Paranoia over light-fingered pub patrons was the basis for this early 1980s campaign for Gold Label brand lager, which proposed several creative means of combatting the perceived problem with help from various formidable members of the animal kingdom. Each installment opened with a hand extending toward a (seemingly) unguarded pint of the coveted liquid, prompting the indignant cry of "Oi! You're nicking my beer!", and triggering some kind of mechanism in which a dormant beast is awakened and, as implied by the campaign tagline ("A man and his Gold Label lager are seldom parted"), prompted to retrieve the stolen beer, and maybe a limb in the process. Being miniature man vs nature narratives, they did the routine thing and had the wrathful critter's entrance be accompanied by John Williams' theme from the 1975 film Jaws - even a slim seven years removed from the Spielberg shark film, I suspect this was already starting to feel like a hackneyed device, although it suits the tongue-in-cheek tone of the campaign, which struck a deft balance between skin-crawling tension and knowing absurdity. They were playful exercises in drawn-out suspense, milking each bizarre set-up for all its gleeful worth and leaving the actual moment of reckoning to our imaginations; the ads understood that the real joy came from the countdown to carnage, and in watching that omnipresent sense of menace assume the form of something tangible and deadly. The subtext was, of course, that the nightmares of nature of display were all fiendish metaphors for the Gold Label drinker's own bestial urges to protect the contents of his pint glass. The lager was so enticing that wayward hands would brazenly scavenge whatever morsels were up for grabs, forcing the rightful owner to unleash their grisliest tactics in order to stay on top. It's a jungle out there, with the Gold Label patron emerging as the meanest, most ferocious beast of them all, because the stakes for them were always higher.
The campaign consisted of four ads in total:
- Alfred Hitchcock Presents: This one is very consciously looking to evoke Alfred Hitchcock's seminal natural horror The Birds (1963). Stealing the booze causes a caged mynah bird to sound an alarm call, summoning a murder of voracious crows that bore their way through a wooden door with the presumed intention of pecking out an eyeball or two within. As a set-piece, it's by far the most intricate of the series, and also the most unrelentingly spooky, since the implication is that by fucking with a man's beer, you've fucked with a force of nature, as opposed to a single specimen deployed to guard it. This uncanny alliance doesn't merely extend to the avians either. The faux horror atmosphere is lovingly set in motion with the swaying of those slender tree branches in the backdrop, signifying the brewing disturbance before the thief's hand is even in sight (eerily, the shape of the branches appears to mirror the hand's grasping movements), and providing a ready platform on which the rabble of ill-disposed bird silhouettes can duly materialise. It is as if the entirety of the natural world is in on the vigilance, the violation of Gold Label ownership an act so intrinsically egregious that it will bring the combined retribution of every living thing upon your head.
- Trapdoor Spider: Technically I think the featured arachnid is a tarantula and not a trapdoor spider, but the visual pun is nevertheless implicit. Lifting the glass causes a hidden door to spring open, from which our eight-legged menace is unleashed. From a narrative standpoint I'd consider this to be the least interesting of the bunch - there's not a whole lot going on besides a big hairy spider inching with painstaking stealth across the screen - though I enjoy the unsettling way in which the spider's legs resemble grasping fingers, again recalling the beer thief's own tricky digits and manifesting as a malevolent counterforce to their rapaciousness.
- Twisted Tale: A simple, somewhat crude but ultimately effective visual gimmick in which the beer is lifted from a silhouetted enclosure that is subsequently shown to be the coils of a hulking great python. Against all odds, this emerges as my personal favourite of the four - narratively, it's no less straightforward than that aforementioned spider ad, but the punch it packs feels a whole lot juicier. The way the python's silhouetted body initially stirs and wavers is, admittedly, not very snake-like, making it plain that the lower coil is really a prop; nonetheless, the payoff that the scenery is alive and poised to transform into a threat is all shades of delectable eerie. As a pint defender, we could knock points off the snake for the slowness of its technique - all of these animals take their sweet time in going for the kill (as is the campaign's big appeal), but in the snake's case it allowed the thief to lower his hand into its coils without chomping him then and there, which arguably comes off as a bit slack. Still, we wouldn't doubt from the ultra-intent pose it strikes at the end that it means business.
- Here Kitty: The most purely humorous of the lot. The glass is attached to a blue cord that slowly tightens when pulled; we follow the path of this cord, watching it twist around various items, before discovering that the other end is hooked up to the neck of a tiger. The sequence fades out just as the cat is roused into action with a gleaming flash of its razor-sharp fangs. Implied bloodshed that could have been avoided had the thief been perceptive enough to remove that entirely conspicuous blue cord. All four ads are self-evidently silly, but this one is revelling the most in the ludicrousness of its premise, and you have to love that about it.
Each ad ends with a teasing tailpiece, where the beer thief's hand is again seen reaching for the pint, but on this occasion a simple "Oi!" from its unseen owner is enough to dissuade them from the theft (except for the bird ad, where they're also deterred by the added detail of a crow perched beside the beer pint taking a swipe at them) and a second confrontation is swiftly averted. Ideally, messing with a pint of Gold Label is not a mistake you should make twice in a row. That's just good survival sense.
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