The Man Who Blew Away (One Foot In The Grave)

 Content warning: Suicide

The Christmas of 1994 was a Christmas quite unlike any other, all on account of what was happening at Victor Meldrew's house that year. 

One Foot In The Grave was then riding high among the cream of the contemporary Britcom crop. The previous year's special, "One Foot In The Algarve", had been a major ratings success, and you can bet that the BBC were eager to maintain that momentum with another festive special in 1994. Series creator and writer David Renwick didn't have time to devise a stand-alone special from scratch, but suggested that one of the scripts he'd been working on for the upcoming Series 5 could potentially be expanded to 40 minutes. The episode in question was "The Man Who Blew Away". Legions of Meldrew devotees tuned in to BBC One at 21:00 on 25th December, eager for another extended round of wacky hilarity with the irascible sixtysomething, and by 21:40 were sitting there in stunned silence, struggling to wrap their heads around what they had seen and keep a day's worth of Yuletide dining down. The episode garnered immediate notoriety, guaranteed to come up in conversations to the tune of "Can you believe THAT went out on Christmas Day?" for years to come.

If you are unfamiliar with this episode, then I fear that the content warning at the top of this page might have given the game away. The plot involves Victor and Margaret accommodating a house guest with suicidal tendencies, and having to talk him out of his latest attempt, which involves him climbing around naked upon their roof. Then in the epilogue they receive news that he made a subsequent attempt soon after leaving their company and on this occasion he succeeded. The episode promptly ends. Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!

In fairness, One Foot In The Grave had dabbled in some gloomy subjects in previous Christmas specials. "Who's Listening?" from 1990 contained a subplot dealing with the Yuletide struggles of a bereaved young family (albeit one that ended happily, by way of a deus ex machina). Pippa's pregnancy arc in "The Man in The Long Black Coat" from 1991 ended on a note of immense pathos, with her being injured in a bus crash and suffering a miscarriage. The thing is, neither of those specials had aired on Christmas Day itself. There was traditionally a safe enough buffer between the peak of the festive celebrations and Renwick's morbid indulgences. Even the ambitious, feature-length (and relatively breezy) "Algarve" had to make do with a Boxing Day slot. "The Man Who Blew Away" was the first One Foot In The Grave special to have the honor of going out on 25th December, and it yielded what has to be one of the show's most unapologetically downbeat endings ever (bested only by the final episode, "Things Aren't Simple Any More", which at least had mercy enough to sign off to the triumphant sounds of The Travelling Wilburys). It all makes a little more sense when you consider that it wasn't originally written to be a Christmas installment, but at the same time, there was something incredibly on brand about the series using that prime Yuletide slot to leave the nation not merely depressed, but seriously perturbed into the bargain. The ending to "The Man Who Blew Away" isn't only tragic, it's also deeply unsettling. A large part of that has to do with the song that accompanies the closing credits, "The Laughing Policeman" by Charles Penrose, a classic music hall song from 1922 (itself an adaptation of "The Laughing Song", recorded by African American singer George W. Johnson in 1890). The song had shown up at an earlier junction in the story, where it was nothing more than an insomnia-inflicting irritation to Victor and Margaret, but it acquires much darker overtones when it's repeated in the outro. Renwick remarks on the DVD commentary that he's always thought there to be something terribly "macabre" about the song - not because of the hysterical, borderline-crazed laughter that makes up the chorus, but because of the clicking noises going on in the background, which he reckons are evocative of something you'd find in the horror comedy series The League of Gentlemen. 

The irony is that I vividly remember watching the episode's festive premiere as a child and not finding the experience anywhere near as dark or disturbing as I should have done, on account of "The Laughing Policeman". I should explain that my school's Christmas show for that year had been themed around music hall, and "The Laughing Policeman" was one of the songs we'd performed. A really fun song to perform it was too. So when it cropped up in this episode, I was positively buzzing. It was something that I knew, and the excitement of that performance was still very fresh on my mind, so naturally I gravitated straight to it. When we heard the news at the end that Victor and Margaret's friend had died, I did think it was a weirdly sad way to cap off the episode. But then "The Laughing Policeman" started up again in the credits and it cheered me right up. It was only when I revisited the episode in the early 00s that it hit me what the real intention had been. You weren't supposed to laugh at the Laughing Policeman. The Laughing Policeman laughs at you. "The Man Who Blew Away" feels, more savagely than any other edition of One Foot In The Grave, like a story where the last laugh is squarely on the viewer. Which makes it all the more ballsy that it went out on Christmas Day. 

The circumstances of the episode's airing is a detail that will forever colour it, giving it a greater infamy than it would have acquired had it aired according to Renwick's original plans. But looking at "The Man Who Blew Away" thirty-one years after the fact, it holds up as more than just a twisted joke that rattled some 15 million people on the Christmas of 1994. The thing that always made it worthy of that coveted Xmas slot is that it stands out as one of the very strongest installments of One Foot In The Grave. A lot of that is down to the doomed character, Mr Foskett, and how wonderfully portrayed he is by Brian Murphy. He is one of the most hauntingly complicated figures ever to grace the series, at once ridiculous and tragic. Creating a character who is both soul-crushingly tedious and uproariously hilarious can be a challenge enough in itself, but Murphy pulls it off effortlessly, all while imbuing Foskett with a multi-layered pathos that has us running the whole gamut of emotions. On the one hand, we empathise fully with the Meldrews in finding the man unbearable and in wanting to give him as wide a berth as possible. On the surface his behaviour is beyond infuriating. He shows up on their doorstep and expects to be immediately accommodated, then talks at mind-numbing length about every nondescript detail in his own life, never letting anybody else get a word in edgeways. At the same time, we become increasingly aware that Foskett's rabid neediness stems from forlorn desperation; that this is a deeply damaged man teetering on the edge, and his various imposing tendencies amount to cries for help that the Meldrews are ill-equipped to provide. We become uneasy about where this story might be headed, and rightly so. We're still able to get in plenty of laughs at Foskett's expense, but this is all turned back on us in the final scene, when we are implicated, along with the Meldrews, as part of the wider unsympathetic milieu that consigned this poor fellow to oblivion. 

Mr Foskett is the narrative centrepiece of "The Man Who Blew Away", but the funny thing is that he doesn't appear until 22 minutes in. That's over midway through the episode. What's more, his arrival comes completely out of the blue, making it every bit as jarring for the viewer as for the Meldrews. There hadn't been so much as a throwaway mention of the character in any of the preceding scenes, so when Victor receives a telephone call and hears Foskett on the other end, we have no context for who he even is, other than that the mere sound of his voice is enough to make Victor jolt upwards in terror. His being there represents an intrusion from a terrible chapter in the Meldrews' past they had considered long buried; it's revealed to be such an absurdly minor chapter at that, but one that's left deep psychological scars on them both. Foskett was a fellow guest at a boarding house the Meldrews had stayed at during a trip to Weston-super-Mare seventeen years ago, and the bulk of their interactions came from him having to walk through their bedroom every night to access the bathroom. Obviously he talked their ears off then, and demanded their contact details so that they could keep in touch when their holidays were over. The Meldrews gave him a false address and hoped that would be the end of it. Foskett has tracked them down anyway. He might not manage this until the latter end of the story, but what's clever about that first half is that you can look back and identity how it's been building toward his appearance through its artful use of foreshadowing. The opening sequence has Margaret returning home to find that Victor has neglected to bring in the washing, and their clothes have blown all over the snow-covered garden. Among them are a pair of socks frozen into the shape of a boomerang. "I'd throw these socks away," Margaret grumbles, "Except they'd probably keep coming back."

On the commentary, Renwick states that one of the modifications made to his original script was the inclusion of snow in the outdoor scenes, to give the impression of a festive setting. Even so, "The Man Who Blew Away" does not actually appear to take place at Christmastime (which was not at all unfitting, since "Who's Listening?" was the only OFITG Christmas special that did - the specials were more an opportunity to tell stories on a grander scale than your regular episode). The only direct artifacts of the festive season are the box of Christmas crackers and reels of wrapping paper that feature in an early sequence, recent purchases from the Happy Shopper (a defunct convenience store brand that has since been supplanted by Premier), suggesting that the events of the special fall somewhere close to Christmas, although there is ambiguity regarding the precise proximity. Does it take place in the early winter, before the decorations have gone up, or in the aftermath, with Margaret having purchased marked-down crackers and paper in the January sales, so as to have cheap supplies ready for the following Christmas? I lean toward the latter, largely on account of the box of Milk Tray chocolates Victor is seen working through at the start (and in such a classy fashion, by skewering them with cocktail stick and dunking them in his tea), as it seems like the kind of seasonal gift that you might still have left over in the early days of January. Such details feel like arbitrary concessions thrown in to make an otherwise disconnected story a little more superficially Christmassy, although a great gag is mined from the presence of the crackers, when Victor opens one to find that someone has slipped an insulting joke inside - "What's the difference between Victor Meldrew and a chef who keeps dropping his pancakes? Answer: They're both useless tossers!" (Adding insult to injury is that the pranksters have failed to construct the joke correctly; as Victor points out, it should be "Why is Victor Meldrew like a chef who keeps dropping his pancakes?").

Renwick's other major modification was to pad out the initial sequence in the Meldrews' living room, and if "The Man Who Blew Away" has any real shortcoming, it's that the story takes a long time to get going. Even so, the protracted opening doesn't feel like time wasted, with the slowburn enabling the more outlandish material to land with greater impact - notably, when Victor casually approaches a drawer and pulls out an arm, a weird and macabre gag that falls within a sequence of lower-key moments and is not immediately explained. As it turns out, Victor has lately been the target of a string of bizarre pranks, with false limbs being left around his bin and garage to give the appearance of bodies stuffed within. Not only does the resolution of this narrative strand dovetail with Foskett's arrival, the repeated emphasis on disconnected body parts neatly foreshadows the grotesque visual on which the episode will end.

In spite of the misadventures with the clothes, the limbs and the crackers, the Meldrews are in an overall buoyant mood, because their car has been stolen. This is a very good thing, because if you watched "The Beast In The Cage", you might recall how much Victor struggled with their dsyfunctional Honda. As we join the Meldrews, the car has been gone for three months and they are planning which new vehicle to buy with the anticipated insurance settlement. That is, until their good cheer is interrupted by a telephone call, bringing the bad news that their Honda has been found, in one piece...and in Finland. This prompts a truly uproarious reaction from Victor: "FINLAND??? That car couldn't get to FINCHLEY!!!" The events of the Honda narrative, which occupies the first half of the episode, have no direction connection to anything that later goes on with Foskett, but we can see how the seeds are being sown for his eventual appearance. Coupled with Margaret's observation about the frozen socks, a running theme is being established regarding unrelenting nuisances finding their way back to Meldrews as they think they are rid of them. Meanwhile, there is a subplot unfolding next door with Patrick and Pippa, as the former prepares for an engagement with a couple of prospective business contractors. It's a relatively small part of the story, but it climaxes with the episode's most hysterical visual gag, which occurs once Foskett has made it out onto the Meldrews' roof, and which I wouldn't dare spoil here.

Between the unwelcome intrusions of the Honda and Foskett, there is a further bugbear to contend with in the form of Mr and Mrs Aylesbury, an unseen couple who live across the street from the Meldrews, and who apparently have a penchant for throwing raucous parties into the early hours. It's here that "The Laughing Policeman" first comes into play - right after a deceptive silence in which the Meldrews think the party has died down and the ordeal is finally over. The really nerve-grinding part is during the chorus, when the party guests all join in with the deranged laughing (before, as per Victor's account, spilling out onto the front lawn to do Chuck Berry duck walks). For as hilarious as this entire sequence is, I will say that it is the part of the episode that requires the greatest suspension of disbelief (yes, even more so than the stolen Honda showing up in Finland), on account of Victor's observation about no one else on the street is remotely bothered besides themselves. That much is a bit hard to swallow. I could see the Swaineys maybe shrugging this off, but there's no way that Patrick and Pippa wouldn't be just as wound up and inconvenienced as Victor and Margaret, particularly with it coinciding with Patrick's important business preparation. You just to have buy into the premise that this is another instance of universe conspiring purely to make life harder for Victor (and by extension Margaret), and that the Trenches are somehow impervious (since they are typically only affected wherever it will make Victor look worse). In this case, the universe's malice manifests as delirious laughter, permeating the Meldrews' walls and mocking their futility in the face of such unabating chaos. The one consolation for their sleepless night is that it's followed by Sunday morning, and under normal circumstances they would have no obligation to get up early. Under normal circumstances. This is of course where Mr Foskett chooses to rear his head, the seismic disaster in relation to which all other grievances - the inescapable Honda, The Laughing Policeman - have been mere rumblings on the horizon. This is also where the episode really shifts into full gear, with every last moment hitting with utter precision. Time could so easily have diluted the impact of that one joke where Foskett is revealed to be calling on a mobile from outside the Meldrews' front door, coming as it did from an age where mobiles were less prolific and this would have been more unexpected, and yet the timing and the delivery are so perfect that it still feels every bit as fresh as it did back then.

Foskett claims that he'd happened to be in the area visiting his sister-in-law and, having looked up the Meldrews' real address in a telephone book, had decided to call in on them. During the extended, one-sided game of catch-up he has them play, he reveals that his first marriage broke down soon after that holiday in Weston-super-Mare, resulting in the loss of his job and in thirteen separate suicide attempts, but that he's since picked his life up, remarried and has two wonderful sons. Foskett's gushing about his newfound familial bliss brings its own extraneous misfortune for Victor and Margaret. When Victor opens the door, he finds Foskett accompanied by two pre-teen boys and, assuming them to be the sons in question, the Meldrews let them in and offer them breakfast, only for them to take advantage of their hospitality and eat well beyond their fill of jam tarts and roast potatoes. And then it turns out that they aren't even Foskett's sons, but local children who were responsible for the pranks with the fake limbs (and also the Christmas cracker) and were sent by their father to apologise. As the dust settles from that misunderstanding, Victor finds Foskett in the hallway, looking very pale and shaken. He'd gone to make a telephone call to his wife Loretta, who'd declined to come to the Meldrews' on account of having a migraine, only to discover that she and the boys have taken the opportunity to make a bolt for it and abandon him for good. All of his talk about having found happiness with a new family was a sham; they couldn't stand him any more than anyone else he ever encountered.

Following a further mishap, where Foskett retreats to the kitchen for a class of water but ends up collapsing onto a pile of scattered rubbish, the Meldrews allow him to clean up with a bath, but are all the while thinking of how to awkwardly get rid of him, with Margaret suggesting they ring for a taxi. It dawns on her that it maybe wasn't a good idea to let Foskett lock himself inside the bathroom and out of their sight, given his extensive history of suicidal behaviour. Victor thinks she's overreacting, until he goes outside and sees Foskett out on the roof wearing only a towel, threatening to throw himself off. He ultimately has second thoughts, but not without slipping, losing the towel and having to dangle naked from the roof gutter. This is the narrative's major set-piece, with the tension and comic absurdity exquisitely nailed by Susan Belbin's direction, so that even the admittedly rather naff-looking night sky effects don't take us out of the moment. 

In the epilogue, set a short while after the ordeal, we learn that Victor and Margaret are making a habit of leaving their Honda unsecured, in the hopes of it being stolen again, although Victor is questioning the purpose, suspecting that it would merely be returned to them before long. Foskett, on the other hand, will not be back, at least not in the flesh; the Meldrews receive a package containing an update on their old friend, and it's revealed that he made his fifteenth and final suicide attempt after leaving with the police and sadly succumbed to his injuries in hospital. Before his death, Foskett shared that there was one thing that brought him comfort in his darkest hour - his friendship with the Meldrews, the kindness they had shown him on that day, and how pleased they had evidently been to see him after all these years.

Foskett remains something of a puzzle, and we are left wondering if he was perhaps considerably less oblivious than he let on. He comes off as a man in deep denial, commenting on how strange it was that the address the Meldrews had given him turned out to be bogus but convincing himself that he'd written it down wrong. This raises the question as to what really precipitated his arrival at their door - did his family's total abandonment of him come as such a surprise to him, or was it the result of a much more prolonged marital breakdown? It dawns on us that Foskett might have deliberately sought out the Meldrews because he knew that something like this would be coming and felt the need to be with friends when the dreaded news broke. The knowledge that his first marriage had ended soon after the holiday in Weston-super-Mare underscores the likelihood that he was having marital problems back then too, and that his interactions with the Meldrews had amounted to much the same thing. On both occasions, he'd been reaching out to Victor and Margaret, and while they'd sat and endured his company through gritted teeth, all they'd privately desired was to have him out of their lives. That a couple he'd known for a brief spell seventeen years ago should be the only people he could think to turn to tells its own desolate story. The most haunting thing about Foskett? We never even learn his full name. He talks at great length about his vast collection of antique dentures and his allergy to sticky tape, yet that one all-important detail never slips through. The Meldrews were all he had left in the end, and they weren't even on first name terms with the man. He is of course the figure alluded to in the episode title - the opening sequence, in which the onscreen title was juxtaposed with a discarded newspaper page with coverage of local weddings, had foreshadowed Foskett's marital woes as the factor that would drive him over the edge, while also subtly implanting the image of him as a soul drifting feebly upon the breeze, briefly fluttering into people's lives only to be swept out again into the ether. He is a man with a knack for alienating every single person he comes into contact with, with no lasting ties or connections to keep him grounded in any particular social setting. Much like that stray newspaper page, he is discarded rubbish, professing to carry joyous news but totally unwanted and destined to shortly become nothing. It is a haunting allusion, calling to mind how little the Meldrews, or indeed we the audience really knew him, in spite of the tremendous deal he had to say about himself. To The Meldrews, he was an annoyance that came into their lives for a day, while to us he was a momentary diversion to be laughed at, but the gravitas of Margaret's final reading impresses the sobering notion that this was a life, now lost because nobody cared enough to hold onto it. He can also be likened to the scattered washing found by Margaret in the beginning, with the lack of eyes upon him (both literal and metaphorical) leading to his terminal ruin. 

Foskett's belief that he'd found camaraderie with Victor and Margaret is by far the episode's cruellest irony, but of course Renwick isn't going to bow out without inflicting one further instance of cosmic misfortune upon the Meldrews. They open up the package to find that, as Foskett's last remaining allies, he has entrusted them with his legacy in the form of his collection of antique dentures, in which Victor had politely feigned interest in an earlier scene. The final visual of those assorted cabinets of lovingly displayed pearlies creates an uneasy connection between smiling and death, for these are not merely the worldly remains of Foskett himself, but the synthetic snickers of countless owners long departed, all grinning mindlessly from beyond the grave. An underlying theme of "The Man Who Blew Away" is the idea of laughter as a reflexive coping mechanism geared toward masking grim realities and staving off the omnipresent darkness of life. The knowledge that we're all going to die and the likelihood that life is absurd are as inescapable as the Meldrews' Honda; we have to find a way of keeping the pain at bay somehow. The episode ends with Victor expressing newfound sympathy for Mr and Mrs Aylesbury, for he now understands their need to stay up laughing with Charles Penrose into the early hours, and suggests that if he and Margaret cannot follow their example, they too risk sinking into suicidal despair. The final moments, naturally, produce no laughter from either party, only an awkward silence followed by a characteristically morbid punchline, in which Victor asks Margaret where she's keeping the sleeping pills. We linger on one last shot of Foskett's collection before dissolving into the closing credits, where the familiar tortoise footage is accompanied by a reprise of "The Laughing Policeman" in lieu of the usual Eric Idle-sung theme song. Previously a manifestation of the universe's mockery of Victor and Margaret, it now becomes something altogether more sinister - our own laughter and craving for escapism has been implicated in this process of addled diversion, making these hysterical wails of irrepressible anguish an eerie caricture of our own damnation. The presence of those tortoises only adds to the final uncanniness; their significance was explained by Renwick on the commentary for "The Beast In The Cage", where he notes that they are specifically giant tortoises, which are one of the most long-lived of animal species and thus symbols of longevity. Juxtaposed with Penrose's howls, they suggest suffering of a particularly interminable variety, of having lived so long and seen so much lunacy.

Which was certainly an uncomfortable point at which to leave us in the late hours of Christmas, although it should be noted that it did little to sour the public's appetite for further seasonal installments with Victor and Margaret. A festive edition of One Foot In The Grave Christmas would remain an annual event for the duration of the mid-90s, with three further specials, "The Wisdom of The Witch", "Starbound" and "Endgame" airing in the succeeding years (of which only "Starbound" missed out on a Christmas Day slot). Renwick would never again attempt anything with quite the same bitterly downbeat flavour as "The Man Who Blew Away", however, at least not within the festive specials. The upsets of Series 6 were still to come (including an echoing of the themes of "The Man Who Blew Away" in the episode "Tales of Terror"), but those were a good few years away yet.

Finally, since I'm such a VHS nerd, I've spent an unhealthy amount of time scrutinising the Meldrews' living room cabinet to see if I can identify which tapes they have in their collection. I'm not 100% sure, but I think that's The Addams Family there on the bottom right. Neat, the Meldrews have good taste then.

When Flanders Failed (aka Those Germans Have A Word For Everything)

Last month, our coverage of "The Homer They Fall" prompted an interesting question. How can we tell when a particularly happy or sentimental Simpsons ending is being sincere, and when its tongue is firmly inside its cheek? From the start, The Simpsons had always prided itself on eschewing the sappiness and false cheer that characterised so much contemporary American television. In its earliest seasons in particular, it was grounded by a sense of emotional honesty - the messiness and imperfections of modern living were to be embraced and acknowledged, its characters were, for better or for worse, recognisably human, and its warmer moments ideally needed to be rooted in heartfelt observation and not merely trotted out to paper over the rough corners. This delicate balancing act between sensitivity and subversion might have best exemplified in the very first episode, "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", when Bart's awe at his father's seasonal altruism was deftly tempered by the backhanded observation, "You must really love us to sink so low." The nobleness of Homer's deed isn't taken away from him, and he gets his son behind him, but the script refuses to sugar-coat the desperateness of their situation, or the undisciplined dynamic between Homer and Bart. Sometimes the series will bring out the emotive guns purely to set us up for a rude awakening (see the ending of "Bart The Genius", where we see the Homer-Bart dynamic at its most wildly undisciplined). On the flip side, there are occasions when it feels as though the subversiveness is there so that the more heartfelt stuff might be allowed to sneak through with the show's edge still intact. In "The Homer They Fall", we could tell that the ending was being facetious because it went so far with the premise of Moe as a born-again humanitarian, pushing his redemption into the realm of absurdity by having him float around the world in a powered paraglider (a stolen one at that) and airlift people away from various natural disasters. But all fundamentally to compensate for the fact that the story had Moe do the right thing by putting his friend's welfare above his personal ambition. "The Homer They Fall" has one of the strangest endings of Season 8, yet the thinking behind it is simple enough to decipher. In my review, I likened the episode to Moe himself, concealing a heart of gold deep down but needing to offset any suggestion of genuine tenderness with an aggressively churlish exterior. The silliness was in servitude of the sentiment and not the other way around - Moe flew to such dizzying heights purely so that his compassionate side could stretch its legs in the first place.

A sentimental ending that's somewhat trickier to parse is that of "When Flanders Failed" of Season 3 (episode 7F23), which aired on October 3rd 1991. It is an unusually exuberant happy ending, with its final frames consisting of Todd Flanders leading the Springfieldians in a communal chanting of "Put On A Happy Face" from the musical Bye Bye Birdie. What might tip us off that this too should be seen as being in quotation marks is that it borrows so extravagantly from Frank Capra's 1946 classic, It's A Wonderful Life, right down to having Maude wear the same attire as Donna Reed's character and make the same overjoyed gesture with her face and hands. (The It's A Wonderful Life pastiche is, incidentally, the sole reason why I'm classifying this as an unofficial Christmas installment and reviewing it in December - if you wanted a holiday Simpsons marathon in the old days, you had slim pickings and often had to bend your definition of a Christmas episode. As a bonus, there is something vaguely festive about the Bowlarama jingle we overhear at one point.) It hammers so forcefully on the allusion that it doesn't quite seem genuine, but rather coding for the kind of triumphant ending of mythos, in which an entire community comes together to be the light at the end of a particularly arduous tunnel. The ending knows that it's hokey, and a pat solution to a problem that has rationally gone too far to be turned around this easily, but it sells us on it by filtering it through the iconography of something warm and familiar. It also incorporates a moment that does feel entirely authentic, when Ned tells Homer that, "Affordable tract housing made us neighbours, but you made us friends." The subversion was already planted in Ned's musing about the formal banalities that caused their lives to cross, paving way for his second observation to really hit home. That line is so affecting that it seems a shame their truce has to end as soon as the episode fades out, with Homer going back to hating Ned's guts before long - and no, I don't think you can make the argument that that is intended to be the joke here. It might hold true for the ending of "Homer Loves Flanders" of Season 5, but in the early stages of Season 3 The Simpsons hadn't been around for long enough for the tyranny of the status quo to have been quite so embedded. Back then, for all we knew this was the start of a whole new coming together between the Simpsons and the Flanders. That it wasn't is arguably the factor that exposes the ending as a total sham, but maybe that is a mite unfair. After all, there is one aspect of the episode that does stick, and that's that the Leftorium, the shop business founded by Ned to cater to left-handed clientele, ultimately succeeds, off the back of Homer's eleventh-hour goodwill, and remains Ned's occupation in subsequent continuity. The Leftorium's survival is a monument to Homer's latent humanity toward his miraculously patient neighbour, definitive proof that there is some intrinsic level on which Homer does indeed love Ned Flanders, just like everybody else.

Truth be told, "When Flanders Failed" is a rather heavy-going slice of Simpsons life. Before we get to that impossibly wonderful ending, there is an awful lot of suffering and hardship to be endured - as might be anticipated from any installment where the title evokes "In Flanders Fields", the 1915 war poem by Canadian Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. On the DVD commentary, they joke about how the episode follows a foolproof formula of being "sad, sour and bitter for everything but the last ten seconds, then it's really sweet." True, but in all fairness that's kind of what It's A Wonderful Life is like too. The bulk of that movie consists of George Bailey being handed lemon after lemon, and then being subjected to that nightmarish vision of how Bedford Falls would have fared in his absence, before the redemptive finale where his kindness to the community is ultimately repaid. That's a movie we all sit down to watch every year, at a time when we're encouraged to keep our spirits high - sometimes the darkness is necessary to make that final light shine as beautifully bright as it can. Ned is the George Bailey of this particular tale, a rare and precious flower who wants nothing more than help those around him and gets terribly mistreated in return, until the value he brings to the world is finally recognised and lauded. The ending doesn't hold back with the glad tidings because after watching someone as benevolent as Ned get beaten down for an entire episode we're frankly in need of the uplift. The Simpsonian twist in this instance is that we haven't been following events from Ned's perspective, but through the eyes of someone with a vested interest in watching him fail. Ned retains his innocence throughout and doesn't realise the full extent to which he's been mistreated - it has in fact been a much more bitter story than he'd ever imagined. If Ned is our George Bailey, then Homer is...not exactly our Potter, but he is effectively Ebenezer Scrooge (A Christmas Carol and It's A Wonderful Life are very similar stories, when you strip them right down), receiving a sobering vision of how much more terrible life could potentially get as a result of his own callous inaction.

"When Flanders Failed" plays like a direct sequel to the previous season's "Dead Putting Society", giving us another ringside view of the ongoing one-sided rivalry between Homer and Ned, and some further insight into the psychology of both characters. Their mutual humbling at the end of "Dead Putting Society" has done little to change the situation - these episodes open in an uncannily similar fashion, with Ned once again intruding on Homer's futile attempts to keep his garden in order to extend him his hospitality. Ned still wants to be the best possible neighbour to Homer and Homer's knee-jerk response is to rebuff Ned at every turn. He still can't articulate exactly what it is about Ned that gets his back up so, other than that he's jerk, which Marge knows is code for awakening Homer's green-eyed monster. Ned's life puts Homer's in the shade, and not simply because he lives with more material comforts than Homer. Ned's family respects him, and people in general respect him. And why shouldn't they? He's a helluva nice guy who can maintain composure in the face of adversity, and that's something Homer knows is well beyond him. He doesn't like Ned because he's a symbol of everything he'll never be. Paradoxically, he still depends on the generosity of his neighbour, as is established in the opening frames, where Homer is shown using a weed strimmer marked as property of Ned Flanders (paving way for a running gag whereby Homer would effectively steal household items from Ned under the guise of borrowing). And although Homer initially chooses to sit out the BBQ Ned is throwing (preferring to stay home and watch Canadian football whilst fantasising about his family returning to find him dead from emaciation, epitomising his cut-off-my-nose-to-spite-my-face approach to the rivalry), he ultimately lacks the restraint to resist the promise of free food next door. Even then, he insists on taking a plate of food and planting himself beneath a tree at the end of the garden, away from the adult conversation. He is being futilely childish, a point made extra salient in his appreciation for the school-yard taunting going on between Bart and an unnamed girl ("The "fly" was funny and the "booger" was the icing on the cake!").

Ned can afford a plethora of luxuries that Homer can't, but up until now it's all been on a pharmacist's salary, and Ned is about to jeopardise that with his upcoming career change. He states that he had a sinister motive for bringing everyone to his garden today ("sinister" being Latin for left-handed), that being to formally announce the opening of his new business, a store at the Springfield Mall dedicated to selling left-handed paraphernalia. Homer is predictably negative about the venture, which is of course because the gumption or opportunity to start his own business is yet another luxury lacking in his own life. Then when Ned, ever the magnanimous soul, invites him to pull a wishbone with him, Homer's envy takes him down a very dark train of thought. He considers wishing for Ned to die, but decides that's going a bit far and settles for wishing for his new business to fail. Then when Homer pulls the larger half of the bone he provides the perfect metaphor for his position, by laughing so uproariously at the prospect of Ned's misfortune that he ends up choking on a mouthful of hamburger meat and requires Ned to perform a Heimlich manoeuvrer. He is effectively choking on his own hatred. You can bet that this is going to hurt Homer as much as it hurts Ned.

"When Flanders Failed" is nothing if not a risky episode, as it paints Homer in a really unfavourable light for most of its running time. As they point out on the DVD commentary, Homer is supposed to be the character we root for, yet here they made him so spiteful that he wishes for his neighbour's ruin (even if he drew the line at wishing for his demise). We'd seen episodes where he was in a perpetually foul mood, like "Dead Putting Society" and "Bart's Dog Gets an F", but this is on a whole other level - writer Jon Vitti delves into a startlingly malicious side of Homer that was hitherto unknown to us. Now I have seem some defenders of the later seasons who will specifically point to this episode in querying how fans of the classic era can be so critical of Homer's portrayal during the Scully years and beyond (the so-called Jerkass Homer), when we had ample evidence of his more horrible traits right here. It is a fair question, and I do have an answer. It goes back to what I said above about the characters in the early season being recognisably human...for better or for worse. The Homer we see in "When Flanders Failed" is not Jerkass Homer. Jerkass Homer was loud, obnoxious, indulged in the most idiotic of antics and was basically celebrated for it (if not by the characters in-universe, then there seemed to be an underlying expectation that the audience would be hollering in approval). In other words, he was a total cartoon character. What the Homer of "When Flanders Failed" is doing certainly feels a mite exaggerated, but it is being used to hold a magnifier to something honest and genuine, and which is explicitly outlined by Lisa. Schadenfreude, while not a pretty emotion, is a very real part of human nature, and fair play to the Germans for coming up with a word for it where the English language failed. Sometimes, we do take satisfaction in seeing other people fall down, if it makes us feel in any way better about our own shortcomings. We might not feel proud of ourselves, but we like the reassurance that our friends, neighbours and compatriots are just as fallible as we. And that's all that Homer really wants out of the situation - the chance to feel better than Ned for once. He isn't thinking about the bigger picture. (He might have remembered from what happened to his brother Herb that financial ruin is not something to be taken lightly, but I digress.) Which leads us into the other means by which classic Homer, while not the nicest of guys, differs from his later incarnation. He was capable of recognising and acting on consequence. When he realises how badly the failure of the Leftorium has impacted Ned and the rest of the Flanders he does everything in his power to put it right. His awfulness isn't being celebrated as something hilarious but is rather used as the set-up for his eventual redemption. This is why why I consider the sentiments of the ending to be entirely sincere. Vitti's script, while acknowledging the prevalence of schadenfreude in the human psyche, goes on to make a very intelligent and thoughtful argument for why there is ultimately more value to be had in upholding the success of others than in watching them fail.

But let's talk about Ned's left-handed store for just a moment. The Leftorium was chosen as his precarious business because Simpsons writer George Meyer had known someone who'd tried to launch such a store but had failed to crack any kind of fervent left-handed market. The other writers agreed that it sounded like a niche business that could very feasibly go down like a lead balloon. But left-handedness is also a subject near and dear to The Simpsons, since creator Matt Groening is a southpaw and so are many of the staff who work on the show - on the commentary they muse that the statistic given by Ned here is one in nine, but in the Simpsons production crew it's more like one in three. Fitting, then, that left-handedness should also be well-represented within Springfield itself. Canonically Bart is left-handed and, as per this episode, so are Moe, Mr Burns, Barney, Akira and a host of other Springfieldians. (So is Scratchy, apparently - in the featured Itchy & Scratchy short, "O Solo Meow", he holds his fork in his right hand and his knife in his left.) And there is something tremendously satisfying about seeing all of these southpaws come together at the end, finding solidarity and celebration over their differences in a world designed for the convenience of the right-handed. Ned certainly picked the right (or rather the left) community in which to start this particular business.

Which begs the question - why did it have so much trouble in getting off the ground? Did Homer really put a curse on Ned by wishing on some dead bird's furcula? Perhaps. There is certainly precedent for the Simpsons invoking forces beyond their comprehension, with Bart managing to negotiate an act of divine intervention in "Bart Gets an F", but here it's handled with a greater ambiguity. I personally lean toward the view that there is nothing supernatural going on. In a way, Ned has had a curse put on him, but it's the curse of having a neighbour so wretchedly petty that he would gladly see him fail - a curse that's lifted the second Homer's outlook changes. Some would argue that, in the absence of any actual supernatural curse, Homer can't really be blamed for the Leftorium's shaky beginnings, since a lot of its problems rest on matters that aren't down to him. And true, Homer clearly isn't Ned's only bugbear. It does seem that at least part of the Leftorium's teething troubles are rooted in a lack of publicity, given how much of a demand there blatantly is for what Ned is selling around Springfield. The issue is that people just don't know about the store, and maybe there is more that Ned could have done to get the word out. We also have to factor in that Ned is certainly not the most cut throat of businessmen. He refuses to accept payment for a breakage when offered to him, and his generous nature is quickly taken advantage of by mall patrons, who treat him as an easy route to get their parking validated and then don't buy anything from his store. But to get too bogged down in the particulars of how Ned hasn't made it easy for himself would be to miss the point. The point is that Homer sees that Ned is struggling and not only revels in it, he repeatedly passes up opportunities to help him out. He sees Moe in need of a left-handed corkscrew and deliberately doesn't tell him (which, arguably, doesn't make him much of a friend to Moe either). He sees Burns paraphrasing Shakespeare's take on Richard III ("My kingdom for a left-handed can-opener!") in his futile effort to feed the fluffy white cat on his lap (a possible Blofeld reference?), and likewise holds his tongue. His insensitivity peaks when he finds Ned selling a concerning number of household items on his front lawn and exploits Ned's evident desperation to acquire the lot for a piddling $75 - it has, after all, long been his dream to own all the material luxuries that Ned does, and now he gets to enjoy the privilege of being the better-off neighbour. The reality of the situation starts to sink in when a man from a debt collection agency shows up at his door, looking to speak to Ned about unpaid bills. The debt collector is also left-handed, and struggling with right-handed ledgers; Homer begins to tell him about the Leftorium, but gets cut off. His conscience having finally kicked in, Homer attempts to return Ned's items, only to discover that the Flanders have now lost their home and are reduced to sleeping in their car. The following morning they will be leaving Springfield and heading for Capital City to stay with Ned's sister. (Did Ned ever bring up his sister who lives in the city again? Flashbacks in subsequent episodes don't seem to point to him having siblings. I suppose it's possible that it could be another half-sibling situation like Herb, with one of his beatnik parents having another child from a different relationship.)

Seeing this sorry chain of events play out from Homer's perspective rather than Ned's means that up until now we've only ever seen what's been evident from the surface, with Ned striving to maintain a smiling facade and the cracks becoming ever more conspicuous. Just like "Dead Putting Society" before it, "When Flanders Failed" tests the limits of Ned's perpetually sunny exterior, examining just how much of an increasingly trying situation he can bear before he's pushed to his breaking point. Not to the extreme extent suggested by "Hurricane Neddy" of Season 8, which proposed (somewhat unconvincingly) that Ned was totally incapable of expressing anger because he'd been conditioned not to as a child. These are more relatable scenarios, with Ned feeling obliged to keep his more negative emotions bottled up out of consideration for others, but revealing in the end that he is only human. "Dead Putting Society" dealt with his latent irritation with Homer, his attempts to always turn the other cheek, and the extent to which Homer's constant baiting could potentially corrupt his gentle intentions. "When Flanders Failed" looks at how he tries to soldier on in the face of despair. When Homer finds the Flanders locked out of their house, it becomes heartbreakingly apparent that Ned has not only had to remain upbeat when out in public, but also behind the scenes, to disguise the bleakness of the situation for his family's sake. He's managed to sell Rod and Todd on the premise of their homelessness being a grand adventure, with them getting to camp out overnight in their car before experiencing life in the big city. He then goes off to talk to Homer, leaving Maude, Rod and Todd to partake in a preliminary rendition of "Put On A Happy Face". The lyrics of the song epitomise the approach Ned has attempted to apply throughout his ordeal, but they are sentiments that, once he is far enough away from his family, he admits to Homer he doesn't actually share. He bears his despondent soul for the first time, calling his family "poor fools" for not seeing how badly he has let them down by gambling their future and financial security on a silly dream. He recalls Homer's negativity about the Leftorium at the BBQ, which he interprets as Homer being a good friend in trying to discourage him from making such a risky move. Of course, that's so far from the truth that Homer finds himself pushed to his own breaking point (the heaviness of the moment is tempered, just slightly, with a sardonic visual gag, wherein Homer is seen wiping his teary eye with a monogrammed handkerchief he clearly bled out of Ned in his emergency sale). Having savoured an abundance of schadenfreude, and the change it's provided from his usual diet of sour grapes, he is finally discovering that all that shameful joy can leave you with an incredibly bitter aftertaste. His resentment of Ned was always rooted in his assumption that Ned's successes on a personal and financial level were a reflection of his own perceived failings. But seeing Ned now at his lowest ebb, he suddenly becomes a reflection of a far more critical failure on Homer's part - his failure as a human being.

I've not yet touched on the episode's subplot, which has Bart signing up for karate lessons and then continually skipping them to play arcade games. It features a welcome return from Akira, the Japanese waiter from "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish" (albeit no longer voiced by George Takei, but by series regular Hank Azaria doing his best Takei impression). Otherwise, my favourite thing about it is the slick bit of fourth wall-breaking it works in, with Marge indirectly berating the show's viewership. ("As we speak, millions of children are staring at the TV, instead of getting some much-needed exercise. Those children's parents should be ashamed!") As subplots go, it's a fairly arbitrary one, its main purpose being to get Homer into the mall so that he can regularly keep tabs on Ned and the Leftorium, and to give the kids something to do amid this tale of adult pettiness. Bart is initially thrilled by the prospect of learning karate, if it means getting to do cool stunts like breaking blocks of ice with his head, but is disappointed when he realises that Akira's lessons consist more of philosophical study ("We learn karate so we need never use it."). He figures that his time would be better put to use by playing Touch of Death, but has to keep up the pretence of learning karate, which eventually brings him into conflict with Lisa. Stories that pit Bart and Lisa against each other can sometimes be a tough pill to swallow, since ordinarily the two have such a loving and supportive sibling relationship, and definitely work better as a team than at odds. There is, though, a pleasing realism to their dynamic here, with both parties acting like children. Usually, Lisa can tell when Bart is lying (and when he is telling the truth), but here she seems to freaked out on a visceral level by his claims of having mastered a move called "The Touch of Death" that she doesn't want to call his bluff. Thus, Bart gets to intimidate Lisa into doing everything he asks for a brief while, until a fateful incident occurs on the schoolyard, when Jimbo, Dolph and Kearney steal Lisa's saxophone and she calls on Bart to use his newly-honed karate skills to get it back. Of course, Bart can't actually use karate and the bullies mop the floor with him, although in the process they lose interest in Lisa's saxophone, so she gets it back anyway. She concludes that it is indeed possible for two wrongs to make a right. Ah well, at least we got a fleeting glimpse of that typically immaculate Bart-Lisa bond, when he sees her crying and wanders over to ask her what's wrong. But mainly, the Bart story is where the episode's meaner impulses eventually go to get vented, paving way for the A-story to wrap up more clemently. There does seem to be a thematic parallel between Bart's childish abuse of his (feigned) power and Homer's gross immaturity regarding Ned's predicament, something that becomes more pronounced when Bart is implicated as Homer's accomplice in his sinful acquisition of the Flanders' furniture. We've the sense that Homer is inducting Bart into his exploitative mindset -  Lisa chides Bart for doing nothing to stop this and calls him a "scavenger of human misery", a term that would aptly describe Homer for much of this story.

Fortunately, there is still hope where Homer is concerned. He establishes that Ned hasn't yet relinquished the Leftorium and implores him to remain in Springfield and reopen it for one more day. He then goes and calls absolutely everyone he knows to get the word out about Ned's store. When Ned arrives the following morning, expecting another day of hardship, he finds that every southpaw in town has shown up and that suddenly the Leftorium is the toast of the mall. The Flanders' financial troubles are swiftly rectified, enabling them to remain a fixture of the series, along with the Leftorium. Todd leads the store patrons in his second rendition of "Put On A Happy Face", the sentiments of the song now fully upheld, and the Simpsons and Flanders clans close the episode by standing side by side, in a state of ephemeral but nevertheless entirely meaningful harmony (the final chink between the glasses in Ned and Homer's respective left and right hands is a particularly lovely touch). Homer had previously regarded the Leftorium as yet another detail that elevated Ned above him, but that's no longer the case - not because Ned was brought down by the store's near-failure, but because it has become their shared success. Which takes us into the moral of the story. Our friends and neighbours become reflections of who we are, revealing all of our strengths, our weaknesses, and the differences that we've seen fit to make to their lives. Seeing them knocked down, and thus exposed as no better than us, might satisfy some base craving within our psyches, but it isn't half as fulfilling as propping them up and getting to be a part of their accomplishments. The path of solidarity is better than the lure of schadenfreude. It's a message The Simpsons delivers with a full-throated, deliberately quaint euphoria - an approach that might be a little startling for a series famed for its sharp and trendy subtlety, but maybe some messages are worth the enthusiasm.   

TACtics: Lennon's Christmas (So This Is Christmas...)

TAC's Christmas campaigning didn't yield quite the degree of instant classics as elsewhere in the year (which, to be clear, is not just my personal aversion to "The 12 Days of Christmas" speaking - this 1999 study by the Monash University Accident Research Centre found that their Crimbo selection generally left a softer impression on subjects), but I am willing to bat for "Lennon's Christmas" as an underchampioned example of their seasonal output. Haunting the Victorian airwaves throughout the Christmas of 1996, the 60 second ad was in many respects a return to roots for TAC, pivoting on a similar scenario to their 1989 premier film "Girlfriend". We find ourselves back in a hospital emergency ward, cutting between various parties in the aftermath of what looks to be multiple drink driving related-accidents, as paramedics endeavour to save mangled victims, and relatives and perpetrators alike linger in the waiting zone, anxious for an outcome. As with "Girlfriend", we get a string of queasy close-ups showing whimpering patients undergoing harrowing medical procedures, professionals looking on glumly and shattered spirits taking their vitriol out on one another. There are shades of "Beach Road", with a remorseful driver learning that their lapse in judgement has brought tragic consequences for the innocent they smashed into while their presumed partner angrily berates them ("I said I'd get a frigging taxi!"). Also reminiscent of those earlier ads is how it bucks TAC's more recent trend of showing us the accidents, preferring to centre on the eye-view of the hospital staff and how they're tasked with having to mop up (perhaps literally) the unspeakable horrors that entail in the aftermath. It is, however, quite a bit more viscerally nasty than either "Girlfriend" or "Beach Road". There are more graphic PIFs out there, but "Lennon's Christmas" incorporates a higher proportion of squalid injury detail than your typical TAC piece - among its skin-crawling showcase are a kid getting wheeled down a corridor with bleeding around his crotch, a man staggering about spluttering up internal fluid, and an ominously large puddle of blood getting wiped from a surgery floor. The emphasis is still squarely on the emotional fall-out, but there is a notable effort to make us feel physically sickened into the bargain, and a little more ill at ease with our highly pulpable forms.

The detail that most obviously differentiates it from the candidness of those earlier TAC installments, injecting the old school formula with a shot of the sardonicism evident in the same year's "Bush Telegraph", is that commentary on the dismal action is provided not by an onscreen professional but by a disembodied child's voice performing a mournful a cappella version of the 1971 holiday classic "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" by the Plastic Ono Band and the Harlem Community Choir. (So far as I can tell, the John Lennon connection is the only significance behind the ad's title; it's not that any of these characters are named Lennon or anything.) Originally written as a protest against the war in Vietnam, with its pivotal lyrics lifted directly from a billboard campaign John and Yoko had circulated a couple of years prior, the song has here been repurposed to protest the senseless carnage happening just metres from your doorstep in the name of Yuletide jollies, again evoking the responsibilities of the public in procuring peace. The lyrics that explicitly reference the war have been carefully omitted, with the focus being shifted to the opening verse in a way that brings out its accusatory undertones ("And what have you done?") and adds a bitterly ironic twist to its more optimistic sentiments ("I hope you have fun" is juxtaposed with the shot of a man vomiting). Children's voice-overs, while an effective shorthand for vulnerability and broken innocence, can be a recipe for maudlin - I have rated "Classroom" as the Drinking and Drinking Wrecks Lives PIF that most leans into mawkishness. What saves it here is the same thing that ultimately saved "Classroom", where we had that one child who spoke about the driver who'd been down the boozer with a distinct jadedness suggesting that he was no stranger to adult screw-ups. By the same token, the girl in "Lennon's Christmas" delivers her damning recital with no so much teary-eyed horror, but weary disappointment at the interminable stupidity of the adult set. Her glimpse into the bleaker underbelly of the festive hedonism does not seem to outrage and appal her so much as bring her to a place of deflated acceptance, her final "So this is Christmas" being delivered with an intonation not dissimilar to that of a child who's learned definitively that there is no Santa but had a strong inkling all along.

The ad's emotional punch rests heavily on the performance of the child, for if "Lennon's Christmas" has a shortcoming, it's that the fragmented narratives do not themselves deliver quite the same impact as the more focussed action in "Girlfriend" and "Beach Road", which detailed the outcome of a single accident with blunt and terrible consequences. Here, the narrative is less coherent, with it being difficult to keep track of which people are connected to which incident. We see enough fleeting glimpses to know that various tragedies are unfolding - the ad opens with a pregnant woman sitting alone in the waiting area, who is later seen crying, "He can't be dead!", when confronted by hospital staff, while that driver who insists that he wasn't intoxicated is informed that the passenger from the other vehicle has died - but the strategy is clearly to immerse us more in the chaos of the ongoing Christmas calamities, rather than drown us in the intensity of any particular one. Just as the full horror of one character's predicament is unfolding, we find ourselves whisked away to another tribulation in a different part of the ward, not staying with any for long enough to make much of an investment in their singular woes. Where the ad proves most effective is not in the outpouring of unbridled emotion, but in its moments of chilling silence, as it captures not simply the grief of those involved but also the overwhelming loneliness, and where the narrative details are left to fester forebodingly below the surface. There is a quiet, persisting despair in the shots of people sleeping in otherwise deserted waiting rooms, sitting beside unconscious loved ones, and in the grim formalities with which a body is finally carted away, covered up and indiscernible as an individual, as all lingering traces of their being are obliterated from the venue following an unsuccessful attempt to save their life. Perhaps the bleakest implication of all is that this is just business as usual at Christmastime, even if it doesn't get any less challenging for the medics who have to deal with it. The lyrics of Lennon's song warn us that with "Another year over, a new one's just begun." We could have put a stop to the bloodshed, but it's a cycle we've doomed ourselves to repeat.