I will hand it to "Beach Road". Airing in 1990, this was one of TAC's earliest television campaigns (following the same faux documentary style as "Girlfriend" before it), but I'm not sure if they've produced another since that's quite this distressingly painful to sit through. It wouldn't be overstating to call it 60 seconds of pure protracted anguish, leading to a point of total despair. If "Girlfriend" set out to Upset, Outrage and Appal, then "Beach Road" really took it to the next level, with the mission to Depress, Sicken and Overwhelm. Like "Girlfriend" it gives us a gritty, fly on the wall perspective of the aftermath of an accident, as paramedics endeavour to revive an unresponsive child knocked down by a vehicle on what I presume to be the titular road in Melbourne. There's an outpouring of emotion from all sides, the messiness of the situation neatly encapsulated by the rapid intercutting between the various parties - the victim's mother, the driver, a woman assumed to be the partner of the driver - while the authorities attempt to get a handle on how this happened (spoiler: the driver was doing 90 km/h in a 60 zone). The narrative set-up and trajectory is a little similar to the Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives piece "Eyes", but with a rawer presentation that immerses us more aggressively in the midst of the turmoil.
As with "Girlfriend", we're guided through this grim scenario by a medical professional who is clearly no stranger to the devastation reckless driving can cause. Identified on screen as Paul Thresher, Ambulance Officer MICA, he acts as our narrator and emotional grounding, speaking with an authority that injects reason into the disarray. He clearly explains how the calamity is the logical outcome of going too fast, hitting harder and causing more damage. It's an element that later TAC installments would ditch altogether, as seen in the subsequent anti-speed piece "Tracy"; before long, we'd be on our own, without so firm and dependable a voice to help us navigate the unrelenting trauma, as TAC sought out a more immersive experience still. "Girlfriend", "Beach Road" and "Tracy" all take place in the aftermath of an accident, and were designed to give us front-row seats of the unbearable emotional fall-out that accompanies such a dire turn of events. Though we approach each situation from the perspective of an onlooker who's stumbled onto the scene after the fact, the intimacy of the shots gives us the sensation of being right there in the firing line with those directly impacted - we feel at once the urgency of the first responders, the desperation of the perpetrators, the despair of the victims' loved ones (often the perpetrators and loved ones were one and the same, although not in the case of "Beach Road"). While the emotional fall-out remained an integral component of the TAC formula going forward, later ads would shift attentions to the spectacle of the crash itself, giving us some impression of what it was like to be inside the doomed vehicle and to witness the moment that things flipped from banal to baleful. Consistently, the strategy was to capture the shocking point at which reality bit and the full magnitude of what had occurred was left to sink in. For as unrefined as the formula is in "Beach Road", it's here that you can really feel those fangs beginning to sharpen, with it going to the kind of harrowing territory that "Girlfriend" merely hinted at. Whereas "Girlfriend" (and, arguably, "Tracy") leave us with some ambiguity as to the final condition of the injured party, "Beach Road" offers no sliver of hope, and no prospect of redemption. The child is declared dead, and we end with a full-on descent into the weeping and gnashing of teeth of the mother and driver alike. One is in hysterical denial, the other more silently broken.
What "Beach Road" emphasises, more bitterly than "Girlfriend" before it, is the irrecoverableness of the matter, the precise moment its inhabitants cross over into the point of no return. The driver's attempts to deflect responsibility by insisting that the traffic around him was doing 80 km/h are juxtaposed with the paramedics' efforts to revive the boy; both prove equally futile. The tragedy of such a young life being cut so mercilessly short is matched only by the realisation that, for the mother and driver, the gruelling road is only just beginning. Compared to the ridiculous boyfriend figure in "Girlfriend", the driver here is treated as a worthier subject of empathy, with a more hauntingly subdued treatment given to his final display of remorse (though his kitschy fashion sense is admittedly a curious touch). The intercutting of his silent breakdown with the devastated outbursts of the mother is an affecting contrast, showing them as sufferers in a mutual yet wildly disparate despair. Each is left in a position of intense loneliness. The mother has had her kin cruelly taken from her. I believe the woman who challenges the driver about doing 90 to be his partner, since she's as overdressed as him and can be glimpsed standing beside him in other shots, yet she is notably absent in that final shot, offering him nothing in the way of solidarity or comfort. Paul's damning condemnation that he has to live with the guilt for the rest of his life is alone his cross to bear, even if he's not the only one having to live with the repercussions.
As the ad nears its end, Paul delivers the tagline, "Don't fool yourself, speed kills", words not half as iconic as the "bloody idiot" tagline of "Girlfriend", but as blunt and effective as they need to be, implicating the viewer as complicit in the accident for their own reluctance to acknowledge the potentially serious consequences of the action. The last, most unsettling word, however, goes to the bereaved mother, screaming "Give me back my boy!" as we fade to black. Her demand is naturally beyond anybody's power to fulfil, but the rawness and the passion of her grief cannot be denied her, forming the bottom line on the entire matter. She screams this not to the driver or to the paramedics, but simply into the void, as she's drowned along with the driver in that final sorrowful engulfment. The time when anybody could have made a difference to how the scenario turned out has passed and will not return. All that's left now is the stifling embrace of eternity.
"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 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.
In the mid-1980s, the Central Office of Information were in search of a new trusted figure to educate children on the importance of keeping their wits about them when crossing the road. They settled on SuperTed, eponymous star of a popular Welsh cartoon about a defective teddy bear who became the galaxy's saviour thanks to the interventions of a spotted extra terrestrial and a personified Mother Nature. The upshot was that Ted received his own public information film, "Super Safe With SuperTed", in which he took a break from battling power-hungry Texans and effeminate skeletons to take on something more nefarious - Earth traffic (identified by Ted as being the worst in the galaxy), which he must teach his absent-minded sidekick Spotty how to navigate, following a narrowly-averted disaster on the Planet Spot.
SuperTed started life as a series of books written by Mike Young (inspired by a bedtime story he'd devised to help his son overcome his fear of the dark), before an animated adaptation was commissioned in 1982 by budding Welsh-language public broadcast channel S4C (Warner Brothers were also apparently interested in acquiring the film rights, but Young preferred that his intellectual property remained in Welsh hands). The series was produced by the Cardiff-based Siriol Productions (founded by Young with his wife Liz) and proved such a hit in its native Wales that an English-language dub was created and aired on the BBC in 1983 to similar success. It followed the heroic exploits of a teddy bear (voiced by Geraint Jarman in the Welsh original and Derek Griffiths in the English dub) who was discarded by the human world but found valuable allies elsewhere, being granted life by way of the cosmic dust of an alien named Spotty (Martin Griffiths/John Pertwee) and special superpowers courtesy of Mother Nature (Valmai Jones/Sheila Steafel). Whenever trouble reared its head, SuperTed would activate those powers by whispering his secret magic word (which he never confided with anybody, so it can be as filthy or outlandish as your imagination wants it to be), typically to fend off his recurring nemesis, the conniving cowboy Texas Pete (Gari Williams/Victor Spinetti), and his bungling henchmen Skeleton (Emyr Young/Melvin Hayes) and Bulk (Huw Ceredig/Roy Kinnear). The premise of a crime-fighting teddy bear might have been goofy as hell, but the characters were colourful, the tone was earnest and legions of hearts had warmed to the plucky ursine as the hero the 1980s urgently needed. People so looked up to SuperTed that they manufactured a line of children's vitamin supplements in his image. A turn in a public information film was all but inevitable.
For myself, the secret ingredient to the show's success, and the element that continues to make it such an enduring classic, is the touch of melancholy that was often so palpable throughout. The opening sequence is one of those early television memories that's always haunted me - the coldness of Ted's abandonment (emphasised by the bombast of Peter Hawkins' narration), followed by the vividness of the unlikely solidarity that came with Spotty's appearance. Equally stirring was the closing theme that signed off each adventure, with its awe-struck yearning for a hero with "A scarlet suit, a flowing cape, a magic word, a super change." The music, composed by Chris Stuart and Mike Townend, was totally captivating. The English dub is the version I grew up with, so I can't attest to Jarman's characterisation in the Welsh original, but there was something so endearingly poignant about Griffiths' performance as SuperTed. He sounded honest, stout-hearted and resolute (all of the nice characteristics you would expect from a heroic teddy) but also kind of mournful. His was a voice that conveyed the sadness of the universe, as if he'd never quite gotten over the horror of being thrown away like a piece of rubbish into that old dark storeroom. That same melancholy was successfully captured in the public information film, which rounds out with SuperTed making about the glummest observation possible, particularly in light of the fact that it effectively functioned as the series finale. It wasn't the last we'd be seeing of Ted and Spotty - Hanna Barbera would revive the franchise three years later with a sequel series, The Further Adventures of SuperTed - but this is where the original Made in Wales era wrapped, and what an engagingly solemn note to conclude on.
"Super Safe With SuperTed" was initially presented as a five and a half minute short, though this included the usual opening and closing titles; the PIF itself amounted to three minutes and forty seconds. It was broadcast on BBC One on 26th March 1986, before receiving a home video release on the Children's Video Library VHS The Magic of SuperTed (and later on the 1994 Tempo release The Biggest Ever SuperTed Video). In it, SuperTed discovers that Spotty's comprehension of road safety
is not up to snuff, and with help from Spotty's sister Blotch (Wendy
Padbury), takes him to Earth (specifically to Cardiff) for a
demonstration of the proper crossing procedure. A shorter edit, clocking at a minute and twenty-two seconds, subsequently did the rounds as an ad break filler; this focussed on the later portion of the story, with Ted, Spotty and Blotch safely traversing the roads of Cardiff. Excised was the narrative build-up, in which Spotty first demonstrates his crippling lack of road sense via a computer simulation, and then nearly gets himself mowed down by an alien motorist, prompting SuperTed to activate his powers and pull off a dramatic rescue.
The short opens on the Planet Spot, where Spotty is playing a characteristically 1980s-looking video game that involves guiding a pixilated chicken across a road. Alas, Spotty has no natural flair for chicken protection, and we see him guide the sprite directly into the path of a car and to an instant Game Over. Ted helps Spotty get a better hang of the game by explaining the rules of road crossing - find a safe place to cross where you can see clearly both ways, don't stand too close to the road, look and listen carefully, then cross while it's all clear, while still remaining alert to any incoming traffic. Using these principles, Spotty is able to lead the chicken to safety and earn his first victory screen after 503 occasions of being bested by SuperTed. He is, however, unable to apply those same principles to real life, when he and Ted are out roaming the Planet Spot and notice Blotch waving to them from the other side of a road. Spotty rushes out to greet her without looking and finds a Spotty Rocket hurtling in his direction; thankfully, SuperTed is able to speak his secret magic world and save his friend in the nick of time. In spite of all his prior training with the video chicken, Spotty remains confused about road safety, and gets offended when Ted suggests he look for a zebra crossing, possessing an automatic disdain for things with stripes (is that a by-product of coming from a spot-orientated culture?). Ted hits upon the idea of taking a trip to Earth to give Spotty a full-on demonstration with that infamously awful Earth traffic; Spotty reveals himself to be just as disdainful of Earth's residents (whom he identifies as the worst in the galaxy), but he complies. With prompting from Ted and Blotch, Spotty becomes a proficient road crosser, even while inclined to make every mistake in the book (crossing out from behind a bus, standing right at the edge of the kerb, running across the road instead of walking calmly).
Although the sequence in Cardiff seems gentle and non-threatening (compared to the drama of that prior sequence on Planet Spot where Spotty nearly becomes road pizza), hawk-eyed viewers might notice that two of Ted's enemies, Texas Pete and Bulk, make stealthy cameos as motorists. There's nothing to indicate that either is up to anything malevolent, but it adds a suggestion of hidden danger, as though the potential for calamity is always there, lurking below the seemingly untroubled surface, even if it can't be immediately perceived. The real kicker, though, comes at the end, when SuperTed's kindly reassurance that, "If you remember these rules, you will be safe crossing the road anywhere in the universe", is immediately followed up with the sombre reminder that, "I can't be there to save you...especially on the planet Earth." As noted, these were Ted's parting words to his fans, as he finished up his original run, and they took the form of a haunting allusion to his own unreality. A world in which an animate teddy bear could become a superhero and save you from all potential harm made for a delightful fantasy, but a fantasy was all that it was. The viewer now had to wake up and acknowledge that they lived on Earth, where such things did not happen, but where danger and terrible outcomes were very real possibilities. Ultimately, the viewer was on their own, their survival dependent on the honing of their own wits and judgement. It adds an extra sting to Spotty's prior remark about Earth having the worst people in the galaxy, if this innately hostile world is the one we have to figure out how to live in.
Even so, there's the lingering prospect that SuperTed hasn't left us for good, and might one day return to share his wisdom with the 21st century. What with the current cultural obsession with superheroes and nostalgic reboots, there has been intermittent talk of bringing the series back for a new generation. This is something Young has been endeavouring toward since the 2010s, and every now and then we get word that progress has been made, although the end-product has yet to materialise. Young has indicated that we shouldn't expect it to return in quite the same form, and that the villains in particular would have to undergo an extensive retooling; he noted in a Radio Times interview given in 2014 that, “In SuperTed, we had a gun-slinging cowboy, a flamboyantly gay skeleton
and a fat guy who had jokes made about his weight and all these things
you just wouldn’t do today,” Okay, I get why the guns and fat jokes wouldn't be on the table nowadays, but what was wrong with the flamboyantly gay skeleton? Don't you think that Skeleton was an icon? Kudos to Young for giving us official confirmation of his sexuality, though.
Over the years the Central Office of Information (COI) enlisted numerous celebrities to dispense enlightenment to the calamity-baiting masses. Michael Palin warning us about the dangers of driving too close to other vehicles in a downpour. Ernie Wise guiding Glenda Jackson through the process of donating blood. Alvin Stardust, Joe Bugner and others delivering reproving lectures to children reckless enough to disregard the Green Cross Code. Few, though, were hotter than Basil Brush, a felt fox whose distinguishing characteristics included his Terry-Thomas-like vocals, his uproarious laughter (typically at his own jokes) and his signature cry of "Boom! Boom!" At the time Basil landed his own public information film in 1976, he was riding high as one of the elites of UK television, with his variety program, The Basil Brush Show, showing no signs of stopping after eight years. If the public was going to listen to any public figure sound off on the all-important subject of seaside safety, it was the buck-toothed vulpine with the penchant for cheesy puns. He was certainly cooler than Tufty, at any rate.
Basil Brush got his start in 1962, in a television series detailing the struggles of a down-and-out circus troupe, The Three Scampies (I approve of the title), before graduating to being a supporting act for magician David Nixon. The wisecracking fox proved so popular that in 1968 he received his own spin-off. The actor and puppeteer behind the magic was Ivan Owen, a man so
committed to preserving the illusion of Basil's reality that he fervently avoided
doing any publicity work as himself. The Basil Brush Show had a prosperous run that spanned all of the 1970s, but as the 1980s set in Basil's empire started to crumble and by the end of the decade his relevance had all but receded, giving way to fresher puppet creations like Roland Rat and Gordon the Gopher. I'll confess that he played no part in my own early childhood, with my personal introduction to the character coming via an advert for Angel Delight dessert mix that he'd appeared in in 1995. He would, however, enjoy a major comeback in the 2000s with a retooled version of The Basil Brush Show, which followed the format of a family sitcom and saw Michael Windsor taking over from Owen, who'd passed away in 2000. Throughout his career, Basil worked alongside a lengthy line-up of human second bananas, including Rodney Bewes, Billy Boyle and, in the 2000s series, Christopher Pizzey, with actor Roy North (or Mr Roy, as Basil called him) serving as his sidekick at the time of his foray into PIF territory.
The two minute short, "Basil Brush and The Airbed", sees Basil and Roy savouring a day of sun and sand when Roy proposes going for a ride out to sea in his inflatable dinghy, followed by a dip in the waters once he's gotten beyond the waves. This causes their jovial banter to shift to the serious topic of inflatables - objects of buoyant holiday fun, or treacherous deathtraps threatening to lure swimmers into a salty blue abyss? Basil gives us the lowdown, and despite a comical misunderstanding over Roy's intentions when he speaks of "blowing up" an inflatable canoe, emerges as the voice of reason. Basil might be a joker, but he's no fool when it comes to respecting the briny.
As public information films go, "Basil Brush and The Airbed" is firmly at the non-traumatising end of the scale. Basil and Roy don't get into any hazardous situations, they simply talk about the various ways in which things could go wrong, and Basil is ultimately at pains to stress that the inflatables themselves are not actually the problem, just people's usage of them and lack of consideration for the precarious nature of the waters. The terrifying scenarios related - being swept away from an inflatable dinghy you have foolishly vacated, or drifting out to sea atop an airbed because you weren't paying attention to where it was headed - are softened by the characters' arsenal of wisecracks (with Basil fiercely jousting to retain sole joking rights), and the agreeable chemistry between Basil and Roy, which has the effect of framing the discussion less as a lecture than as a spot of good-natured sparring between friends. Indeed, the most startling moment might be when Roy abruptly breaks the fourth wall, a minute and forty seconds in, to deliver one warning directly to the viewer, prompting Basil to glance at the camera more reservedly, as if reluctant to outright implicate the lesson's intended recipients.
The PIF rounds out with a suitably light-hearted moment, with Basil opting to stick to the shallower regions of a nearby paddling pool, but having trouble summoning his rubber duck Horace, who is averse to getting wet under any circumstances. We're a long way from the nightmares of "Lonely Water", even if the threat in question is much the same.
For a long stretch of the 20th Century, UK road sense was synonymous with a little red rodent with brilliant manners and an impeccable grasp of the kerb drill. 1953 saw the genesis of Tufty Fluffytail, an anthropomorphic squirrel created by Elsie Mills of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) as part of an initiative designed to instil safety awareness in the very young. By 1961, the character had grown sufficiently in stature that a Tufty Club was formed, and would be an educational powerhouse for the ensuing two decades. Tufty's adventures were detailed in a series of stories, written by Mills and illustrated by Kenneth Langstaff, each with an explicit teaching about avoiding some form of calamity. Tufty lived in a community of creatures known as the Furryfolk, and was frequently seen with his friends Bobbie Brown Rabbit, Minnie Mole, Harry Hare and Willy Weasel. Though the campaign was predominantly associated with a common concern facing wildlife and small children - how to avoid becoming road kill in a world increasingly dominated by traffic and tarmac - the Tufty tome dealt with all manner of safety considerations, to hidden hazards around the home to playing safe near water to sensible behaviour at firework displays. Attempting to steer these guileless youngsters in the right direction was an assortment of adult authority figures, including Tufty's parents, the perpetually stern Policeman Badger, schoolteacher Mrs Owl and a hedgehog crossing guard whose moniker eludes me.
I recall Tufty being a pretty ubiquitous part of my early childhood - I had multiple books, an audio cassette and I think even a Tufty board game - so I find it interesting just how few other Millennials I've encountered, even older Millennials, who seem to remember who he was. I've entertained the possibility that he might have faded a bit by the late 1980s and I had all this Tufty stuff due to coming into some 70s kid's unwanted junk through a car boot sale. And yet, as per the timeline on RoSPA's official website, Tufty was still around by the early 1990s, when he was subject to a modern redesign that presumably did not resonate well with the Nintendo generation; from there, things dropped off until 2007, when an appearance on the BBC time travel drama Life on Mars gave him momentary relevance.
Whether you regard Tufty as a beloved childhood icon or an archaic obscurity, I hope it won't go amiss if I confess my deepest darkest secret regarding the bright-eyed blighter - I actually didn't like him that much. Oh, I liked the stories and the Furryfolk in general, but there was something about the lead character that I always resented. My big lingering reservation about Tufty, as a child, was that he always did everything right. And that's terrible.
Far be it from me to question the effectiveness of the Tufty campaign. It ran for four decades, at its peak the Tufty Club boasted over two million members and 25,000 branches, and just a year after the club was launched, the director general of RoSPA, Brigadier R.F.E. Stoney, had already noted a significant reduction in deaths among children under 5. That's all very excellent. Go Tufty! For me, though, there was little appeal in a hero who was so stainless and who made so very few mistakes. I appreciate that Tufty was supposed to be a character who modelled good behaviour and whom kids could look up to, but the trouble is that he wasn't at all relatable. I remember precisely one Tufty tale, from that audio cassette, in which Tufty had his turn at being the fuck-up, and it involved him leaving toys on the stairs and causing his mother to take a tumble. That story was one of my favourites, because it was so satisfying seeing the goody two-shoes be knocked off his high horse for a change. Otherwise, you had your occasional example of Bobbie Brown Rabbit doing things wrong (often relating to his two younger sisters, Bessie and Betsie, whom he was hopeless at looking out for) but duties for modelling bad and unadvisable behaviour typically fell on Harry Hare and Willy Weasel. Harry was basically the anti-Tufty, in that he was a cocky bastard whose understanding of consequence was practically zero, while Willy was a pliable milksop who could be easily led astray with the wrong influence (ie: Harry). Neither character was malicious or actively looking to cause trouble, but they had a heck of a knack for inviting it. The species alignment is unsurprising - squirrels and rabbits are considered cute and innocuous, while hares have an Aesopian association with impulsive bravado and weasels are traditionally depicted as the little seeds of chaos of the animal kingdom (even if, in Willy's case, that chaos has no basis in any predatory instinct). If you're wondering where Minnie Mole fit into the equation, she was the token female friend whom I recall got largely sidelined. Off the top of my head I only remember one story where Minnie was the central character, which involved her getting impatient waiting for her mother to collect her from school and wandering into the street by herself.
To me, Harry was the most interesting character because he was the most fallible of the bunch. Something about his rebellious spirit, however ill-fated, evoked admiration. His naivety and his difficulty in differentiating right from wrong gave him an endearing vulnerability. He was a character the reader could learn along with, as opposed to having the superiority of an already perfect character rubbed in their faces. I found myself rooting for Harry to come through, however probable it was that he was going to come a cropper. Just as any rare instance of Tufty being humbled was received with great satisfaction, any intermittent yarn where Harry was able to demonstrate sound judgement, or at least not become the cautionary example, was something to be savoured.
With the immense popularity of Tufty tales, it was all but inevitable that animated outings would follow, and these came courtesy of John Hardwick and Bob Bura of Stop Motion, an animation team best known for the "Trumptionshire Trilogy", a series of programs comprised of Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley. Their Tufty collaborations began in 1967 with the 12-minute theatrical short The Furryfolk on Holiday, which dealt with various aspects of safety at the beach. In 1973, a series of television fillers followed, featuring narration by Bernard Cribbins. The most infamous of these among public information film connoisseurs is "Ice Cream Van", which depicts what happens when the titular vehicle stops at Tufty's street and Tufty and Willy each go to get a soft serve. Tufty does the sensible thing and asks his mother to accompany him, whereas Willy heads out without adult supervision, with disastrous results. On this occasion, Willy didn't need the peer pressure of Harry to lure him into taking risks, with the promise of ice cream providing incentive enough.
The Tufty fillers were targeted at children under 5, and
were accordingly a gentler breed of PIF, steering clear of the muted eeriness
of the "Charley Says" series or the nightmarish metaphors of "Lonely
Water". There is a warmth and geniality both to the animation and to
Cribbins' narration. "Ice Cream Van" does not, nevertheless, soft pedal
its message, emphasising the van's deceptive duality as a vendor of
exciting treats and a potential deathtrap drawing children to the
hazardous roadside. Having collected his ice cream, Willy makes the
mistake of crossing out beside the parked van, so that an incoming
vehicle does not see him until he's immediately in front of it. The
moment of impact is tastefully obscured by the van, though a dull
telltale thud is highly audible, making it obvious what kind of grisliness is playing out behind it. The good news is that Willy does not
seem too seriously injured - he's last seen sitting upright, fully
conscious - although the sight of his inert leg and dropped ice cream
make for pitiable signifiers of shattered innocence. Cribbins mournfully
observes that, "Willy has been hurt, and all because he didn't ask his
mummy to go with him to the ice cream van", before the PIF ends on a moment
of comfort, in having Tufty and Mrs Fluffytail walk out and stand
compassionately over their wounded compatriot. Significantly, they walk
together and retain their tight hold of one another's hands, a wholesome
gesture that reinforces the PIF's message whilst underscoring the sorry
absence of parental vigilance around our wayward weasel. Cribbins'
narration places the blame for the accident squarely on Willy, but maybe
the greater onus was on his parents to not allow such a young child to
wander the streets unsupervised to begin with (I'm assuming Tufty and his friends aren't meant to be significantly older than
the audience they were aimed at). One notably dated component is that Cribbins explicitly identifies it as the mother's role to look out for young children - the notion of the father having caregiving responsibilities is apparently unthinkable.
A slight quirk of these Tufty fillers is that, for those
who know the squirrel primarily as a PIF character and not from the
Mills books, it is Willy Weasel who's remembered as the neighbourhood
shit-stirrer. By comparison, Harry got off surprisingly lightly in his animated
form. He had a somewhat harder time in The Furryfolk on Holiday,
when an impromptu swimming session necessitated his being rescued by
Policeman Badger. His television presence, however, was restricted to a single
filler, where he himself didn't suffer any repercussions for his
ill-advised actions, outside of the trauma of witnessing Willy being
knocked down by a car...again. Yes, this is by far the grimmest thing
about these Tufty animations - they somehow made Willy being hit by
traffic and breaking his leg into a running theme. The first time it happens, in "Ice Cream Van", it's stark and upsetting. When it happens a second time, in "Playing Near The Road", it takes on a slightly more unintentionally comedic edge, since you rather get the impression that this whole neighbourhood might have it in for Willy (a suggestion not dispelled by Policeman Badger's total indifference to the motorist who knocked him down, or the distinctly unprofessional manner in which he hauls the injured Willy to his feet and lets him stagger back to the pavement). It casts a darker shade upon the Furryfolk - bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and suspiciously slow to brake for weasels.
Shaun and his brethren weren't the only flock to emerge from the Aardman fold and attain superstardom. At the break of the new millennium, the Bristol-based animation studio found great success on the other side of the pond with a series of ads promoting Serta-brand mattresses. The premise of the campaign, devised by advertising agency Doner, had it that Serta mattresses were so fabulously comfortable that kipping on one might earn you a visit from a very irate band of sheep who objected to your choice of pad. These were no ordinary field-dwelling ovine, but the Counting Sheep, the woolly jumpers whom, in more restless times, you might traditionally have summoned to aid you in accessing the land of nod. These sheep thrived on insomnia, and it was their mission to keep your nights from getting too cushy for their comfort. In Serta, they'd found a formidable adversary, one they feared could potentially make the practice of sheep-counting obsolete, and they weren't shy about barging into the bedrooms of former clientele to make their dissatisfaction known. An aggressive business model that seldom worked out for our flock, although hilarious antics often ensued.
How many Counting Sheep there actually were was anybody's guess - in theory, their numbers could have stretched on indefinitely, depending on the wakefulness of the client they were serving. Each sheep was distinguishable by their identification number, spray-painted onto their fleeces in the style of their barnyard counterparts, and various distinct personalities emerged across the series. 1 was naturally the leader, and the most officiously outspoken of the sheep. 13 was inevitably a magnet for physical misfortune, while 36 was a father whose offspring required orthodontic work, 8 was a ditz and 86 was the black sheep (although not literally) of the group, who in one commercial was caught partaking in an illicit relaxation session upon a Serta, and was defenestrated by 1 for his infidelity. For the campaign's initial run the sheep were brought to life with Aardman's signature stop motion, combined with footage of live action humans, although later installments switched to using computer animation - meaning that the sheep unavoidably picked up something of the uncanny valley that I find lurks in all CG Aardman productions made to replicate Nick Park's style, and which is absolutely all over the movie Flushed Away (not so much Arthur Christmas, which isn't as beholden to Park's look).
The campaign had a bit of an ongoing story for the sheep, detailing the impact the Serta scourge had on their livelihood and the various measures they took to combat it. We followed them as they attempted to find alternative forms of employment, sought legal advice from an unscrupulous lawyer (I'm not sure if this was ever followed up with any ads detailing the court case he assured them they had), traded tales of hardship with a hobo, protested outside a mattress sale and outright sabotaged a couple of others. At their most classic, though, the ads were centred around the core scenario of the sheep hanging out in people's bedrooms and berating them for wanting to cut ties. It's a charmingly absurdist means of getting across the intended message that Serta mattresses are pleasurable to sleep on, but you've got to love how counter-intuitive it is in-universe. Get a Serta and the upshot seems to be that you'll have an indefinite number of talking sheep amassing around your bed and keeping you up by belligerently challenging your consumer choices. You've effectively traded in one form of sleeplessness for another, unless you had the foresight to acquire a guard dog like an unnamed lady in one ad, or to change your locks like the Hendersons. And, even if you were resting upon a Serta, just how well were you going to sleep knowing that these vengeful sheep might be wandering in at any time and glowering all over you? Adding to the awkwardness was that the conflict was often framed as being akin to the breakdown of a sexual relationship as opposed to a professional one, with orgasm innuendo cropping up at least twice. In one commercial, a client breaks the bad news that she's been faking her sleeplessness for months in order to appease the sheep. And in the aforementioned spot where 86 is caught cheating with a Serta mattress, he brings attention to himself with his wildly ecstatic shrieks about its luxuriousness (giving the momentary impression that he's engaged in a threesome with the Kandinskys). In both cases, the Serta is the irresistible temptation that lures you into backstabbing your bedfellows.
Here's the great paradox with the Serta Counting Sheep - their business practices might be obnoxious, but they themselves end up being loveable underdogs. You admire their spunk, and their willingness to fight for their established domain. They are the downtrodden little guys daring to take a stand, and you're rooting for them to prevail against the mattress giant threatening to slap them with irrelevancy. The most satisfying campaign installments were the ones where they managed to scrape a rare victory - for example, when they get Tom banished from the Serta and onto the couch by blowing to his wife that he's been lying to her about being at work all day to cover up his clandestine golfing session. Serta might fix five of the most common sleep problems, but it won't cleanse a shady soul. That was pretty ingenious of the sheep, and I wish them nothing but luck in pursuing this particular recourse, although it introduces further unsettling implications regarding the sheep's ability to spy on us and harvest our dirtiest secrets.
It's perhaps in part because of the sheep's intrinsically sympathetic nature that more recent Serta ads have tended to downplay the antagonistic angle and instead show them cuddling up on their mattresses and tucking human occupants in. It's actually kind of surreal if you've been following the flock's history and know that their in-character inclination really should have been to turf those people out. In the end the sheep became synonymous with the brand (with Serta having established a neat sideline in sheep merchandising), so it doesn't matter how much sense it makes from a narrative standpoint, but I wonder what the explanation would be in-universe for this unlikely truce? Did the sheep and Serta finally figure out how to make their respective trades coexist? Is the implication that the sheep are actually working for Serta now (in other words, helping to feed the beast that killed them)? Or maybe the flock's suppressed love of the mattress's softness finally got the better of them. For that was the single biggest shame in the Serta Sheep's closet - they were latent Serta cheerleaders all along, as evidenced in all instances where they could be enticed into making physical contact with the mattress, and were immediately taken by how fabulous it felt. Fact is that 86 wasn't a lost sheep. He was just slightly ahead of the curve in making his Serta adoration explicit.
There couldn't possibly be anything more awkward and unfortunate in the Serta Sheep's closet, could there? If so, I'm not confident I have the spoons.
It's funny how campaigns on the issue of piracy had this erstwhile tendency to be leagues more apocalyptic than campaigns on issues that might strike you as being immediately more threatening. A few years back, we touched on the classic 1990s cautionary fable regarding Rebecca's pirated VHS experience - I'm still not 100% sure what was going on in that film, but I really did get the impression that the world was ending in that closing shot. In 2002, the Federation Against Copyright Theft got even more on the nose with a little piece called "The Pirates Are Out To Get You", the mere title of which says it all. The imperilled suburban innocence denoted by Rebecca's guileless giggling was now but a distant memory; this film might as well have taken place after the collapse of civilisation brought about by the foolish choices of Rebecca's unscrupulous parents, of which Rebecca herself appeared to have a chilling premonition at the end of her chapter. We find ourselves plunged into a burning hellscape, in the company of a pirate who might as well be the Devil himself. They didn't go so far as to give him pointy horns (although that wouldn't have been any less unsubtle), but he's got red-tinged skin and the glow of annihilation in his eyes. In place of his traditional pitchfork, he wields a brand in the shape of an X (for Forbidden!), which is first submerged in flame and then pointed at the camera, aaand it's not my imagination, is it? This anti-piracy film was intended as a parody of the Flaming Carlton Star? I mentioned in my coverage of that logo that the red-hot star-shaped brand was made all the more unnerving for the fact that we never saw the hand that moved it, enabling it to take on an uncanny life all of its own. Thanks to FACT, we get to discover if the alternative - seeing the sadistic thug with a penchant for scorching - is any more reassuring.
In lieu of turning the brute force of his weapon upon the audience, our demonic brand-wielder instead gets his kicks out of torching stacks of VHS tapes, film reels and CDs. A mere touch of the X is enough to engulf them in a flaming explosion that would make Michael Bay proud. The use of VHS makes the film feel curiously behind the times, as by 2002 the public were well along the process of tossing them out for DVDs, and countless VHS collections were meeting similarly miserable fates at landfill sites the world over. Being a VHS aficionado myself, I'll admit that the sight of all those tapes going up in flames makes my heart a little fluttery. (CDs? Torch as many of the snotty fuckers as you like. In this house it's vinyl or nothing.) By 2002, the Carlton Star had also been operation for long enough for audiences to be well-accustomed to kick-starting their watching experiences by having a burning iron shoved in their faces, so the idea was presumably to offer a startling subversion, with the (sorta) familiar imagery directing us to somewhere altogether more unimaginable. This is the Star's corrupted counterpart, signalling a dystopian world in which those pesky pirates, and not the advertisers, call the shots on what we see and hear - that being a slew of explosions and all the tell-tales noises of a society sinking deep into an apocalyptic chasm (sirens wailing, mobs chanting, gunfire rattling), indicating that our video-killer's actions have further-reaching consequences than a few melted copies of Bend It Like Beckham. I like the concept in theory, although it has to be said that the red hot X, in spite of its ability to make everything it comes into contact with to messily combust, lacks the awe-inspiring potency of its inspiration. We're issued a grim warning on the perils of letting the pirates brand us with their mark, yet "Pirates" doesn't make good on the implications of that threat - unlike the logo it's recalling, it never forces the viewer to endure the simulated experience of having the searing brand thrust directly upon them. It certainly puts a lot more emphasis on the fire visuals, making it a full-on nightmare for any pyrophobe unfortunate enough to find this lurking on the copy of Cheaper By The Dozen they rented, but compared to its counterpart, I never feel the creeping paranoia that the X-shaped brand is coming for me. The C-shaped brand (for Copyright!) that ultimately takes its place, once a bucket of cold water has put a stop to the mindless media-burning, is a slightly different story. Despite having just emerged from the same bucket of water that vanquished the X, it too ignites, with enough fury that it apparently causes the screen to burn out. It glows white rather than red, which I guess is intended to signify its purity, but the use of violent imagery to represent copyright is still jarring, meaning that it's not presented as a healing force that will put the world to rights, but an angry and vengeful one that's out to get you every bit as much as those pirates.
The film's most memorable component was its infamously foreboding monologue, which wasn't actually claiming anything that Rebecca's ordeal before it didn't. There, terrorism and organised crime were also said to be the beneficiaries of our dodgy video investments, although their invisibility made them more effective foes; the mere mention of the man at the market was ominous enough in context, but the suggestion that this only scratched the surface of a far more sinister agenda unfolding beyond the eyeline of Rebecca's ignorant parents was genuinely spine-chilling. The tactic was to prompt questions about the hidden costs of piracy and, through the highly emotive figure of Rebecca, what kind of world we were building for our children as a result. In attempting to provide more concrete answers to those questions, "Pirates" ends up feeling a lot more hyperbolic, in no small way because of its exceptionally bombastic choice of visual accompaniment (in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the specific charge that "piracy funds terrorism" had also become an especially loaded one). It was an even more drastic leap from "Daylight Robbery", the anti-piracy film we all got sick of seeing at the start of our tapes in the late 1990s, in which the pirates were represented by a cartoonishly belligerent market vendor who played like a nastier version of Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses. Obnoxious to the core, and not the kind of bloke you'd feel comfortable doing business with, but at least he was only a bloke and not the Devil incarnate, claiming your hard-earned fiver for a barely-functional copy of Trainspotting but sparing your soul. "Daylight Robbery" was a notably lighter kind of anti-piracy ad, its tactic being to present piracy as a particularly loathsome inconvenience as opposed to an all-destroying force, and it found room for humor in its featured scenario (the vendor claims that his trade was "advertised on Crimestoppers"). "Pirates", by comparison, takes the path of excess. The pirates are depicted not as unscrupulous criminals, but as unearthly demons on a mission to set the whole world ablaze, who get one step closer to succeeding every time someone fails to source their copy of Minority Report from a reputable retailer. Its message is conveyed with thoroughgoing seriousness, and yet its hyperbole is so hilariously bald-faced that it ends up getting the comedic edge on "Daylight".
For as much notoriety as its doom-laden monologue amassed, it has to be acknowledged that it is rather clunkily-constructed. There are snippets that work well enough, like the eerie ambiguity in the statement that piracy "will destroy our development and your future enjoyment." Obviously, they're talking about the jeopardy facing the entertainment industry, but after that mention of terrorism it's hard not to get the sense that they're alluding to the possible destruction of society as a whole. But the equation of those two concerns - the repeated criss-crossing between the proclamation that the very worst, most malignant kinds of people stand to overwhelmingly benefit from piracy and the affirmation that the film and music industries have everything to lose - is overall unwieldy (the use of explosive imagery to imply that these two concerns go hand in hand feels especially ham-fisted). It's further weighed down by the surplus of inelegant fire analogies - in addition to the aforementioned "Don't let them brand you with their mark!", there's "Don't let the pirates burn a hole in your pocket!" and "Don't touch the hot stuff. Cool is copyright!" (which immediately contradicted by the image of that C catching alight). You get the distinct impression that several different marketing slogans were proposed and, after a backstage deadlock on which was the punchiest, all of them were tossed into the final script, with the effect that they cancel one another out.
As easy as it is to poke fun at "Pirates" for its intensely over the top tone and production, its crudely nightmarish charm always makes it delightful for a nostalgic revisit. It also looks positively sophisticated when up against FACT's upcoming specimen for 2004, "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" (aka the worst anti-piracy film ever made). All I'll say is that it's impossible for me to watch that one and not hear Tweety Pie's voice echoing at the back of my head. "You wouldn't steal a car..." "Her don't know me vewy well, do her?!"
These days I often find myself remarking that advertising is a dead art. Which is obviously enormously hyperbolic of me, but it is the case that a lot of contemporary advertising just doesn't capture my imagination the way it used to. In part, I would argue that this is because we're living in the age of the touchy-feely ad (for which we can thank the root of all syrup-slathered evil, John Lewis), and I do not, in general, care for touchy-feely ads. But I do also have to acknowledge that, yeah, it's probably not a coincidence that the advertising era that made the greatest impression on me was the mid-90s through to the mid-00s, back when I was in the process of coming of age. Of course the ads of the 2020s aren't going to have quite the same magic as they had back then. I became an old fogey, and the world in general lost a wad of its lustre. I'm sure that, in 1996, some codger was shaking their head and muttering about how advertising was so much more epic when they were using iguanas to sell cigarettes, and not maggots to sell booze. All I know is that, once upon a time, watching the ad reel before a movie used to be an integral part of the cinemagoing experience for me. Remember that shrill woman in the car in those cinema sponsorship bumpers (from Volkswagen?) who used to yell out, "We're gonna miss the ads, that's the best bit!"? Clearly you were intended to sympathise more with her husband (who, IIRC, got out and abandoned her with the vehicle in motion in the final bumper) but I privately felt she spoke a lot of truth. Going to the movies and seeing the ad reel was like getting a grab bag of bonus miniature stories before the main feature, some weird, some terrifying, some absolutely baffling. I'd sometimes emerge chewing more upon that advertising than the film itself. But now, while I remain a staunch proponent of the theatrical experience, I often find my feet dragging in the foyer as the ads are about to start. To me, they're no longer an indispensable part of the package, but these annoying things you have to suffer through before the real fun begins - sentiments that I fear are inevitable around the onset of middle age. I'd be curious to know if kids today still get spooked by theatrical ads. Anything can seem scarier when it's magnified and in the dark, and you're susceptible enough to the sensory overload - how else can I explain being so deeply unsettled by an ad about a Lloyds cashpoint that played before Free Willy? Even some seasonal John Lewis drivel that's bending over backwards to give you the synthetic fuzzies might seem utterly horrifying when viewed through the right pair of eyes. All the same, I'd contend that a major reason why cinema ads seemed so much more spectacular in my favoured period had a lot to do with the company they kept back then, when the promos of the advertising companies themselves were epic little serotonin-inducers in their own right. As long as Pearl & Dean keep using Pete Moore's "Asteroid" as their jingle, a sliver of that grandeur may be preserved for future generations. But we've yet to find a worthy successor to Carlton Screen Advertising and their flaming Carlton star, which was as singularly commanding a cinematic visual as they come. Nothing said "You will fucking pay attention to what we're selling!" quite like having a red hot iron shoved in your face. Those were the days alright!
What made the Carlton Star so special? For a start, I can't claim that any other logo enticed me into to role-playing that I'm a criminal in olden times who's been sentenced to branding. That may sound like a strangely masochistic reaction, but I'm not sure what other narrative I was expected to attach to the sequence in question. We see a star-shaped iron being dunked into burning coals, then before you know it the thing's upon you. I can only speculate what infraction could warrant the barbaric penalty of having a star-shaped scar singed onto my face, but Carlton inflicted it on me with every trip to Cineworld. What exactly was the symbolism there? Were creators Lambie-Nairn seeking to convey some sly commentary on how advertising seeks to imprint on and commandeer our psyches? Was it deliberately likening the process to an act of brutal assault, implying that, by violently searing its mark upon us (or at least, giving the impression of doing so) it was laying claim to us, and to the impulses and desires that could be molded to make perfectly obedient consumers of us? This implicit message, whether conscious or not, is echoed in the logo's stinger, which arrived at the end of the ad reel to give the star the final word. This add-on was less dramatic than the main ident, showing only the star-shaped brand still pointed at the screen in a visibly cooler state, but (thanks in no small way to the eerie background drones), felt no less threatening. This was my final ominous reminder, as a branded medieval criminal, that the pain from my punitive burns might eventually lessen, but the mark wasn't going anywhere. The star insisted on lingering. I belonged to it now.
The Carlton Star enjoyed a healthy run, turning up the heat for UK cinemagoers until well into the 2000s. Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the light finally burned out in in 2008, when the UK operation of Carlton Screen Advertising was acquired by Odeon and Cineworld and rebranded as Digital Cinema Media. The Carlton Screen brand (and the star) remained active in Ireland until 2014, when Wide Eye Media (now Pearl & Dean Ireland) took its place. With the Carlton brand now obsolete on both sides of the Irish Sea, it's unlikely that the Carlton brand will be making a comeback any time soon. But like I say, once marked by its searing intensity, there was no way you were getting its imprint off you. Those of us who grew up with the logo will always bear the star-shaped scar somewhere upon our souls.
The logo had another curious legacy (of sorts), in that it was the seeming inspiration behind a 2002 campaign about how piracy would destroy us all. Was it as petrifying as the real deal? All will be revealed in time.
Let's talk about the single greatest oddity of British Telecom's 1992 "Get Through To Someone" campaign. The edition that conceals it isn't half as unnerving as the one about the woman who frets that her daughter is freezing to death inside a student hall, but it is several times more confounding. On this occasion, we focus on a plucky would-be Lothario who's determined not to get through to someone - or rather, to get through to her by maintaining total radio silence. Our protagonist considers himself a pretty slick fella, and thinks it most beneath him to give his girlfriend a bell to let her know that he loves her, preferring to keep her interested by keeping her hanging. He's so slick, in fact, that he justifies his dubious tactic by misremembering a quote from the 1940 Marx brothers film Go West. "What's that line from the old film? Fanning the flames of desire with the bellows of indifference..." Go West is not explicitly cited, but the quotation in question is markedly similar to one uttered by Groucho Marx therein. Problem is, it's not an exact match; the actual line spoken by Groucho is: "The secret is never let her know you care. Never pursue her. Let her pursue you. Fan the flames of desire with the bellows of indifference!"You might think this is a case of me being unreasonably pedantic, but where it gets perplexing is that we hear the snippet of dialogue playing in the protagonist's head, spoken in some suave, old timey actor's voice, and presented as though it were an extract of culled directly from the film itself. On top of everything else, that suave, old timey actor is audibly not Groucho Marx. Which begs a number of questions. Can we say for certain that Go West is the old film our protagonist has in mind? If not Groucho Marx, then whose voice is it? Is it a legitimate extract from some other classic picture in which a character makes a near-identical observation, using the exact same metaphors? Or is it just a faux dialogue extract, created to sound like it was taken from an old movie? Was the idea to have the protagonist seem additionally foolish, since his memories don't quite align with what's heard in the film itself, or was the intention here simply to allude to Go West without actually having to secure the rights to use any of it? That last one has the ring of plausibility, although why go to the trouble to create a faux extract when you could have had the protagonist (mis)remember it in his regular voice, creating much the same implications?
It should be noted that most ads in the "Get Through To Someone" campaign involved some element of paranoid or delusional fantasy, with characters fretting over the barrage of unknowns presented by their individual situations, before their fears were finally put to rest with a call and a sound of that soothing harmonica leitmotif. "Bellows" is something of an anomaly, in that the protagonist professes to be entirely at ease with a state of no communication. In lieu of a paranoid dream sequence, he gets an internal monologue, and his misquoting of Groucho Marx, in the wrong vocals, is the closest he gets to retreating into fantasy, with the misremembered details distinguishing his musings as a display of personal indulgence (those mysterious misplaced vocals representing his own attempt, as part of that internal monologue, to role play not as Marx, but as a more generically suave actor from Hollywood's golden age) and not objective memory. There seems to be a broader theme involving classic Hollywood; when Debbie calls, and his facade is totally punctured by the sudden surge of panic that has him lurching for the telephone, Sally the dog appears and creates an awkward, albeit jovially dispelled misunderstanding ("Sally, get off! No, no no, she's a dog. No, a sort of terrier type thing!"). Is it a coincidence that she is, specifically, a Cairn terrier, the breed most familiar to general audiences as that of Toto, the travelling companion of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz? These allusions to old Hollywood are emblematic of the protagonist's desire to immerse himself in a world of airy fantasy, exposed as foolish play pretence the instant reality comes calling and drags him straight back down into Kansas. There, he lives in disarray, surrounded by the contents of an upset fruit bowl, hounded by an over-enthusiastic terrier and suddenly very eager for the reaffirmation of Debbie's affections ("Debbie, listen to me," he implores at the end).
The especially fun part with these GTTS ads is noticing which aspect of the mise en scene works its way into the final arrangement, sharing the BT logo's status as the connective tissue between the featured parties, what function it serves within the characters' narrative and how it might be construed as symbolic of their relationship. In this case, it's the eye-catching knick knack that's foregrounded during the opening frames of the ad, an indoor water fountain comprised of a female figure, and droplets trickling all around the sides of her casing. Her foregrounding is juxtaposed with the protagonist's utterance of "Women...", indicating that she's to be seen as the embodiment of his professed views on the fairer sex. As with "Empty Nest Angst", I suspect that water is once again being used as a metaphor for sex, or at least for sexual desire, with this perfectly contained figurine encapsulated by her own ever-flowing desire serving as a telling reflection of how our protagonist envisions Debbie, treated mean and kept keen. But seems just as appropriate those non-stop trickles to be indicative of his own inner craving to connect with Debbie, barely concealed by his purported inclination to play it cool by emitting those bellows of indifference. In actuality, he's a chaotic geyser of ill-suppressed yearning. In the closing collage, the figure's image is situated so as to appear to be gazing from his direction and onto Debbie, a sly visual allegory for how transfixed by her he really is.
As we've established, New Zealand's intersections were dangerous places to hang in the 2000s, and this campaign - quite possibly the most inspired of all NZ intersection campaigns - offered a really creative means of illustrating that point. "Wheel of Misfortune" was created in 2008 by agency Clemenger BBDO Wellington for Land Transport New Zealand (who'd inherited LTSA's mantle in 2004), and arguably represents the absolute peak of LTNZ's output. I'd go a step further and say that it represents peak road campaigning, period. When it comes to public information films (or whatever the equivalent international term would be), "Wheel of Misfortune" is one of the all-time greats. Top 10 material, definitely. Maybe even a contender for the Top 5. All of the right ingredients are there - an ingeniously novel set-up, spine-chilling atmosphere, beautifully crafted tension, flickers of grim humor and the kind of indelibly grisly climax that makes any PIF buff weak at the knees. What's more, it has a villain who could give the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water a run for its money. Here, the face of crossroads carnage is actor David Austin, playing a wordless, other-wordly carny who occupies the focal intersection and beckons drivers with the ultimate challenge - the opportunity to Risk It All, Risk It Here. Getting across without giving way is envisioned as a twisted carnival game, straight out of your darkest, most nutmeg-addled nightmares.
The premise of "Wheel of Misfortune" has it that whenever a driver navigating the intersection fails to give way, the other-worldly carny spins the titular big six wheel, determining their fate from five possible outcomes - Near Miss, Minor Crash, Major Crash, Death and an ultra-slim chance of Miracle. The original campaign installment followed a "rule of three" structure, teasing us with the evil possibilities while reserving the most brutal developments for last. The ad was broken up into three different segments, opening with a driver who, laughing with her passenger and presumably not paying adequate attention to the road, pulls out in front of a red van and gets a Near Miss on the wheel. A collision is averted, although the driver of the red van angrily sounds their horn, indicating their mistake. The second segment shows a driver making more sensible choices and crossing the intersection without prompting the carnie to spin the wheel (just as well, as I think he had a kid in the back). The final segment opens with a driver (who I've always thought looks a bit like Peter Gabriel) giving way and making it across the intersection safely, but has a second driver in a grey sedan attempt to cut across right after, throwing themselves directly into the path of a black sedan, and into the wheel's climactic wrath. And here's where the fun part begins - there are multiple versions of the ad, revealing the various possible repercussions for the hapless drivers based on what comes up on the wheel. It is, notably, always the same two vehicles involved in all instances (with a third unhappy vehicle getting dragged into the action in one variation), indicating that we are exploring the alternate consequences of the grey sedan driver's single rash decision, and not different outcomes for other drivers who prompt a wheel-spinning on different days. This is the Sliding Doors of road campaigns. Or Run Lola Run, since there are three possibilities shown.
The first of these variations, the "Death" ending, might be considered our default version, as it contains the most obvious narrative from a cautionary standpoint. We already got our tantalising glimpse of potential catastrophe with the opening segment; surely now it's time for them to hold nothing back and to reveal what absolute disasters we could potentially bring on ourselves. Here, the black sedan duly slams into the grey sedan (and its occupant) with full force, causing the vehicle to crunch and leaving an ominous trail of shattered glass in its wake. The action is intercut with the spinning wheel, and the eyes of the carny as he keenly awaits the results. For a moment, the final outcome seems uncertain, with the pointer resting on the final spoke between Major Crash and Death, but it gets that last little burst of momentum to flip over into the latter, sealing the grey sedan driver's terrible fate. Naturally, this is the very worst thing we see happen to the grey sedan, but it's not the only thing.
Another variation, the "Near Miss" ending, was a real unicorn. I'd seen someone describe it on an internet forum soon after the campaign started airing in New Zealand, stating that there was one version in which the grey vehicle narrowly cleared the black vehicle, only to get a police car on their tail. But I could never find this one on YouTube, and my hunt proved so fruitless that I started to doubt that it even existed. After all, they'd already demonstrated the "Near Miss" outcome with the first segment (albeit without the police getting involved), so wouldn't it be redundant to show it again at the end? Would it not reinforce the very misconception the campaign seemed designed to downplay, that it wasn't a big deal if you failed to give way, since your odds of being involved in a collision were low compared to your chances of getting across safely? I wondered if perhaps the author had misremembered the "Near Miss" variation, by conflating details from the opening segment with a legitimate ending. But no, I can confirm that it does exist, having eventually been signposted to an upload on Vimeo. Seeing the grey vehicle miss the black by the skin of its teeth, having scoured the net for it for so long, and knowing the other versions inside out, was frankly surreal. I can also confirm that it makes more sense in context as a variation, as the Near Miss in this case is a hell of a lot nearer than that in the opening segment, as signified by the pointer once again getting caught between two possible outcomes, Near Miss and Death. In this version, the pointer doesn't quite have the momentum to flip over, staying in Near Miss and averting the collision. It's nevertheless hair-raising to complete just how razor thin a line had divided the more desirable outcome from complete disaster. The "Near Miss" ending makes a point that was implicit in the opening segment (the first time the wheel is spun, you might notice that Death fell immediately after Near Miss, and that's certainly sobering) but not given quite so brutal an emphasis (since the first driver still lands safely in Near Miss). When you fail to give way on an intersection, not only are you playing a foolish game of chance, but the factors that separate one extreme from the other (whether you get out unscathed or get completely pulverised) could be totally miniscule. On top of that, the police indeed show up, indicating that the grey sedan driver will face consequences in the form of a fine. He's not getting to wherever he was headed any sooner.
The third and final variation is "Miracle", and this one basically feels like it's there for a bit of comic levity. This time around, the grey sedan's gambit causes the black sedan and a third vehicle approaching from the opposite direction to swerve in a desperate attempt to avoid collision, and somehow or other, it works. All three vehicles come to a safe standstill without making contact. Gentle choir music plays in order to hammer home the point that this is nothing short of miraculous. Clearly "Miracle" is intended to the jackpot outcome. It only occurs
once on the wheel and takes up less space than the others, so the odds
of landing on it are significantly smaller than the others. In practice, though, I'm not sure what makes
"Miracle" any more of a jackpot than "Near Miss". Nobody gets hurt in either result, no damage is dealt to the vehicles, and both presumably entail heapings of stress for the people involved. Muting the cute music and looking at what
actually happens in the "Miracle" ending, if I had been in one of those
vehicles, I think I'd have found the experience considerably more traumatic than if I'd been in one of the vehicles in the opening segment. It may just be that "Miracle" falls between "Death" and "Major
Crash", the two worst outcomes, so it represents your slim chance to get
out of an extremely fucked situation. But there are evidently no winners in this game, just needless risks and varying extremes of punishment. (Some of which spilled over into the behind-the-scenes arena, with a stunt driver requiring hospital treatment during the filming of one of the endings, presumably the Death one.)
The outcomes of Minor Crash and Major Crash were not represented in the television ads, but did receive their own print ads.
At the time, I recall seeing a handful of online voices who claimed that the concept was flawed, since it implied that whether or not you get into an accident is all a matter of chance and had nothing to do with the driver's diligence. I can only assume that those viewers weren't paying close attention, because the ad makes it clear that the carny does not spin the wheel for drivers who don't make bad decisions. That is the whole purpose of the middle segment, where nothing happens, and that's a good thing. That the carny readies the wheel suggests that the second driver was at least tempted to cut across, but managed to resist, and is rewarded by getting to sit out the game. And he doesn't even ready the wheel for Peter Gabriel. We can think of his philosophy as being somewhat akin to that of the Mystery Man in Lost Highway, and how it was not his custom to go where he was not invited. By the same token, the carny does not subject anybody to the game who did not take him up on his offer in the first place, however unwittingly. He lets people make their own decisions, and if they choose wrong lets fate make the decisions from there. What makes Austin's performance especially chilling is the air of total impassiveness with which he imbues the character. Compared to the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, there's nothing to suggest that he derives any kind of sadistic relish from being a force of reckoning for these foolish and unwary drivers, but he goes about it with a steely, unflinching sense of duty that's every bit as ghoulish.
In a campaign brimming with disturbing touches, it might be difficult to isolate the most disturbing, but here's a bit of gratuitous horror that always stands out to me - at the end of the ad, no matter what the variation, we'll get a final shot of the carny and his wheel in motion, signifying the interminable nature of the game, accompanied by a discernible, disembodied whispering. What the whispering is saying isn't fully intelligible, but you can definitely pick out a "Yeah, that wasn't worth it..." at the start. What's more, we hear that same disembodied whispering at the beginning of the third segment, as the ill-fated grey sedan pulls into view and the carny waits for Peter Gabriel to pass. Spooky, no question. But whose disembodied whispering is it? Arguably, it's the carny's internal monologue, which would align with it being juxtaposed with him, but that would imply a degree of emotional investment in the lives of these passing motorists that I don't think he makes. Presumably it's not the ghost of the grey sedan driver because a) we hear it in all versions of the ad, not just the one where he gets Death and b) we hear it prior to him making his stupid decision. It might be that it has no deeper narrative significance, and was incorporated as an extra bit of atmosphere to accentuate the viewers' goosebumps. I've got another theory, though, and it alludes to yet another layer of implicit horror that you might pick up on if you study the details closely. At the start of the ad, the pointer is already positioned on Death. Once the carny has had his first opportunity to spin the wheel and it's landed on Near Miss, we can see that it remains in that position at the start of both succeeding segments, until he has the chance to spin it again. If we read between the lines, then the implication is that the last unlucky sod to play the game before the events depicted in the ad had landed on Death. So I'd suggest it might be their ghost we're hearing, urging the other motorists not to make the same mistake. Maybe even multiple ghosts, all resigned to the same locale to collectively rue the one reckless blunder that cost them everything. I think the implication is definitely that the intersection is haunted, in one sense or another, a monument to the accumulated mistakes made by various individuals in the heat of the moment, the grim consequences of which are now echoing across eternity.
Despite the brilliance of the campaign, coupled with the morbid elegance of Austin's performance, the carny would not go on to have a long-running presence on New Zealand television (I don't know if the disestablishment of LTNZ in mid-2008 had anything to do with that). He appeared in just one further ad, in which he was shown to be stalking the same individual across various different intersections on different days, the omnipresent spectre of what could potentially go wrong, waiting for this patently conscientious driver to make the single slip-up for which he could be punished dearly. This ad did not have multiple endings, although there were different edits, the longer of which resulted in another driver who did not follow the protagonist's shining example, necessitating a spin of the wheel, although the ad cut away without showing us how they fared. That was the final curtain for the Kiwi intersection carny, yet he's never quite gone away. His face, his wheel, his eerie fairground leitmotif...it all still haunts me. There are days when I think I can just make out his silhouette from the corner of my eye, lingering on the roadside and anticipating every possible opening for calamity. Public information legends never retire, they merely enjoy an extended encore in the psyches of their viewers.
