The Otto Show (aka That's One Palindrome You Won't Be Hearing For A While)

I like to begin each year by devising a rough plan of the Simpsons episodes I intend to cover each month. Even if I don't stick to it all the way, I find it helpful to have some idea of what I'm working toward, and of which episodes might go well with certain points in the year. It's a list that I'm constantly rethinking and revising, and there will inevitably episodes I've had it in mind to review that end up being passed over. "The Otto Show" (8F21) was one that I had strongly considered cramming in near the end of 2025, to give it proximity to the new Spinal Tap movie, and it very nearly took the spot of "The Homer They Fall" - in the end, though, it just worked out better for me to have covered that episode right before I did "When Flanders Failed" (what with that whole discussion about the sincerity of their respective endings). I figured that "The Otto Show" could wait until January - with the result that there's now a huge air of melancholy hanging over this episode that there wouldn't have been back in November. That is of course down to the tragic death of Spinal Tap director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner on December 14th. When I went to see Spinal Tap II: The End Continues in October, I wasn't preparing myself for the possibility that this would be Reiner's last film, and certainly not under such terrible circumstances. Given that This Is Spinal Tap (1984) was the first feature that Reiner helmed, there is something hauntingly poetic in the fact that his directorial career was bookended by Spinal Tap projects. The lads in Spinal Tap might be among the most enduring comic creations in cinema history, but for the foreseeable future revisiting them is going to come with this inherent sadness, because inevitably you'll be thinking about Reiner. It's a lot like how it's been watching scenes with Lionel Hutz and Troy McClure in the years after Phil Hartman's death - those performances still feel every bit as fresh and impeccable as they did back in the day, but they are also harrowing reminders of what was lost, and in the most horrific possible way. Reiner had no direct involvement in "The Otto Show", but the episode is nevertheless an extension of his legacy, the coming together of The Simpsons and Spinal Tap being one of those marvellous pop culture intersections that speaks to the richness of both worlds. It opens with England's so-called loudest band stopping by to perform a concert in Springfield, and while it does eventually spill over into a more generic tale about Otto the bus driver losing his job and having to move in with the Simpsons, it's the Spinal Tap reunion that makes the strongest impression.

Debuting on April 23rd 1992, "The Otto Show" was part of a spate of third season episodes centring on the private lives of the show's peripheral characters, following on from the likes of "Like Father, Like Clown", "Flaming Moe's" and "Bart The Lover". To that end, it is easily the least successful of the four, in that it doesn't convince us that Otto has much of a private life worth writing about. He definitely works better as a tertiary character, getting the odd moment here and there but generally taking a backseat to the narrative action. This is something that the production crew are entirely upfront about on the DVD commentary, acknowledging that they never attempted a second Otto show and pointing out how revealing it is that you barely see him for the first half of a story billed as being all about him. They joke about "The Otto Show" being an episode built upon shaky decisions, which they attribute to it being written so late in the season when everyone was running out of fucks given. Truth be told, I appreciate the experimentation. When you're working with a world as vibrant and alive with possibilities as Springfield, misfires such as this are are a necessary part of figuring out where your limitations lie. Besides, it's not always obvious from the outset which characters are going to thrive or shrivel in the spotlight. Common sense ought to have dictated that the aforementioned Troy McClure was a one-trick pony who couldn't possibly have supported his own story, and yet he ended up with one of the most fleshed-out and affecting of all the series' character studies. Otto's just never takes flight; the development of him losing his job and winding up homeless happens too far along in the episode for anything substantial to come of it and runs out of steam almost instantly, once we get into the rather pedestrian plot point about him living with the Simpsons. From there, the episode feels like it's going through the motions, with Otto making a nuisance of himself in the most predictable of ways, before we've accumulated enough time for our inevitable status quo reset. The result is an entirely watchable though largely disposable slice of Simpsons life, in which we don't learn a lot about Otto beyond what was already self-explanatory.

Otto's name might be in the title, but the Taps are unquestionably the headline act - in fact, you get the impression that the writers might have come up with the idea for the Spinal Tap gig first and that everything that followed was always an afterthought. This technically wasn't the first instance of a pre-existing fictional character being incorporated into the Simpsons' reality - Gulliver Dark, the lounge singer voiced by Sam McMurray in "Homer's Night Out", was a fellow alum from The Tracey Ullman Show (where McMurray portrayed him in live action skits), but whereas Dark's appearance had the feel of a fun little Easter egg, Spinal Tap's appearance definitely had an eye toward garnering hype. What has it seeming like a totally logical merging of worlds, rather than a hollow gimmick, is of course the Harry Shearer connection - it was a fitting opportunity for the series regular to reprise his role as bassist Derek Smalls, and to be joined by guest stars Christopher Guest and Michael McKean as his bandmates Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins. As crossovers go, it certainly feels a lot less forced than the ones the series would later attempt with The Critic and The X-Files, in part because The Simpsons and Spinal Tap's respective humor styles are already on such a close wavelength, but also because it doesn't overplay its hand by having the band hang out with the family or anything - Tufnel, St. Hubbins and Smalls are incorporated in a way that feels like a plausible part of the show's broader world-building, rather than one in which the Simpsons themselves are automatically at the centre. None of which precludes the reality of there being a transparent ulterior motive in the form of cross promotion. Spinal Tap had released a new album, Break Like The Wind, only a month prior, and it's no coincidence that the song performed at the truncated Springfield concert is that album's title track, rather than one of the hits from their 1984 film. The Simpsons was, nonetheless, required to pay a hefty sum for the privileging of promoting "Break Like The Wind", with Fox complaining that for that cost they might as well have brought in a real band, so I don't doubt that this was something the series staff were really eager to see happen. You could make the argument (as Nathan Rabin does in his review on The AV Club) that there is something slightly suspect about having Bart be so enthused about the prospect of attending a Spinal Tap gig - after all, one of the major plot points of This Is Spinal Tap was the band's declining relevance in the contemporary music scene, with people widely regarding them as yesterday's news. But then I suppose that their performing in a burg as crummy as Springfield speaks volumes as to how far they've fallen in the world. Supplying promos for idiotic shock jocks Bill and Marty is somewhat of a degrading business, even if you are choosy about the material you'll recite.

The first act, when Spinal Tap are in town, is a lot of fun. Writer Jeff Martin has a really good handle on the little details that made This Is Spinal Tap so delightful. The concert is plagued by an assortment of technical snafus that are enjoyably reminiscent of the things that would go wrong for the band throughout their mockumentary. The lighting is off and misses Smalls as he makes his grand entrance, forcing him to discreetly readjust his position. A giant inflatable devil that reportedly looked very impressive when it hadn't expelled half of its air is lowered onto stage, something the band handles with more aplomb than the comparable fiasco with the Stonehenge prop in the movie proper. It ends in a way that feels more befitting of the culture in Springfield, with a full-scale riot, prompting Kent Brockman to weigh in with perhaps his wittiest editorial: "Of course, it would be wrong to suggest that this sort of mayhem began with rock and roll. After all, there were riots at the premiere of Mozart's The Magic Flute. So what's the answer? Ban all music? In this reporter's opinion the answer sadly is yes." (Is that actually true about The Magic Flute? Historically, classical music audiences haven't been the best-behaved bunch - there were riots at the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring - so Brockman's basic point stands, but I can't find any reference to The Magic Flute specifically.) Ultimately the chaos of Springfield puts the band themselves in the shade. The movie's most morbid joke - the running gag about the long line of ill-fated drummers that have worked with Spinal Tap - is not evoked, but the episode turns out to have far more cut-throat aspirations in mind. In an epilogue to the disastrous concert it's implied that the entire band might have been killed, when Otto runs their tour bus off the road, causing it to crash and burst into flames - although I note that Skinner does later say, "It's a miracle no one was hurt", so maybe they all survived unscathed, the drummer included. I mean, being driven off the road by a speeding school bus almost sounds too mundane a way for a Spinal Tap drummer to go (a bus driven by a dog, maybe).

The most fabulous moment in the concert's downfall is of course when Homer is waiting for Bart outside the stadium while singing along to "Spanish Flea" on his car radio, so engrossed in his private karaoke session that he doesn't even notice the bloodshed unfolding behind him. It's a sequence that treads such a fine line between Homer's innocence and his negligence. Acquiring the rights to use "Spanish Flea" was even more of an uphill battle than getting "Break Like The Wind", so much so that the sequence was very nearly jettisoned, but prevailed in the end thanks to a) Dan Castellaneta's exquisite performance, which charmed everyone at the table read and b) Jay Kogan having a personal connection that enabled him to pull strings with somebody involved with Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass.

Otto is glimpsed early on, in attendance at the Spinal Tap concert alongside Snake (Snake having been introduced as a friend of Otto's in "The War of The Simpsons", although that connection was basically dropped from here on in). In fact, he and Snake are the characters who incite the riot, but we do have to get through a whole other plot development before we eventually circle back to our nominal star. The ever-impressionable Bart, unfazed by his brush with the uglier side of rock and roll, gets it into his head that he too could be a heavy metal musician. At this point the episode looks as if it might be going a similar route to "Bart The Daredevil", the key difference being that Marge and Homer are only too happy to nurture this particular aspiration by investing in a guitar. Bart discovers that, compared to leaping over vehicles on his skateboard, strumming does not come quite so easily to him and is quickly discouraged. This eventually leads to him showing the guitar to Otto, insisting that it's broken, and Otto dazzling his young passengers by playing it like a boss. Otto gets so carried away with his performance that he loses track of the time, causing him to make a dash for the school at breakneck speed, driving Spinal Tap off the road, disrupting the annual police picnic and finally crashing the bus. Skinner uncovers the scandalous truth, that Otto has no driving license, and suspends him without pay, reasoning that since he drove an all-terrain vehicle in Vietnam, he can shoulder the bus driving duties in his absence. Shorn of his status and source of income, Otto rapidly hits rock bottom, failing to pass a driving test and facing eviction from his apartment, until Bart finds him sheltering in a dumpster and invites him to bed down in his family's garage. In the meantime, the entire narrative thread about Bart wanting to become a rock musician is simply left to fizzle. I will give the episode this - it at least fizzles out in a way that feels realistic in terms of a child's expectations, with Bart admitting to Homer that he gave up the guitar because he wasn't good at it right away. Obviously, playing the guitar isn't the kind of thing that you should expect to be good at right away, but when you're a kid you often don't have the patience to see these things in the longer term, and not getting that instant gratification can be enough to severely dampen your interest. We immediately trade in realism for a window into Homer's well-intentioned but totally warped parenting, when in lieu of impressing the responsible teaching about the value of hard graft and perseverance, he praises Bart for having reached one of life's great epiphanies, namely that if something is hard to do, it's not worth doing. Why waste time with demanding interests like guitars, karate lessons (nice nod to the subplot of "When Flanders Failed" there) and unicycles when you can partake in the totally passive alternative of reclining in front of the chattering cyclops, irrespective of what's on? What's on was never the point.

Fair play to Martin's script for tying such an upfront bow on its own listlessness, although I suspect that a narrative where Bart got to do something with his guitar-playing aspirations before inevitably packing it in would have been a notch more interesting than the one we get with Otto. Having him move in with the Simpsons feels, as I say, like somewhat of a stock development, one we'd be seeing a lot more of throughout the course of the series, where stories about down and out characters seeking refuge under the Simpsons' roof have happened with more frequency than you might first think - heck, this wasn't even the only example from the back-end of Season 3, with Herb Powell showing up on the family's doorstep just two episodes along in "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?". Elsewhere, we had Krusty move in during the events of "Krusty Gets Kancelled", Apu in "Homer and Apu", Lampwick in "The Day The Violence Died", Cooder and Spud in "Bart Carny", and I think that Artie Ziff might even have lived with them at one point. Some of these scenarios have the ring of plausibility more than others. I certainly find the prospect of the Simpsons accommodating Herb a lot more believable than I do Otto - Herb's family, and he had a grievance the Simpsons were anxious to atone for, whereas Otto isn't even someone they know particularly well outside of his profession as a school bus driver. Wanting to help him is one thing, but I'm not sure that I buy Homer and Marge allowing him to stay with them indefinitely, even with Marge justifying it as an act of Christian charity (Marge: "Doesn't the Bible say, whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me?" Homer: "Yeah, but doesn't the Bible also say thou shalt not take...moochers into thy...hut?"). Arguably, it's an example of a problem that episodes looking to focus on the supporting characters tend to run into, in that their hands are often tied by the obligation to keep the Simpsons at the centre of events, even in situations that shouldn't be logically their business. One of the reasons why the Troy McClure episode worked as well as it did is because it didn't try to shoehorn the Simpsons in any more than was necessary (being a Selma-centric installment, it perhaps wasn't perceived as so disconnected from the main family). But then it's not as though there were a wealth of possibilities for where Otto's arc might otherwise have gone; the staff are clear in the commentary that they didn't have the same passion for crafting an episode around him as they did one involving Spinal Tap and Homer's rendition of "Spanish Flea". What else could Otto have done if he didn't have the Simpsons to turn to? Move in with Snake? 

Otto is in some ways comparable to Moe, in that both are bereft of basic dignity and nearing the bottommost rungs of Springfield's social ladder - Otto, though, doesn't share Moe's bitter misanthropy or his desperation for acceptance, being so laid-back and oblivious that his lowliness barely registers. He has the air of a perpetual teenager in the body of a grown man, with little impetus for joining the adult world. I'd say he was a take on the Gen-X slacker archetype that was being sent up a lot at the time, except that Otto's year of birth is given in this episode as 1963, so he is technically a Boomer (albeit almost as young as a Boomer can possibly be). For the most part, Otto even seems happy with his lot in life, so he doesn't invite quite the same opportunities for pathos as Moe. "The Otto Show" only allows him to reveal one hidden depth and, unfortunately, it's a variation on the one Krusty just did - his father, a naval commander, disapproved of the lifestyle he chose and now wants nothing to do with him. This is brought up at two separate intervals to give context for Otto's predicament, but isn't developed in any way as a plot point (presumably because it would be too reminiscent of "Like Father, Like Clown"). At most, when Otto takes a disliking to Homer during the episode's climax, it's possible to project a subtext about Otto using his friction with the Simpson patriarch to gain catharsis for his own daddy issues, but this isn't explicitly stated. Another possible avenue might have been to have centred on Bart's relationship with Otto, something that was explored more insightfully in their brief interaction in "Bart Gets an F", when Bart confides in Otto his fear about the possibility of being held back a grade. Bart finds it easier to relate to Otto than to most adults because he behaves less like an authority figure and more like an overgrown school kid, but given his blank-eyed reaction to Otto's response - that being held back isn't a big deal, because it happened to him twice, and now he drives the school bus - it seems that Bart has, in that moment, seen through him. There is a clear discrepancy between the message Otto thinks he's conveying and the one Bart is receiving; Otto sees himself as someone who mastered his situation and ascended to the top of the elementary school ladder, whereas Bart sees him as someone who never transcended the cycle and is now permanently stuck in the mentality of a fourth-grader. Bart respects Otto for the subversive mayhem he brings to the otherwise monotonous school routine, but deep down inside recognises that he isn't looking to emulate him; even at this point in life, he senses that he has greater ambition than Otto. Here, Bart gives Otto encouragement by assuring him he's the coolest adult he knows, with no such complexity.

Otto's cohabiting with the Simpsons, however questionable, doesn't come without its share of laughs. I like the scene where he terrifies Lisa with his overly intense retelling of the urban legend about the killer in the backseat, and his request for reading material "from the vampire's point of view" (er, you mean like Anne Rice?). The most interesting thing to arise is Homer insisting that, "This is not Happy Days, and [Otto] is not the Fonz", only for Otto to walk in and casually address him as "Mr S". I'm not massively well-versed in Happy Days lore, but as I understand it that's a reference to Fonzie's practice of addressing his host Howard Cunningham as "Mr C". What's curious about this moment, with hindsight, is how it foreshadows the appearance of Roy, the radical young man who was inexplicably living with the Simpsons in the Season 8 episode "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", and who also referred to Homer as "Mr S". We sense, fleetingly, that there is some intention to playfully mock the sitcom tendency toward contrived co-living situations in which contrasting characters get on one another's nerves, with Otto's addition suggesting a certain hackneying of dynamics in the Simpsons household. Overall, though, "The Otto Show" ends up not quite being the sum of its parts. Perhaps befitting for a program about Otto, it feels hampered by a fundamental lack of ambition. There is a clear enough narrative vision in the sense that everything flows fluidly from one point to the next, but it is largely a matter of "this happened...and then this happened...soon followed by this". What it doesn't do is to stop to unpick a great many of the possible characterisations lurking beneath each of these story decisions, to the extent that the episode never quite settles on what it's even about until literally the closing few seconds. It isn't about Bart's fleeting ambition to become a rock star, or his relationship with Otto. It isn't about Otto's relationship with his estranged father, his conflict with Homer or even his desire to salvage his barely existent self-esteem. What it is about, in the end, is Skinner's perception of Otto. Skinner has only a minor role in "The Otto Show", but he is very much where the heart of the story lies. It's thanks to Skinner that everything does eventually come together in the end.

In many ways Skinner can be seen as the antithesis of Otto. If Otto is an unusually cool adult, then Skinner is the absolute epitome of how Bart perceives the adult world, being an uptight, no-nonsense stickler for model behaviour, overly occupied with tedious duties and with little room for fun in his life (ironically, Skinner is even more of an overgrown schoolboy than Otto). It's no surprise that he would feel disdain for Otto, a grown man so disorganised and devoid of pride that he can't even show up to work wearing his own underwear. After suspending Otto, Skinner initially seems to vibe well with his stopgap transportation responsibilities, as the children welcome him with a collective rendition of "Hail To The Bus Driver", a spirited song sung to the tune of "O du lieber Augustin". Skinner, though, has a harder time navigating the route than Otto, not being assertive enough with his fellow motorist and becoming frustrated with the lack of consideration he receives in return. He struggles to make a turning because nobody will let him in and ends up a complete nervous wreck. By the end of the episode, when Otto has been restored to his position and the children are celebrating his return with a reprise of "Hail To The Bus Driver", it's Skinner who gets in the final word, watching from his office as Otto drives off into the distance, and reciting the lyrics of the song with a thoroughgoing reverence. Having had a first-hand taste of how difficult Otto's job is, he's come to see the value in what Otto does and is thankful to have him. That's why I consider Skinner to be the heart of this episode - he's the only character who undergoes any real growth as a result of his experiences in "The Otto Show". Bart misses the opportunity to develop a new skill and is potentially set back further by Homer's false pearl of wisdom. We're given no indication that Homer's opinion on Otto ever softens. As for Otto, while he eventually summons the resolve to retake his driving test and regains his job, he doesn't do so because he made any improvements as a bus driver, but because of who had chosen to like him on a given day. Although Patty was thoroughly unimpressed by Otto on his initial visit to the DMV, on his second visit he and Patty build a rapport over their shared dislike of Homer, and she's willing to overlook his many failings. (Incidentally, I don't know how people feel nowadays about that part where he offends Patty straight out the gate by asking if she's a transwoman - it's hard to dispute that a joke is being made about Patty's perceived lack of feminity, but there's an extent to which it feels also partly at Otto's expense for his presumptions of good allyship: "You can tell me, I'm open-minded".)

What makes Skinner's final expression of admiration for Otto particularly resonant is that he, perhaps more so than Homer, serves as a proxy for Otto's unseen father - he's also from a military background, and he's the one who banishes Otto in disgrace from familiar turf. It means that he is, at least on a subliminal level, able to bring some resolution to this otherwise untouched on narrative detail. Unlike Krusty, Otto doesn't go into depth about his father, so we don't learn the full story of what caused their relationship breakdown, but we're left to presume that it was likely influenced by their differences in values. There is a telling moment where Otto, boasting to the busload of kids about how playing the guitar was all he did back in high school, lets it slip that his father told him he was wasting his time and would never amount to anything, followed by a pause and a dissatisfied murmur. Otto has, for a second, inadvertently cut through his own obliviousness and is left contemplating if maybe his old man was onto something after all. Unlike Bart, he had the dedication to master the guitar, but otherwise lacked the gumption or discipline to make anything of himself, at least according to his father's standards, and deep down Otto is perhaps no more immune to life's disappointments than anybody else. It's no surprise that he'd want to savour the opportunity to show off his guitar skills before the kids on board the bus, and to soak up that meagre drop of personal glory. But really, in spite of Otto's momentary insecurities, there is intrinsic worth in what he does, which is to be a dependable source of conviviality for the community's children whilst taking them to and from their education. And Skinner, in lieu of Otto's father, is able to extend him the respect that he's due, now that he understands that it's not a role that just anyone can fulfil. There might not be a ton of prestige attached, but he's clearly appreciated by the people for whom it matters the most. Maybe there's not such a massive gulf between the stadium's applause for Spinal Tap and the enthusiastic response Otto receives when he returns to his young charges at the end. 

There's not much left to say, other than to dedicate this review to the memory of Rob and Michele Reiner. As much as I love Spinal Tap, my favourite Reiner film is actually When Harry Met Sally. Word has it that we got the version we did because Rob and Michele happened to fall in love during its production. What a beautiful legacy for them both.

Safeway: Little Harry Goes Shopping

Shopping at Safeway is an undertaking I never got round to in this lifetime. Growing up, they were this inoffensive brand that was always there somewhere in the backdrop, but I don't think I ever so much as set foot in one of their stores (same deal with Somerfield). My parents were long-term Sainsbury's devotees, and by the time I was old enough to manage my own food acquisition they were already disappearing, in the process of being swallowed up by Morrisons (an unfortunate fate, since Morrisons is the UK supermarket chain I'm dead-set on avoiding). The Safeway experience is one that I'll forever have to partake in vicariously, through the televised adventures of Little Harry and chums, the array of highly articulate tots who promoted the chain through the mid to latter half of the 1990s. What better way to establish your chain as a warm and family-friendly place to hang than to show small children having the time of their lives while on their weekly shop with their parents? Meanwhile, the accompanying tagline, "Lightening The Load", asked that we equate not just convenience and efficiency, but also wholesome good fun with the brand.

The child star who originally fronted this campaign was known as Little Harry. He was played by a boy named Jack Hanford, who was reportedly chosen from more than 1500 prospective young actors, although his innermost thoughts were delivered in the droll tones of Martin Clunes, best known for playing Gary in the contemporary sitcom Men Behaving Badly. The campaign owed an obvious debt to the then-recent Look Who's Talking films, which used a similar gimmick in pairing grown-up voiceovers with footage of ankle-biters. Harry would experience the various perks of shopping at Safeway with the fascination and naivety of a young child, but expressed through the sardonic musings of an adult, an approach that allowed for an easygoing mix of endearment and absurdism. The idea was to emphasise that Safeway was a particularly ideal choice for shoppers with little kids in tow, but even if you didn't fall into that demographic, you could perhaps still see a bit of yourself in Harry's wry observations. No matter what your age, your weekly excursion around your supermarket of choice was such a major part of your routine that there was something infinitely relatable and charming about following a single family and how their lives revolved around the contents of their grocery bags. Somerfield had a similar premise going (under the banner of "Shopping In The Real World"), but in their case the ads centred on an adult woman played by Suzanne Forster, and her slightly drippy husband with the tendency to misinterpret shopping lists ("I meant mincemeat for mince pies!"). 

In 1996 Harry was joined by a new co-star in the form of Molly, who was played by Rosie Purkiss-McEndoo and voiced by actress Lesley Sharpe, and was initially introduced as a romantic interest for Harry. Molly's encounter with Harry was treated by Safeway as a major event (it even came with its own line of tie-in merchandising), although it attracted its share of controversy at the time, from those who felt uneasy about the amorous overtones given to the tykes' interactions. Still, the outcome was ultimately not a pre-school recreation of the Gold Blend couple, with Safeway likely having broader motivations for adding new blood to the cast than to sell a few themed tea towels. The disadvantage in using children as the long-term faces of brands is that they'll grow up significantly within the space of a few years, so unless you're willing to build that into your campaign narrative, you might have to accept that they'll only have a limited shelf-life. I would hazard a guess that this is why Harry was all but phased out in later stages of the campaign, with ads shifting their focus toward Molly and her Paul Whitehouse-voiced brother, as well as a few additional "guest" faces, including a Northern Irish kid voiced by Frank Carson, an American girl voiced by Ruby Wax and a Scouser voiced by Cilla Black, although Harry did eventually return for a 1999 installment set at a millennium party. It served as a neat send-off for the campaign as a whole, as going into the Y2K Safeway made the decision to move away from television marketing altogether, and didn't have much longer to go as a brand. But of course the memories live on in our VHS recordings.

The first of the ads, from late 1994, saw Harry making his introductory visit to Safeway. He'd dared hope that his mother (Michèle Winstanley) was taking him to Toys R Us (the shopping locale where every child wanted to be be in the 1990s) and was initially disappointed to discover that they were headed for a supermarket, but was swiftly won over by the ease of the Parent & Child parking, and by the opportunities to comment on his fellow patrons from the vantage point of a trolley seat (including two sisters in a trolley with handy double seating). He was less sure about the bag-packing and carry-out service, since he could only interpret the helpful clerk as a stranger tampering with their goods before following them out of the building - the underlying narrative being that Harry was not accustomed to seeing such convenience from wherever he and his mother had shopped previously, so it was all new and alarming to him. (The ads often included shots of the Safeway employees smiling at the children, thus emphasising the genial service you could expect to receive within, although in this guy's case he cracks a curiously half-hearted smile, causing him to come off as being just as wary of Harry; not sure what the intended narrative is there.) Safeway's infinite friendliness to the young family crowd came to our hero's aid, when he and his mother were able to "hide" from the perceived stalker in a baby changing room (presumably helping his mother to deal with an entirely different kind of predicament), with the subsequent dissolve into the Safeway logo imparting the implicit message that parents would do well to view Safeway as a refuge from less accommodating venues. The ad went out of its way to cram in as many perks as possible - the option of gifting your loved ones with a Safeway voucher was not explicitly cited by the narrator, but was cunningly slipped into the mise-en-scene, when Harry and his mother walk past a poster promoting this very service.

Clunes' voiceovers naturally did a lot of the heavy-lifting humor-wise (slickly matched with Hanford's expressions), but for me the real high point of this ad is a moment where Harry has no words, and is instead having a grand time pretending to wield a sword - amid all the witticisms, it is heartening to see glimpses of the kid just being a kid.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #54: Gold Label Retrieval Squad

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 highest.

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.

The Mourning After (Brought To You By Seagram)

At first glance "The Mourning After" seems entirely self-explanatory. The onscreen title makes it obvious that this is a piece on the subject of bereavement; that it did the rounds in UK ad breaks and cinema reels during the Christmas and New Year period (initially in 1982-83, although it was rerun elsewhere in the decade) means that we can already connect the dots as to the probable cause of the loss in question. Still, our assumption that we're watching a public information film on the perils of drink driving transpires to be only half-correct. The first drop of discrepancy comes when the text informs us that "Seagram sell more wines and spirits than anyone else in the world", followed by "Naturally, we like you to take a drink". This is immediately tempered by the disclaimer, "But always in moderation. And never when driving", but it is hard not to be thrown by that slight air of incongruity - an ad selling us on the virtues of a product whilst confronting us with a grim reminder of the potential consequences if we are not judicious consumers. It's an oddity, to say the least.

"The Mourning After" is what could be termed a pseudo-PIF. It does the work of a public information film, but it's really a bog standard advert and as such is looking to double as promotion for a brand. There is certainly an element of the (now defunct) Canadian drinks company looking to have their cake and eat it - amid the sombre display, they cannot help but brag about their stature in the world of alcoholic beverages, and to work in the implicit suggestion that Seagram's wines and spirits are very good when partaken under the appropriate circumstances. But in spite of these ostensibly contradictory intentions, "The Mourning After" still packs quite a heavy punch as a drink driving film, no less so than many actual PIFs on the matter. There is something hauntingly lyrical in its approach, which feels markedly different to that of the more infamous "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" PIFs that would begin their run toward the end of the decade. Whereas D&DWL focussed on the voices of those impacted by drive drinking incidents, "Mourning" contains no spoken dialogue, allowing an instrumental piano piece (a track from the KPM library, "Recollections" by Dennis Farnon) to convey the mood, while lingering on a series of static black and white images with deliberately minimal human presence. It is effectively a statement on drink driving delivered via a tone poem. Pun-tastic title aside, there is very little onscreen grieving - an early shot of the bereaved gazing longingly at the unoccupied pillow beside her (with a worn-out tissue at hand) and a subsequent still giving a face to the deceased, via a framed photograph, supply us with enough information to fill in all of the crucial narrative blanks, but what we're shown is largely a series of empty spaces, the remnants of a life vacated and abandoned. Clothes hung within a closet, no longer worn, a vacant spot in a garage that presumably once housed two vehicles, an unfilled chair beside a pair of unfilled slippers. The personality of the deceased is communicated through the array of personal items he leaves behind - we can deduce that he was a keen outdoorsman, as implied by the stack of books on fly fishing and the pair of binoculars glimpsed on the bedroom shelf. Meanwhile, the assortment of artefacts scattered around his photograph (car keys, rings, wristwatch, pocket journal) appear to have been arranged as a monument to the life he led, being the items he kept closest to him at all times, while forebodingly indicating the accidental nature of his death (since these were in likelihood the items found about his person in the aftermath).

Compared to D&DWL, the emphasis is not explicitly on the life attempting to function in the aftermath of the tragedy, although the loneliness of the grieving spouse is omnipresent within the subtext of the images - the two chairs at the breakfast table, only one of which has crockery set before it, and the solitary car in the garage. We are all throughout seeing snapshots of her corrupted world, of the rawness of waking up into a home where her husband should be, but isn't, and yet still feels so tauntingly near through these innumerable tokens of his existence. The colourlessness of the images suggest an emotional austerity, while their stillness suggests inertia. We might be put in mind of the D&DWL film "Jenny", which illustrated how both the comatose Jenny and her quietly devastated mother were prisoners of a mutual entrapment, for "Mourning" conveys a similar sense of two intertwined lives that have been brought to a standstill - the husband whose life has literally been reduced to an assortment of inanimate artefacts and the spouse who has become a part of this deserted landscape, its crushing emptiness now her lived reality. The tragedy only deepens as we venture beyond the house and encounter a pair of wellington boots that presumably belonged to the deceased, and beside them a much smaller pair, the advert's sole indication that there may be a bereaved child in this equation. Given that the smaller boots are also shown unoccupied, there are multiple ways of interpreting this particular image - as a glimpse the spouse's interior world, it could be a symbol for the child they will never have. Alternatively, it could point to a child in the present who can no longer follow in their father's footsteps (both literally and figuratively) now that his role as a mentor and protective figure has been voided. In either case, the invisible child stands for the cancelled future. I note with some curiosity that this is also the still with which the text "Naturally, we like you take a drink" is juxtaposed, perhaps implanting the subliminal message that Seagram can be seen as a nurturing entity to the consumer, offering them pleasurable watering but also protective guidance on where to draw the line.

As we journey deeper into the grounds surrounding the house, we happen across a lawnmower left out upon the grass, possibly indicating some unfinished business on the part of the deceased, although it may have a more disquieting significance still. Our final image is of a tennis court, with leaves scattered across one half, as a ladder seen to the left of the court points to a trimming job that our deceased protagonist was unable to complete before his accident. It is here that the fateful text "And never when driving" appears onscreen. Something that "Mourning" obviously lacks is imagery overtly tying the featured grief to a drink driving accident - in lieu of this, the debris upon the tennis court appears to substitute for the wreckage of the crash, with the unsecured gate in the foreground suggesting an inattentiveness to safety. It is a poignantly understated means of illustrating what went wrong. That only one side of the court should be covered in leaves is yet another emblem of that broken union between the deceased and bereaved, this site of vibrant play now off-limits to them both. There is a solemn irony in the insinuation that the garden, traditionally a place of regrowth and rebirth, should serve as our final symbol of stifling devastation. The deserted lawnmower and scattered leaves are indicators of a battle against a metaphorical wilderness that has already been lost, the disordered garden signifying the dangers that lay outside the safety of home in the allure of those alcoholic beverages (whether Seagram brand or otherwise) and their potential for calamity when combined with driving. At the same time, we sense that this is only the beginning, and that the garden is about to fall into a even deeper state of disrepair. The lawn will get evermore overgrown and the volume of leaves on the tennis court will merely increase, as this erstwhile paradise becomes all the more lost and buried in the passage of time.

"The Mourning After" is an oddity, sure, but a supremely affecting and intriguing one. It was acclaimed at the time of its debut, picking up a British Arrow Award in 1983, and while it since seems to have fallen into obscurity, I reckon it deserves to be remembered and celebrated. As its legacy, Farnon's "Recollections" will forever be a track that tears hard on my heartstrings.

Note: At least two versions of the ad exist, the only difference being Seagram's parting words at the end. In one they wish us a safe Christmas. In the other, a safe New Year. Presumably they were swapped out according to whichever occasion for intoxicated revelry was next on the horizon.

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, noting that any keys left in the ignition have been invariably returned by would-be Good Samaritans. 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.