"Bush Telegraph" from 1996 might be one of the best and most hard-hitting films ever produced by the Transport Accident Commission, but anyone venturing into it should know that it commits an egregious and practically unheard-of sin in the sphere of road safety campaigning - it incorporates an implied dog death. Seriously, how many times can we say we've seen that happen? When it comes to public information films and public service announcements, the ones that entail animal misfortune tend to be those PIFs and PSAs pertaining specifically to animal issues. Warnings on the perils of drink driving and speeding seldom cast our four-legged friends as incidental victims, as it would likely be seen as a step too far. Under the right circumstances, you might be able to justify killing a child for emotive impact, but it's hard to imagine the death of a dog being perceived as anything other than totally gratuitous. When dogs do show up in road safety films, they tend to play one of two roles. Often they're the catalysts for disaster, the element of unpredictability that throws everything else off - a loose dog might run in front of a speeding vehicle, causing the driver to swerve and lose control, or a child might run into the road in pursuit of their dog. Or else they're representative of the bereaved. A dog sniffing forlornly at the body of its lifeless master can make an effective shorthand for our unhappy aftermath, and is usually a less heavy-handed visual than a crying child. The dog in "Bush Telegraph" is one of the rare canine participants who's forced to share in the fate of its human owners, who think unfortunately little about getting behind the wheel after one too many. Is it gratuitous? In a narrative sense, yes. The dog doesn't add anything in terms of plot progression and could very easily have been jettisoned. What the dog does allow for is a small touch of atmospheric uncanniness; if you listen closely, just moments before things take their inevitable turn for the catastrophic, you can hear it barking. It knew what was going to happen and was trying to warn them, but to no avail. A good boy let down by bloody idiot owners.
The dog isn't the only passenger to tragically perish along with the driver. He also takes his teenaged son with him, a development that's less gratuitous and more the logical outcome of his having inducted his son into a culture with an explicitly lax attitude toward drink driving. "Bush Telegraph" pivots on a similar theme to that of TAC's earlier "Tracy", and the UK PIF "Mates", in underscoring the damning contradictions of a professed friendship where one party so wilfully endangers the other with their reckless driving, but broadens it to be not merely a problem stemming from the choices of the individual, but the mindset of the wider community. Here, there are multiple failures of responsibility. The title of the short alludes to the way in which this particular group of associates communicates and looks out for one another, calling to advise when there are "booze buses" (sobriety checkpoints) in the vicinity, but actively encouraging each other to crack open that extra can of beer before hitting the road. The camaraderie that offers ostensible protection against meddling authorities is shown to be deeply treacherous, its solidarity extending in the wrong direction. "Bush" goes a step further than either "Tracy" or "Mates", so that the irresponsible friend doesn't even have to get behind the wheel with his chum to seal his fate - the fallacious assertion that he's been drink driving for years and nothing's ever happened to him, therefore it's no big deal, is more than enough. Meanwhile, the doomed driver's teenaged son is not yet old enough to participate in the drinking itself, but he is already complicit in the surrounding culture. He's the one who receives the call from Billy warning them of the booze bus on patrol and helps in passing the message on to his father. Later, as he and his father pass the checkpoint and observe that Billy, of all people, looks to have been pulled over, they share a hearty giggle at the irony. Although the son conveys some misgivings about his father's condition as they set out on their drive, he's absorbed the group's core value that the humiliation and inconvenience of getting caught out by a checkpoint is your biggest concerns when it comes to drink driving, and that so long as you can bypass those pesky booze buses then it's all hunky-dory. So when his father's alcohol-impaired judgement causes them to advance into the path of a hulking great tanker and get jointly flattened (along with that poor dog who saw it coming), it's the terrible culmination of the multiple ways in which he's failed in his duties as a parent - firstly by putting his son in the immediate danger of being the passenger of a drink driver, and secondly by instilling in him the sense of communal negligence that's led him so lethally astray. The shared demise of father and son illustrates how the fate of one generation is bound to the choices of the generation before it, with both being steered in the same perilous direction.
The crash in "Bush Telegraph" is one of TAC's most impressive, right up there with that seen at the end of "Nightshift" - it's abrupt, it's brutal and it makes it painfully clear, without showing any actual gore, that the occupants of the crumpled vehicle would in all likelihood not have survived. The short is, in general, a textbook example of TAC's three-act formula at work - we have the nondescript build-up representing the calm before the storm, the eye-popping incident that causes everything to change, and finally the bleak aftermath in which those still standing struggle to come to terms with this cruel twist of fate. In this case, the lull immediately preceding the collision seems almost eerily tranquil, a vacant space filled by only the muted sounds of the dog barking and a couple of kids crossing with a bike in the foreground. It's an uncomfortable stillness, accentuating our anticipation of the impending calamity. We (like that unfortunate dog) know exactly what kind of situation we're headed for - that much has been thoroughly telegraphed by the preceding dialogue - but the questions of when, where and what form that destruction will take hang queasily in the balance. Even with our level of foresight, odds are that we (like the driver) didn't see that tanker coming until it was directly upon them.
The post-accident denouements are where TAC campaigns tend to be most prone to excesses, although "Bush Telegraph" is one of their more restrained specimens, and very much to its credit. There are even traces of the sardonicism that characterised some of the later Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives installments, notably "Pudding" and "In The Summertime", in how the culture of heedless consumption depicted is ironically juxtaposed with its devastating consequences. The short ends with a return to the two friends who'd sent the driver on his way with that fateful one for the road, and a second telephone call, this one carrying news of a very different nature. The friend who answers initially responds with disbelief, before dissolving into a sober silence. Over his shoulder we see the alcoholic indulgence continue, with the other friend casually swigging at his own can, finally lowering it when it becomes apparent that something is desperately wrong. A woman (possibly the wife of one of the two, or else a client they're doing building work for) wanders into view with a fresh supply of beer, and delivers the ad punchline, buoyantly advising them to "Drink up!", in a bitterly inadvertent toast to the ruination their overconsumption has brought. Then she too catches wind of the fact that this isn't the time, and the entire scene sinks into sombreness, the carousing atmosphere abruptly voided. The call's recipient turns to face them, and the ad fades to black before he's able to deliver the harrowing message. We sense that the darkness might have set in on their social circle for quite some time.
What's equally haunting about that closing sequence is the way the recipient initially ingests the news, insisting that, "He was a just here a few s...", as if trying to negotiate with some higher power as to why his friend couldn't possibly have departed so suddenly. Alas, there is no quibbling with it. As TAC are so adept at illustrating, the barrier between being and non-being really is that flimsy.
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