backdrop has a queasy uncanniness, appearing to stretch out into infinity, echoing the subject's statements about there being no way out from his remorse. David opens his monologue with the word "Loneliness", which carries a certain irony when we consider that he is the only interviewed perpetrator who is not depicted alone. That prison guard is only metres away, yet there's an aloofness to his presence. He's an impassive bystander who exists as part of that institutional scenery, emphasising the disconnect that exists between David and the external world. Meanwhile, the camera's alternating proximity to David, which shifts from extreme close-ups to chilly remoteness, suggests an anguish active and throbbing, haunting and regarding its subject from all ranges. The air in here is of a nightmare from which you can't awaken; nothing quite seems real or solid, everything feels oppressive and threatening, the most terrible things are intangible but omnipresent.
These images of David are so striking in themselves, and the story he tells so powerful that one has to wonder if they would have sufficed on their own, without the need for all the arthouse bells and whistles. But the PIF insists on getting befuddling, punctuating the monologue with an array of abstract visuals in grey and washed-out colours. Among these disconcerting sights (in the full 79 second edit) are hands reaching from the blackness, naked bodies bending and contorting, a splash of red stuff and...uh, eels from the looks of it? The eels are the one detail I can't make sense of - I'm not sure what purpose they serve, other than providing a visual that might make a few viewers squirm. But undressed bodies are an obvious shorthand for human vulnerability and the red splashes a stand-in for blood-soaked carnage. Other images are more direct - a bend in the road with an ominous haze rising above it (the presumable spot at which the accident occurred, refashioned to look a little more like something from a horror picture), a limp hand lying in the grass. WIL follows the D&DWL model, in largely shying away from images of the crash itself; one sequence, a POV shot from a driver's seat that flips into a spinning motion (excised from the 30 second version), brings us teasingly close to the action whilst showing us very little. This, as the monologue makes evident, signifies David's unending efforts to go back and revisit the life-changing incident in his mind, attempting in vain to come to terms with it through memories that are blurred, inaccessible and confounding to his present self. The abstract imagery might seem superfluous to some tastes, and perhaps a little ostentatious, but I appreciate the spooky character they bring to the WIL series. They are attempts to represent what is unspeakable, things that would ordinarily exist only between the cracks of a more conventional monologue.
When the WIL campaign was doing the rounds in December '99, I had yet to develop my love-hate relationship with the public information film. Back then, I straight-up hated them, and quickly learned to change the channel whenever that grim title card appeared. The "David" PIF I happened to tune into right in the middle of, so by the time I'd processed what the ad was about, it was too late to back out of it. I remember thinking then that the closing title, which implored the viewers, "Please don't drink and drive", seemed oddly quaint, less the voice of authority imparting instructions on how to behave than a woeful voice pleading with us to not keeping making the same mistakes when we really should have gotten the message following years of tireless D&DWL campaigning. Despite its macabre energy, I've always felt that WIL, more so than any of the D&DWL installments, betrayed an underlying sense of weary frustration, as if disappointed by the fact that drink driving PIFs were still necessary as we entered the year 2000. In that context, all those abstract images could be perceived as laborious attempts to grab attention more than anything else. Then again, the fourth PIF in the WIL series, "Mike and Joy", opened by asking a different question, and closing with what was effectively the punchline to the entire campaign: "This millennium take a moment to think about the rest of your life". No matter how far we think we've come as a civilisation or a species, we remain as fragile as we've ever been. One thoughtless decision is all it takes to bring our time to a smothering still.