Maxwell House (We Don't Like Change, Do We Deirdre?)

The Maxwell House "Deirdre" ad from 1994 is one of those campaigns that didn't really catch on with zeitgeist in any significant way, but that I've found definitely made a quieter impression on the people who saw it - particularly if, like myself, they were young and ultra-susceptible to a gloriously uncanny sign-off. For many years, my quest to locate the Imperial Leather spot about the dishonest minimalists that had so unsettled me in 1996 was impeded by the problem that no one besides myself seemed to so much as remember the premise (much less the brand it was promoting). If I mentioned this freaky black and white ad from the mid-1990s about a couple who lived in a surreal abode and were concealing bars of luxury soap from one another beneath the plant pots beside their bathtub, I was met with blank stares all around. But if I brought up the mid-90s ad about another couple who lived in an eerily drab living room and were complaining about their next door neighbours and how they'd stopped liking them ever since they'd switched coffee brands, then it was a different story entirely: "Oh bloody hell! Yes, I remember, that advert scared the crap out me. That freeze frame at the end was diabolical!" I wouldn't go so far as to claim that the eponymous "Deirdre" ever gave me nightmares as a child, but I do have distinct memories of waking up in the early hours, Skinamarink-style, and being haunted by the mental image of her monstrously contorted face in the darkness. I was certainly old enough to know that there was no way that that woman was going to emerge from the television and devour me, but in practice that mattered little. She had already gotten to me where I felt most powerless. She was, without doubt, one of the most terrifying presences to stalk the advertising airwaves in the 1990s, and I say it's high time we gave her her flowers.

There is actually quite a bit of thematic overlap between the "Dierdre" ad and the aforementioned Imperial Leather "minimalist" ad, in that we glimpse their respective products from primarily the perspective of people who would, on the surface, be inclined to shun such things. We could even combine them with the Toyota Roadster "ascetic" ad from 2000 to form a lose sort of trilogy of advertising scenarios regarding people leading deliberately spartan existences, in which said product acquired a haunting and/or intrusive presence as a sinfully destructive item to be resisted at all costs. They were all profoundly odd and disconcerting pieces that hinged on a tension between abstinence and clandestine desire in a way that clearly rattled me at various stages of my childhood development. In the ascetic's case, he lived alone out in the wilderness and had only himself to answer to for his lurid Roadster-inspired fantasies (and, in the extended cut, the suit and tie he had stashed away), but the other two involved deception amongst couples who'd made a conscious decision to forgo certain creature comforts, whether as a bold lifestyle statement or out of a sense of social superiority. For the Imperial Leather minimalists, the deception was mutual (and potentially something that both parties were fully aware of), but in "Deirdre" it was a joke that only one partner was tauntingly in on. Of the three, "Deirdre" is the most overtly comedic, but it's also by and far the most hair-raising, both on account of the fiendish sting in its tail and the repeated atmospheric dissonance to which it subjects viewers on the route to its psyche-scarring payoff.

The genius of "Deirdre" is that it effectively gives you two ads in one. One is breezy and conventional, the other is arch and sardonic. They represent the opposing characters of two different households, which are intercut with an incongruity so jarring as to evoke the sensation of flicking back and forth between two channels. The couples in question frankly don't feel as though they could inhabit the same universe, let alone live side by side on the same street. The Maxwell-drinking couple (never named, but we'll deem them our "protagonist couple", on account of them being the ones we're supposed to want to emulate) are presented in a succession of exuberant cuts that call to the mind the types of ad campaigns that would have populated breaks a few years back, when the 80s were transitioning into the 90s and there was an extensive reliance on upbeat jingles and sun-kissed images (for an example from Maxwell House's own arsenal, check out "Get The Max" from 1988). The time we spend with the protagonist couple is agreeable, if utterly banal. Taken on their own, it's a straightforward demonstration of how an activity as mundane as downing a morning cup of Joe might become an invaluable ritual in reaffirming familial connections and greeting the possibilities that each new day has to offer, with only the excessive jauntiness of the accompanying music track suggesting any kind of parodic intention. The cliched nature of the images is given a more thorough recontextualisation through the input of our antagonist couple, who comment on the action from their own lustreless confines. The bespectacled husband (also unnamed) is the only one who speaks, while the wife (she's Deirdre) stands expressionless in the backdrop. In their pre-Maxwell days, the protagonist couple were apparently just like them ("our sort of people"). The tale of how they changed their coffee and in the process ceased to be the kind of neighbours the antagonist couple could jibe with is revealed to us as though the husband were divulging some form of community-rocking scandal, with the final assurance that, "We try to avoid them nowadays".

Already there is an atmospheric unease, generated by the rapid intercutting of the motion and blaring party music characterising the coffee-induced euphoria next door and the silent inertia conveying the coldly puritanical flavour of the antagonist couple's lifestyle. It will likely not escape us that the protagonist couple are always seen surrounded by greenery, embracing the open world, while the antagonist couple never venture from their living room, making them prisoners of their own close-mindedness. But it also rests on a tension between what plays like a feverishly heightened fantasy and a cartoonishly tedious reality. Neither side feels particularly real. For all of their vapidity, the scenes with the protagonist couple have a surreal, dream-like quality, suggesting an exaggerated proposal for how a consumer product could transform your life, and with the framing commentary from the antagonist couple implying a self-awareness on the ad's part of its own falseness. The antagonists' world has, on the one hand, a stronger grounding in reality, with its lack of music and frenetic energy, but that's negated by the humorously caricatured nature of their conservatism. Although the two worlds appear to be at total odds, they represent the perfect balancing act - the make-believe paradise of the protagonist couple is both a knowing joke and a sympathetic refuge from the overbearing austerity next door. The antagonists' angle might give us an outlet for sneering at the more banal advertising conventions in which the protagonists are revel, but they themselves are ultimately too grotesque to elicit much affinity.

Which takes us to our infamous ending. A third-person voice-over imparts the slogan, "The full of beans coffee for full beans people", suggesting that this is the fundamental distinction being drawn between the two sides. Some people are "full of beans", possessing all of the enthusiasm for life that Maxwell House typifies, and those who aren't a part of that privileged group will simply not get it. The closing twist, however, implies that it is a potential that just about anybody can unlock. The antagonist husband acknowledges his wife for the first time: "We don't like change, do we, Deirdre?" Deirdre has spent the entire ad in silence, which ostensibly signals accordance with her husband's sneery sentiments. In the final seconds, she maintains her silence, but gets in the last word regardless. Her face alters dramatically as she holds up a jar of the forbidden product and demonstrates where her own allegiances truly lie. She is willing to embrace the Maxwell House revolution, if literally behind her husband's back, and change is coming, whether he's ready for it or not. While her husband embodies the smug front of people set in her ways, Deirdre expresses the latent potential yearning to break free.

As a twist, it seems cute and logical, but the execution is disproportionately terrifying. Deirdre doesn't merely hold up the jar of freeze-dried beans with an air of surreptitious triumph. Her face contorts horrifically, in a manner that is presumably intended to indicate an intense and uninhibited elation bursting belatedly to the surface. In practice, she looks like she's possessed, a testament to the twisted power of the Maxwell House brand and its ability to warp everything around it beyond recognition. It was an expression that sent shivers down the spines of numerous young viewers, its horrors amplified in how it ultimately insisted on lingering as a static freeze frame. I swear that the folks responsible for cutting together advertising blocks knew exactly what they were doing and had a penchant for inserting it right at the end so that the final image would be prolonged even further. It seemed to persist for an eternity regardless, a perfect vision of unfiltered monstrosity forever etched onto my brain, ready to strike whenever I was feeling particularly vulnerable. I don't think that closing sense of dread was entirely accidental either. The way Deirdre is holding up the jar at the end, it frankly looks as though she could use it to bonk her oblivious husband on the head. Maxwell House becomes a deadly invading presence, and the husband's determination to keep it at bay has, unbeknownst to him, proved painfully futile. It is already much closer than he thinks, right behind him inside his seeming place of safety. The barriers have been eradicated and we're left with an uncanny intersection between the exaggerated caricatures of one world and the excessive animation of the other. A distressing transformation indeed. 

The original Deidre ad is the only one I remember seeing at the time, but there was indeed an entire series spun around the premise, in which the husband got to exercise his equal disdain for Noel Edmonds (who'd also infiltrated their house without his knowing and was unambiguously looking to strike his head with the jar of Maxwell House) and for Penguins (the brand of chocolate-coated tea biscuit and not the bird, although odds are that he didn't care for them much either). I'm not 100% sure, but I could swear the actress who played Deirdre kept changing with new installment - a subtle commentary on the inevitably of change and the husband's ongoing obliviousness? And then there was at least one ad that swapped out the cast entirely, centring on a different set of couples divided by Maxwell House, and with a holiday-making theme. The protagonist couple were there identified as "Ron" and "Fran", with Deirdre having been supplanted by "Laura". The antagonist husband still went unnamed, but here had acquired a wetter sense of humor to go with his new rain-soaked environs. I'm not sure, but I think this might have been the only installment in which the husband actually cottoned on to his wife's being a closet Maxwell drinker. "This isn't our usual coffee, Laura? LAURA!!!" 

 

 

Two versions of the original ad existed, one 46 seconds in length, the other a shorter 30 second edit, which saved time by trimming down the sequences with the protagonist couple, including only one iteration of the "full of beans" catchphrase and, most curiously, using alternate takes of the antagonist couple, in which their dialogue was more concise ("Could changing their coffee be responsible for this distressing transformation?" becomes "Could changing their coffee have changed them?", and "We try to avoid them nowadays," becomes a more definite "We avoid them nowadays"). The husband's closing expression also differs slightly between the versions, with him gazing more intently at the camera in the longer cut and in the shorter wearing a look of self-satisfied complacency. No massive differences to report between Deirdre's final poses, but for what it's worth I'd rate her as being all the more purely terrifying in the shorter version.

There's No Disgrace Like Home (aka I Thought We Were Making Real Progress)

"There's No Disgrace Like Home" (7G04) is a Simpsons episode of multiple paradoxes - not least, that it provides such an honest and illuminating glimpse into the central family's dynamics while presenting a version of the family that might have come from a parallel universe, in which a number of the key roles associated with each member have been rearranged. Writer Mike Reiss sums it up neatly on the DVD commentary: "Virtually everything in this episode is wrong in the perspective of the show as it became. Lisa's a brat and Marge is a drunk and Homer's the most concerned family member." Watching the episode, only the fourth in the series' gargantuan run, it is certainly evident how loosely defined most of the characters still were following on from their origins in a collection of skits from The Tracey Ullman Show. The Ullman shorts had overwhelmingly tended to favour Bart's brash young perspective, with Lisa seldom receiving much development beyond her status as a middle child for Bart to bounce off of, while Marge's name was never spoken. Homer's personality was a bit better formed, but he was, in the beginning, defined largely by how Bart saw him, which was as a buffoonish would-be authority figure who endeavored to maintain order within the family but rarely succeeded. Coming out of The Tracey Ullman Show, the premise of Homer being willing to part ways with the household television in order to fund a family therapy session with a dubious-looking shrink really wasn't all that strange, although that's immaterial to a chunk of the fanbase. Like all of Season 1, "There's No Disgrace Like Home" is undervalued by modern viewers, but it attracts a particular flak, from fans who regard its more rudimentary interpretation of the characters as insurmountable. Even those who appreciate that character development isn't always a smooth process tend to dismiss it as a weird and redundant relic of another era, a view that I personally consider short-sighted. Having laid out its peculiarities at the start of the commentary, Reiss closes by concording with co-writer Al Jean and series creator Matt Groening that the episode itself still holds up well, and I agree. Even if "Disgrace" doesn't nail down everything about the Simpsons as we'd come to know them, it's earned its flowers as one of those quintessential episodes that took massive leaps in solidifying the series' heart and soul.

The paradoxical nature of "Disgrace" is further exemplified through its particular significance to the series' UK broadcast history, it being the first episode to air on BBC One, on 23rd November 1996. This ended a six-year period in which The Simpsons had been retained as an exclusive perk for Sky subscribers, and for mainstream UK audiences would have been their first real opportunity to get acquainted with the likes of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie. It's fair to say that the Beeb's ordering of the series was, to begin with, aggressively scattershot. The enlarged gap between the show's satellite and terrestrial premieres meant that there was already an extensive backlog to get through, and rather than adhere to the original US order, or any kind of logical order at all, they were quite happy to jump about between the early seasons - the next few episodes to air across the remainder of 1996 were "Bart The Daredevil" (Season 2), "The Call of The Simpsons" (Season 1), "Lisa's Substitute" (Season 2), "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" (Season 1) and "A Streetcar Named Marge" (Season 4). It isn't hard to comprehend why they'd wanted to defer the Christmas episode, which launched the show in the US, until later in December, but can we make sense of any of the other choices here? Were they just pulling episodes at random out of a hat, or was somebody making a conscious decision about which of these installments went out when? Looking at that line-up, I do wonder if there was perhaps a deliberate effort to get the series off to the strongest possible start by prioritising episodes that might be considered "fan favourites", hence the likes of "Bart The Daredevil" and "Lisa's Substitute" being bumped to the front of the queue. The former has that indelible ending sequence where Homer takes a tumble down a gorge, while the latter has a reputation as one of the show's most emotionally searing entries. "The Call of The Simpsons", meanwhile, sticks out as arguably the most purely farcical of the early episodes, while "A Streetcar Named Marge" boasted one of the series' biggest and most ambitious finales to date, in which the characters enact a musical rendition of A Streetcar Named Desire. It does feel like a carefully-curated portfolio of everything the show could do, ensuring that BBC viewers got a compact snapshot of how effectively it functioned as both an anarchic comedy and as a heart-rending drama. If true, then the implication would be that "Disgrace" was hand-picked as the ideal introduction to the series, the episode that best encapsulated who the Simpsons were and what their adventures had to offer - a bitterly ironic move, given how everyone who views this episode nowadays invariably complains about how unrepresentative it is of the characters we've since come to know and love? Or were the BBC in fact onto a good wicket?

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that "There's No Disgrace Like Home" really was the perfect episode with which to kick-start the series. "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" did the job just fine, but an obvious limitation that episode had as an introduction is that it is predominantly a Bart and Homer show, with the Simpson women having to sit around the living room for the bulk of the duration. By contrast, the producers' original choice for the premiere, "Some Enchanted Evening", feels like it was consciously designed to be an ensemble episode, with every member of the family (Maggie included) getting to do something to further the narrative, but as a hypothetical pilot always had two key factors working against it. It gets a bit uncharacteristically dark and threatening in its second half, once Ms Botz enters the scene, and as for the first half, I'd question of the wisdom of launching the series with such a close and uncomfortable look at the problems underpinning Homer and Marge's union.  It was also fundamentally a tale of the family divided, with the kids being left to fend for themselves against a dangerous home invader while Homer and Marge are off resolving a conflict of a different nature - whereas "Disgrace" has the honor of being the first Simpsons episode interested foremost in exploring what makes the family work as a unit. That is its major strength, and why ultimately it doesn't matter if the family, as individuals, aren't entirely in line with their subsequent characterisations. "Disgrace" is more concerned with what makes them collectively the Simpsons, the unified front weathering the judgements of the external world and undercutting its various hypocrisies. It exemplifies the anarchic spirit that differentiated the show from its contemporaries, for what could be more subversive than a climax where the family are seen administering electric shocks to one another with wild abandon? But it's also a redemption narrative, ending on a note of genuine if wryly unconventional triumph, emphasising why this endlessly imperfect clan should speak so sincerely to our innermost psyches.

"Disgrace" also stands out as the installment most conspicuously informed by one of the original Tracey Ullman shorts, in that it is a loose sort of remake of the "Family Therapy" short where Homer tricks his family into attending a session with a psychologist named B.F. Sherwood, seeking to remedy the fact that they don't laugh any more. In both adventures, the solution to the family's problem is to come together against a common adversary, exposing the weaknesses of the hapless authority tasked with guiding them to a better standard of behaviour and confirming that, actually, the rest of the world is every bit as screwed up and chaotic as them. "Family Therapy" emphasised this point by making Sherwood yet another doppelganger of Homer's (being a slimmer, more successful Homer makes him the precursor to Herb Powell, who, as we've discussed, was the precursor to Frank Grimes, in a perfect chain of increasingly bitter self-loathing). Wearing a suit and tie and occupying his own office didn't preclude the fact that there was a raging simian in him looking for an outlet, and he was able to call Homer out so bluntly on his bullying of his children because deep down inside he was no better than him. "Disgrace" refines the premise in a way that makes the Simpsons themselves less antagonistic - other than being whacked by Bart with a de-foamed rod, Dr Marvin Monroe isn't placed so directly on the receiving end of their vindictive anguish. Rather than be provoked into behaving in the same unruly manner as his patients, he's exposed as a huckster peddling a facile vision of bliss, and the family one-up him by discovering that there is plenty of joy and unity to be had in embracing their imperfect selves.

Truth be told, I think a lot of the charges about the family being out of character in this episode are superficial at best. The only one that stands out as particularly egregious is the plot point of Homer wanting to sell the television set for therapy money, a development the story at least manages to justify thematically. But is there anything else in here worth getting overly hung up upon? Sure, we get two or three instances of Lisa bickering childishly with Bart, something that would all but die out as her personality matured and their sibling relationship mellowed, but she isn't completely unrecognisable either. "Disgrace" sees her taking distinct steps toward becoming her own character, touching briefly on her college ambitions and her melancholic realisation that the odds were always stacked against her ("There go my young girl dreams of Vassar"^[1]). As for Marge getting drunk, let's be fair - that much is explicitly framed as being an out of character occurrence within context. Marge states that she generally isn't much of a drinker, and judging by the outcome here it's not hard to see why. She really can't take her fruit punch (much like how she can't keep her gambling impulses in check once she's crossed that most treacherous of lines). But even then, it's not like she does anything especially untoward while intoxicated, just lead the other women in a sing-song and clap too enthusiastically during a round of applause. It isn't on a par with, say, Homer's drunken behaviour at the party in "The War of The Simpsons", which overshadowed the whole occasion and made it an uncomfortable experience for everybody present. Here, the other families look a little perturbed during Marge's protracted clapping, but I guarantee they immediately forgot about it.

Where you most feel the roughness of the show in "Disgrace" is less in the characterisation of the main family than in the wider world-building, which within the more limited scope of the Ullman shorts was even vaguer and more undefined. "Homer's Odyssey" before it had done much in establishing the kind of place that Springfield was as a community, giving us a glimpse into its pollutant-belching power plant, its incompetent police department and its neighbourhoods of unconcerned bystanders, but we still had a way to go in cementing who was who within the town. Mr Burns is present (albeit still more of a Ronald Reagan caricature than he would later become), as is Smithers, but Lenny, Carl and Charlie weren't introduced until much later in the season, so for now we have to make do with a bunch of random nobodies at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant's company family picnic. The Flanders likewise didn't exist at this point - viewers had previously met Ned and Todd in "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", but only because that episode was shown out of its intended order - necessitating the creation of a one-off "perfect" family who could put the Simpsons in the shade with their impeccable harmony (this family are never explicitly named, but according to the commentary they're the Gammills, after Reiss and Jean's friend Tom Gammill who later became a writer on the show). Even some of the familiar faces don't seem entirely on model, in particular Barney, who is here a surprisingly mean character (he's not usually one to look down his nose at Homer for his domestic failings, much less get physically violent with him). On the flip side, this episode marks the introduction of Lou and Eddie, Chief Wiggum's underlings, and while Lou is wrongly depicted as Caucasian, their personalities are nailed straight off the bat. Both are more preoccupied with downing beers than with their duties as police officers, and their German shepherd Bobo (who sadly didn't stick around) clearly has more brains than either of them.

From my perspective, the moment in "Disgrace" that aged the least elegantly would be our first ever reference to Mona Simpson, Homer's absent and (at the time) presumed deceased mother. Homer makes a comment that's meant to give us some insight into the kind of upbringing he had, and from the sounds of it, they were possibly envisioning her as more of a female Abe - apparently, she once told Homer that he was "a big disappointment". We don't know how old Reiss and Jean envisioned the disparaged young Homer as having been when they wrote that particular piece of dialogue, but "Mother Simpson" of Season 7 would later establish that Mona was out of Homer's life when he was still a small child, so...that's a harsh thing to have to contemplate retroactively. With hindsight, it would have been more in keeping with Abe's parenting approach for that assessment to have come from him, but it's also clear that Homer attaches a certain reverence to his mother's words that he wouldn't necessarily do with Abe.

Regardless of who planted the initial seed, Homer's deep-rooted feelings of inadequacy are the driving force behind the drama of "Disgrace", as they were in "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" and "Homer's Odyssey". In those episodes, it was his failure to be a first-rate breadwinner for his family that fuelled his desperation, whereas in "Disgrace" it's the family themselves who've become the impediment, holding him back from achieving his full potential as a breadwinner and upstanding member of society. He feels the weight of that judgement at the company picnic, where Burns alternately chooses to fire or promote his employees based how good impression their children make (again, a preoccupation that seems out of sync with his later characterisation, in which he's completely detached from the lives of the common people, but it works within the context of this particular conflict). After an afternoon of chasing two over-stimulated kids around Burns' estate and trying to keep his intoxicated wife from attracting too much attention, Homer is struck by the respect and devotion paid to Mr Gammill by his ultra-polite son. As they head toward their cars, Homer confides in Mr Gammill what a relief it is to be leaving the picnic so that they can get back to being themselves, and is met with only contempt and confusion in return; Gammill is offended by the insinuation that his family's spotless behaviour was nothing more than a performance to get into Burns' good graces. We know that Homer wasn't being malicious in proposing as such, but was rather reaching out for the reassurance that he isn't doing things so spectacularly wrong and that all families, no matter how well-scrubbed on the surface, are cursed with the same challenges as his own. Gammill offers him no such solidarity, and instead seems to confirm his worst fears - that the kind of brood he's raising is a reflection of his own merits as a patriarch, and that if his family aren't up to snuff in the eyes of society, he'll be condemned along with them. This anxiety is sublimely illustrated in a fantasy sequence where the Simpsons are transformed into cackling demons, beckoning Homer into their Hell-bound vehicle on the insistence that he is assuredly one of them, while the Gammills, ever the precursors to the Flanders (and so unbearably wholesome that they sing "B-I-N-G-O" as they drive away, a stark contrast to the Simpsons' Freaks-inspired chanting), acquire angelic wings and halos and ascend into a heavenly light. Homer is inspired to try and teach his family better manners, but ironically causes them to degenerate further. His solution is to take them out spying on other families in the neighbourhood, hoping to give them a first-hand glimpse into the natural bliss most other households are able to attain within their natural habitats, prompting the community to raise alerts about a gaggle of peeping toms in the vicinity. Their ill-fated tour of the neighbourhood ends with an inevitable return to where they started - they approach their own house, where Homer gets to express further self-loathing by joking about having trampled the residing sucker's flower bed before realising where he is. The reality that all roads lead back to the disorder exemplified by the Simpsons is entirely inescapable. 

Because here's the thing. Homer was right about the Gammills. Their presentation as the happiest, most perfect of families is a facade. This is confirmed in a subtle but extremely telling visual gag, when we later see them in the waiting room of Monroe's clinic, all wearing distinctly sour expressions on their faces and all refusing to look one another in the eye. We can only speculate as to what's really going on behind closed doors with this clan (perhaps, much like the Lovejoys, the pressure of having to maintain their public facade is precisely what's causing them to crack). As it turns out, Homer has spent the narrative in pursuit of a mythical vision of the family that never existed, bearing out Lisa's assertion that "The sad truth is all families are like us." The final arrangement with the Gammills is not something the script explicitly highlights, leaving the viewer to take note and to draw their own conclusions, but it encapsulates the core message of "Disgrace", in having us contemplate why our sympathies should be so firmly with those ragtag Simpsons, and why it brings us such smug satisfaction to see the Gammills brought down to Earth. It is, naturally, so easy to see ourselves in the Simpsons' fallibility - the chant of "One of us! One of us!" that dominates Homer's hellacious fantasy is directed not just at Homer, but the audience as well, and by the end we can see that it's no bad thing. Monroe cannot fix the Simpsons, even after subjecting them to the most unorthodox, B. F. Skinner-inspired aversion therapy techniques designed to teach them gentler behaviour through operant conditioning ("I'll have plenty of time to explain while I warm up the electric generator"). Finding them uniformly prepared to shock one another without inhibition, and with no sign of slowing down, he's eventually forced to (literally) pull the plug and ask them to leave. Unbeknownst to Monroe, his efforts have failed not because the Simpsons are the worst of the worst and beyond all help, but because they never needed fixing the first place - even if this was something Homer jeopardised by depriving them of their beloved TV.

The moral of "Disgrace" is that the Simpsons were always basically fine. They might not be perfect, but as the the outcome at Monroe's clinic demonstrates, accepting imperfection is often a healthier and more fulfilling option than endeavoring to keep it buried. It's the family's ability to accommodate imperfection that makes them feel so real, and the episode's grasp on that fundamental point that causes it to hold up as such a quintessential Simpsons installment, with the quibbles about the family's individual characterisations all being small potatoes by comparison. The laws of nature say that we should expect families to have their share of messiness mixed in with the tireless devotion (just look at those bald eaglets the Simpsons watch on their television, who are entirely dependent on their mother regurgitating the food their father has worked so hard to bring to them) and, whatever their failings, there is an innate warmth and honesty in how the Simpsons are depicted. While they might not express it as performatively as the Gammills, there is also clearly a love and understanding where it most counts. They certainly come off better than the odious mother at the punch bowl who openly brags about how she plays her two children off one another for her affections: "I don't know who to love more - my son Joshua, who's captain of the football team, or my daughter Amber, who got the lead in the school play. Usually I'd use their grades as a tiebreaker, but they both got straight As this term, so what's a mother to do?" Well, for starters you're supposed to love your children equally and unconditionally, and that's something that Homer and Marge absolutely do (the subsequent running gag where Homer will intermittently fail to acknowledge Maggie's existence notwithstanding). We never meet Joshua or Amber, but you can tell that those poor kids are being set up for a wad of therapy as they enter adulthood. Even the Simpsons doppelgangers seen emerging from a session with Monroe, supposedly cured of their domestic strife, don't seem entirely genuine, talking in a way that seems more informed by Monroe's jargon than any actual connection with each other.

Running parallel to the episode's observations on the expectations and realities of family living is a witty critique of modern culture's dependence on and worship of the television. We see signs of this at the company picnic, when Marge is persuaded to leave Maggie in the designated nursery with the other babies, and with a screen playing episodes of The Happy Little Elves in lieu of human supervision. Later on, Homer finds himself competing with the television for command of his family, twice interrupting their viewing for his fruitless attempts at modifying their behaviour, and eventually resolving to pawn the television so that they can attend Monroe's therapy, much against their impassioned protests. On one level, this makes sense, for Homer recognises that the television has effectively supplanted him as the household patriarch. It maintains the equilibrium in a way that he couldn't hope to, and not only would his children sooner listen to it than to him, Marge even proposes that they pawn her engagement ring in its place, symbolically suggesting that the television takes precedent over their relationship. Furthermore, there's the implication that the television has gone so far as to assume the place in day to day life that might once traditionally have been occupied by a deity, with the ritual of sitting devotedly before the television with a dinner tray in hand having replaced the bygone practice of eating at the table after saying grace. The slight paradox in Homer's crusade is that he is shown to partake in this same idolatry, being as dependent upon the television's teachings as everybody else around him. In one scene, he implores the omnivorous man upstairs for an answer to his personal crisis and is met with only silence. He sees a promotion for Monroe's clinic on the television at Moe's bar and enthusiastically declares that the answers to life's problems are invariably to be found on TV. When presenting his family with his decided course of action, he claims to have researched the matter thoroughly, and that he has confidence in Monroe because of all the therapist commercials he's perused, his was the best. By sacrificing the television, Homer believes that he is reasserting control over his wayward family, but he's also throwing away a vital lifeline, a move bound to end in trouble. Marge accuses him of driving a stake through the hearts of those who love him, and during Monroe's session the rest of the family are unanimous in identifying Homer as the disturber of their previously-balanced peace.

Homer's paradoxical reverence and disregard for the television is compounded by the implication that the answers it's providing might not necessarily be the most trustworthy. We can tell that Monroe is not, in all odds, the solution to the family's problems, and not just because of the company he keeps (Lisa is mortified that Homer would put any stock in a therapist who advertises on pro-wrestling, prompting Homer to counter with the correction that he actually advertises on boxing, which is a more upmarket sport) but because of the glibness of what he's selling. In his ad, there is an unconvincing tonal dissonance between the grim and only partially exaggerated depiction of the struggles of a family where the father is visibly suffering from clinical depression and Monroe's upbeat promises of easy bliss and hugs. But even as Monroe expectedly transpires to have been full of hot air, the television itself does indeed provide. Homer is able to step up and become the dependable patriarch his family requires by holding Monroe accountable to his ad's guarantee of family bliss or double their money back, thus leaving the doctor hoisted by his own glibness. As they exit the clinic, the family are delighted that their supposed dysfunctionality, the sword that has up until now been wielded against them, has paid off so handsomely. As Lisa puts it, "It's not so much the money as the feeling we earned it". Marge suggests that they head straight to the pawn shop to retrieve their television, but Homer has an even better idea - they can use the money to upgrade to a bigger and better television, one with a 21-inch screen, realistic flesh tones (ha ha, I see what you did there) and a little cart so that they can wheel it in to the dining room on holidays. He has evidently abandoned his stance that the family's dining and television-watching should be kept separate, with the television now being extended a formal position at the table (if only on holidays). Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie are in total accord with the proposal. Homer has earned his family's respect, not by competing with the television, but by aligning with it, becoming the provider who improves his family's lived experiences by taking their TV-viewing to the next level. The final image of "Disgrace" shows the family walking off into the night in unison, their arms all stretched out around each other in a picture of perfect harmony. All it takes is a healthy consideration for every member's place within the household, the chattering cyclops included.

Finally, being such a germinal episode, from the point when The Simpsons was still transitioning from the original Ullman shorts and redefining itself as a stand-alone series, "There's No Disgrace Like Home" has ample of examples of those weird, wonderful and ever-rotating background pictures that used to adorn the walls of each interior shot. Until they settled on that rather nondescript boat painting you used to see so many oddities hanging over the Simpsons' couch. On this occasion it's a tropical island scene, similar to the one they later had up in "Moaning Lisa", although not exactly the same. These paintings are specifically singled out on the DVD commentary as one of those "tragic flaws" the producers were eager to be done with, but I personally like how much life and colour they lent the backgrounds in the early days. I miss the times when you could spot something as quirkily disconcerting as that painting in Monroe's waiting room of the lady sitting with the banjo and the cat, and it was all just part of the broader milieu.

[1] I've seen fans cite another later contradiction, in "The PTA Disbands" of Season 6, when Lisa had graduated to being a Vassar basher, but to that I say that she's allowed to change her mind.

West Country Tales '82: The Beast (aka An Affinity With Solitude)

  

One of the more obscure entries into the BBC's folk horror canon is West Country Tales, an anthology series that aired in two separate runs from 1982 to 1983, and never went on to attain the same classic status as the long-running Ghost Story For Christmas, or even the cult curiosity of the largely junked Dead of Night. A home media release has yet to materialise, and it's ever been subject to late night repeats then they've passed me by. My personal introduction to the series was by way of the Cloud Waste and The Calf track "The Beast" (from the 2013 electronic album Rare Sounds Around Britain Vol 3), which sampled extensively from the West Country Tales episode of the same name. It was a track that spooked the bejesus out of me at the time, with the upshot that the episode itself now holds a special place in my heart. The unique hook of West Country Tales was that the spine-chilling dramas in question were all based on actual events that took place in the titular region of the South West of England...allegedly, anyway. The story goes that BBC South West made a local appeal to members of the public to submit their accounts of the strange and macabre things that had happened to them or to people with whom they'd crossed paths, and these were the results. "The Beast", which aired on 1st March 1982, was written by Kevin Crooks, but credits inspiration to a contribution by G.R. Parkhouse. How much of it came from Parkhouse's contribution and how much was altered in the scripting process is anybody's guess.

I do wonder if the lesser popularity of the series has anything to do with its format, in which narrative detail is related predominantly via voice-over monologue while the bulk of the (fairly minimal) character dialogue is regulated to the status of background noise, and which can be an acquired taste. It's a move that seems designed to hold the viewer at a certain distance, ensuring that we are never quite as immersed in the physical action unfolding before us as we are in the narrator's account of it. The idea is the tales are retained foremost within the realm of oral storytelling, the kind of yarn we might be treated to if we were seated beside a particularly garrulous stranger on a pub stool or an extended train ride, with the accompanying visuals representing the blanks that the listener is required to fill in for themselves. Given the series' origins as a collection of purportedly real-life testimonies, it imposes a detachment between voice-over narration and onscreen drama that implicitly invites the viewer to ponder its objectivity. We come away questioning how much of the truth (that is, assuming the account had any basis in truth to begin with) has been obscured in the telling, either through misremembered details or the pursuit of narrative flair, much as we would if a stranger regaled us with a tall story that had evidently been recited to other listeners on countless prior occasions. West Country Tales endeavors to be less an accurate snapshot of the happenings of the West Country than an affectionate tribute to the lore disposed to circulate in far-flung places, as well as to our capacity to suspend disbelief whenever we like where a story is going.

"The Beast" concerns an unnamed narrator (played by David Gilpin in the present and Jamie Barron in flashbacks, but with Jack Watson supplying the all-important voice-over) who journeys back to the Cornish farmhouse where he grew up, in order to confront the demon of his adolescence. He ends up doing so only vicariously, through the more recent experiences of the cousin who has since taken up residence on the farm. The story can be divided into two distinct acts; in the first, which is the shorter of the two, the protagonist recalls how, at age 15, he ventured out into the wilderness with a shotgun he had acquired without his parents' knowledge, intending to practice his hunting skills, only to himself become the target of the unidentified predator that had been stalking him through the undergrowth. In the second act, the adult narrator, still bewildered by the experience, is reunited with his cousin Jenny (Maggie Green), who recounts how her efforts to establish a peaceful pastoral existence with her husband Bill (Steve Tomlin) were slowly but surely transformed into a waking nightmare, with the realisation that they weren't alone in their country abode. 

The narrator has few specifics to offer about the nature of the titular beast, beyond this one chilling observation: "It was no animal...but then, neither was it human." We learn that its presence is indicated by the ghastly breathing noises it makes, reminiscent of gas escaping from a pipe, and that it has a penchant for savaging livestock, but within the monologue its menace stays vague and undefined, with not so much as a hint of the creature's origins or of what it might actually be. The visual accompaniment narrows it down a bit more extensively - the beast (portrayed by Milton Gaylord Reid) is shown only fleetingly, in a series of rapid and generally unfocussed shots, but we do get a single, clear enough glimpse of it staring at us head-on, in which it appears more-or-less human, but with an uncanny gaze and a pronounced overbite. It's also visibly wearing garments, which seems to undermine the possibility of it being a Sasquatch-like creature. If the visuals are to be trusted as an accurate representation of the narrator's testimony, then the most probable explanation would be that the characters are up against a deranged hermit who doesn't much appreciate having to share his range with pesky interlopers. Something that, while terribly sinister, isn't quite as unknowable a threat as the narrative would suggest. There is, however, a greater subtext to be mined from the tendencies of this human-shaped ravager. Importantly, the beast is persistent. It doesn't relinquish its territory, even as the farm changes hands over the decades. The narrator explains how, after the death of his father, the farmhouse was put up for sale and acquired by a man from upcountry who didn't stay there for long, accepting a smaller price than he paid for it and absconding to his sister in Torquay. In a vacuum, the narrator would not regard this outcome as unusual, noting that newcomers used to the hustle and bustle of urban living often struggle to acclimatise themselves to the stillness of the country; as he puts it, "It takes a lifetime to find an affinity with solitude." Jenny and Bill are not explicitly identified as former city dwellers, but they are, in the narrator's view, every bit as out of place as the abode's latest owners, seeing as it is "far too isolated for a young couple." The narrator's assessment that the beast is neither human nor animal would ostensibly mark it out as an unnatural being, but it is perfectly at home in the land that these outsiders find so unfavourable. Its forbidding, aggressively solitary nature suggests that it and the land are really one and the same, that the beast that menaces the characters throughout the narrative is the personification of the brutal remoteness that makes short work of so many escapism-seeking spirits.

 

The subtext to the narrator's story seems straightforward enough. He's an impulsive young man who aspires to attain "the power over life and death" with a discarded shotgun he has surreptitiously repaired (his father has forbidden him from using his own) and a couple of cartridges he obtained by trading a fountain pen at school. As he concedes, his aim is sadly lacking, his failure to take down a gull flying overhead foreshadowing his more critical ineptitude in venturing deeper into the wilderness. But even before then, one of the sequence's most striking images is a wide shot in which the protagonist is seen to wander ever further into a landscape that increasingly dwarfs him, a sure sign that he is out of his depth. As he leaves, his biggest fear is that he might be spotted by one of his parents, making the eventual ambush from the beast feel like the retribution of parental authority as much as that of a vengeful natural world, the gun he incompetently wields representing a violation against his actual mother and Mother Nature alike. In his case, he encounters trouble because he goes looking for it; to remain at the farmhouse, under the guidance of his parents, is to remain in safety. The surrounding landscape conceals a barrage of dangers that are both beyond his comprehension and his ability to master. It is both a matter of man being put in his place by a nature far greater than himself, and an impetuous youngster getting his first real taste of the tribulations of coming of age.

Jenny's story is more of a puzzle. It is also framed as a matter of youthful naivety losing out to the innate hostility of the world, with the narrator's explicit mention of the couple's callowness as the factor that makes them most vulnerable, and is built primarily around the tension between their expectations of idyllic rural living versus the grimmer reality. They try their hand at raising chickens, to achieve Bill's vision of a "proper farmhouse" breakfast of fresh eggs every morning, something that ends in disaster when Jenny returns home one day to find that a predator has paid a sneaky visit to the coop. Even before this unfortunate occurrence, Jenny is ill at ease with the artefacts of the violence that once characterised everyday life upon the farm, harbouring a special wariness of the piggery that was built 200 years ago, complete with a stone gully for draining the blood of the animals as they were slaughtered. It seems significant that the build-up to the second confrontation with the beast consists of the kinds of mishaps and challenges you might expect to face on the most unexceptional of farms, as opposed to anything too unambiguously strange - unidentified noises in the darkness (any noise can sound unnerving if you don't know where it's coming from), unexplained cracks in the window panes (birds sometimes fly into them), the cat showing up with the tips of its ears chewed off (which, as Bill points out, could have been caused by a run-in with a feral cat), the massacre at the chicken coop (possibly the work of a fox, although the delivery man who first stumbles across the aftermath has his doubts). The strongest evidence that anything uncanny is afoot come via the terrifying scratch marks that Jenny finds upon the outhouse door and the enlarged footprint located in the soil. Bill, who is undeterred in pursuing his rose-tinted dreams of pastoral living, farmhouse breakfast and all, always insists on the rational explanation, but for Jenny they add up to a bigger picture of the land and its inhospitable character, with its capacity to punish as much as provide.

As their perspective of the situation diverges, an emotional gulf develops between the couple (deftly conveyed in a shot that shows them seated at a considerable distance from one another at their dinner table), with Bill's dismissiveness of Jenny's concerns amounting to an insensitivity to her increasing discomfort with their remote existence. To that end, there are definite shades of the "During Barty's Party" episode of Nigel Kneale's 1977 horror anthology series Beasts, in which a country-dwelling couple are menaced by an unseen swarm of  intelligent rats that signify the gnawing prospect of social oblivion (it is the failure of titular radio DJ Barty, the narrative's spokesperson for the outside world, to commit protagonist Angie's name to memory that ultimately dooms her and her husband). This beast too seems to represent the onset of an all-consuming solitude, its attack on the chicken coop being less an assault on Bill's culinary cravings than a brutal silencing of the "familiar clucking" from which Jenny derives some reassurance of companionship and connection. And yet, Jenny's longing for "something tangible to happen" that will bring herself and Bill back together seems to inadvertently align her intentions with that of the beast. The narrative climaxes with Jenny hearing more strange noises in the dead of night and urging Bill to go outside and investigate. He traces the source of the disturbance to the much-dreaded piggery, where he is promptly mauled by the lurking beast. The irony should not escape us that Jenny has sent Bill to his metaphorical slaughter. We are assured that Bill survived the encounter, and that his physical injuries were minor compared to the psychological damage he sustained, although neither the voice-over or the visuals care to elaborate further, with Bill being ominously absent from the framing narrative in the present.

We might notice that the rules of the beast's modus operandi appear to have shifted in between the acts. In the narrator's boyhood account, he encounters the beast precisely because he roams away from the farmhouse, with the insinuation that he would have been safe had he stayed within the bounds set by his parents. Notably, his parents do not seem to have had any trouble with the beast during their tenure at the farmhouse - the narrator's story went disbelieved, and it was only following the death of his father in 1963 that the farm fell into a state of instability. Now most of his family has passed on, with the narrator making it clear that Jenny is his only living relative. Their shared vulnerability in being the last of their family's lineage makes it tempting to read the beast as a metaphor for the prospect of having to navigate a world after our parents' departure. A world in which there is no warm and protective (however strict) abode to return to, and we're left with only our self-sufficiency to lean upon, which even in maturity may not be as up to snuff as we would like to think. The adult Jenny and Bill are certainly no better equipped to deal with the advances of the beast than the teenaged narrator. The house itself, once a symbol of parental control, has ceased to be a place of safety, with the creature having taken to patrolling its vicinity, lingering directly outside the kitchen window, scratching on the doors and infiltrating the chicken coop. An alternative perspective is that Jenny and Bill have violated the retribution to the beast because they too violated the laws of the land, in their case by hosting a lively house warming party shortly after moving in, of the kind that the narrator suspects the house had ever seen before. Such jubilant gregariousness is not the norm within these parts. Perhaps it is simply the realisation that the house was never a place of safety, and that its residents were always as vulnerable within its walls as they were in the wide open, the land on which it sits being the same inhospitable terrain as the nebulous wilderness that surrounds - followed by the realisation that a key part of that menace still lingers on within ourselves.

The most striking shot in Jenny's flashback occurs in the aftermath of the aforementioned party, when Jenny has her first brush with the beast, having heard its unpleasant breathing sounds outside her kitchen window, and also her first inkling of her imperilled connection with Bill, whom she suspects of playing a trick on her. While we glimpse parts of this sequence from the kitchen's warmly-lit interior, it is shown predominantly from the beast's perspective, with voyeuristic views of the occupants from the outside, the glazing bar obscuring them in a manner that feels evocative of exhibits in a zoo. The implication is that Jenny is not so much safe on the inside as she is captive, a beast resigned to a state of perpetual entrapment (this notion of the farmhouse as a place of confinement lends a bitter irony to Bill's longing for free range eggs). Jenny's experiences bring her no closer to that coveted affinity with solitude - to the contrary, in the present day framing device, she seeks out the company of tourists in a crowded tea room - but her unwitting complicity with the beast, in directing Bill into its clutches, is suggestive of a kind of subconscious affinity with her prowling nemesis, of some common instinct that drives the two. The attack becomes an outlet for her own repressed resentment toward both her oblivious husband and her entrapment. The beast looks so eerily human, we suppose, because it encompasses the part of ourselves that originated in the same wilderness that has come to signify the dark unknown; it is the dark and all-too-knowable side of humanity that we were never quite able to leave behind as we made the shift to civilisation. Even as Jenny struggles to reconcile herself with the more bestial side of human nature (hence her hatred of the piggery), she yearns for the freedom the beast possesses, the ability to be a part of the land and not stifled by it.

"The Beast" does not build to a conventional twist in the style of "The Breakdown", a fellow West Country Tales intsllament that adheres more closely to the Tales of The Unexpected mould, complete with a gruesomely macabre punchline. The closest thing it has to offer is the curious lack of a third act - following the catharsis of the climactic confrontation, we might expect some form of concluding revelation to follow in the present, with the narrator and Jenny discovering something more definitive about their mutual tormentor, eg: a possible scrap of local lore shedding light on the creature's nature or its origins. Instead, the epilogue shows only glimpses of the abandoned farmhouse, now a total no-go area, and apparently still on the market despite its price being slashed even more times than poor Bill. The lack of human presence in the closing images confirms that it has been reclaimed by the uncanny stillness that characterises the adjacent space; meanwhile, the beast has slipped back into the obscurity from which it came, the narrator seemingly having accepted their encounters as one of those baffling facts of life that will forever evade closure or comprehension. The wisdom he is instead inclined to draw from Jenny's confidence is that places come with their own hidden baggage, the likes of which a house surveyor cannot possibly prepare us for, and that by settling down in a new abode, we sign ourselves up to be part of its ongoing and perhaps not always agreeable narrative. The final, winking gag on which the story ends derives from the fiendish anonymity it bestows on the pivotal farmhouse, making it representative of the prospective country getaways that litter the entire region: "If you're looking for a place in the West Country, remember this one." The message is clear - if it's peace and escapism we're seeking, maybe we'd be better off taking our chances in the Midlands.

 

 

 

Safeway: Little Harry Learns His ABCs

In 1995 Safeway were ahead of the supermarket pack in launching a loyalty card scheme (beaten to the punch only by Tesco), under the banner of ABC. ABC stood for "Added Bonus Card", but it also suggested simplicity and everything happening in a perfect little sequence. Having one of these in your pocket entitled you to a range of goodies, from in-store discounts to family days out, and naturally we had a Little Harry ad to go along with it. This one differed from the last two Harry ads we looked at, in that it didn't tell the story of a single shopping trip, but was instead comprised of three smaller vignettes designed to give you an idea of the various different applications of the ABC card.

This ad always stood out to me as one of the most memorable of the Little Harry series, on account of the surprisingly vicious shade thrown at Tots TV, a contemporary preschool show on CITV about a trio of puppets named Tilly, Tom and Tiny. A VHS tape containing a collection of their adventures is posited here as a blatantly naff selection next to a sponge cake in the shape of Mr Blobby, one of the reigning champions of 1990s UK zeitgeist. Harry's audacity in looking his mother's gift horse in the mouth had him seeming like quite the subversive soul at the time. A running theme throughout these three vignettes involves Harry one-upping the adults around him with his more discerning sensibilities, further playing on the tension between his deceptively ickle exterior and his acerbic inner monologuing. Being a toddler didn't mean that he was thrilled about being stuck with something as wretchedly unhip as Tots TV when there was discounted Mr Blobby merchandising up for grabs. Obviously the viewer was expected to sympathise with his preference, for if the British public (at least the portion of it that bought CD singles) had chosen Mr Blobby over teen heartthrobs Take That in a recent popularity contest, then what chance did those unassuming puppets have?

I might be talking out of turn here, but I get the impression that Tots TV isn't massively well-remembered nowadays, in spite of its tremendously infectuous theme song. In fact, that entire era of preschool television (the gulf between the demise of Rainbow and the dawn of the Teletubbies and the Tweenies) seems sadly neglected in terms of nostalgia. Nevertheless, could we argue that time has ultimately been kinder to Tilly, Tom and Tiny (even with their secret cottage having been torn down in 2021)? The Mr Blobby phenomenon that ate the UK's brains in the 90s is something that people tend to look back on with quite a bit of leery bemusement, wondering how kids were expected to be anything other than utterly terrified of the character, let alone want to consume anything in his likeness. Personally, I don't feel overly qualified to comment, since I was seldom more than innocent bystander in that whole affair. Somehow or other I never watched Noel's House Party, the program where he originated, and I didn't learn of his proper context - that he was initially conceived as a parody of a children's character, hence his somewhat off-kilter aura, and the feature of a recurring sketch where he was unleashed on unsuspecting celebrities - until long after the fact. I was familiar with Blobby to the extent that he was inescapable back then, but I had very little first-hand experience with the hulking pink demon. Still, I think it's a safe bet that the Tots were always the more sophisticated of the two choices. What says more about the battle for culture lost than a wholesome videotape about three puppets and their lovely donkey being passed over for something as crude and unnourishing as a cake shaped like the creepy humanoid with the Pepto Bismol colour scheme?

The second vignette revolves around an agreeable bit of role reversal, with Harry and his father leafing through the ABC catalogue in the manner of a bedtime story, but with Harry doing all the reading while his father can barely keep his eyes open. Harry wants them to redeem their points on a family cinema ticket, but objects to his parents' practice of tongue-kissing in the back row, which he claims is prohibited by ABC's regulations. The humor lies somewhere between Harry's efforts to usurp the position of parental authority, by insisting that the adults keep their pesky hormones in check, and his guarded awareness of said hormones in the first place.

In the final skit, Harry is addressed as an adult (albeit facetiously) by the Safeway cashier who applies a £8.00 discount to his family's shopping and honors him by letting him hold the prestigious ABC card. Even then, he finds ample room for improvement in the adult establishment, handing the card back and suggesting that they produce one containing the whole alphabet (of course, juxtaposed with the cheeky grin Hanford is exhibiting, Harry comes off as being a mite facetious himself). Ever the avatar for the viewer's inner child, he reminds us that it's good and healthy to have copious amounts of childhood fancy mixed in with our adult discernment. 

And yes, if the "C" in ABC stood for "card", then calling it an ABC card was a classic example of RAS syndrome.

Safeway: Little Harry Goes To Wolverhampton

Little Harry's Safeway adventures continued in an ad (circa 1995) which saw the drolly articulate tyke and his mother enjoying a grand day out in one of the chain's newly-opened superstores, the location of which varied according to which part of the UK you were watching it from. The narration in the embedded YouTube upload gives the shout-out to a Wolverhampton store set to open its doors that August, although the all-purpose footage was adapted to reference a variety of stores in different regions. TV Ark has an upload of a variant promoting a couple of stores in Dumbarton and Glenrothes. Wow, Harry and his mother certainly got around.

The Harry campaign was designed to cement Safeway's reputation as a particularly appealing option for parents accustomed to shopping with small children, by emphasising the various perks they had implemented to make the experience more straightforward (including the "VIP" parent and child parking right beside the entrance). But by aligning the viewer's perspective with that of a toddler coming to grips with the vast world and all of its possibilities, at a time when even something as mundane as pushing a trolley around a stack of groceries seemed novel and exhilarating, it had the additional effect of making setting foot in one of their stores seem like a great and wholesome adventure. Safeway were pushing themselves as the supermarket chain that met all of your needs under one roof, to the point that you, like Harry, were dwarfed by its scope (albeit not to the same inhibiting extent where the wide aisles impeded his ability to interact with the items on the shelves). Harry's remark on assessing the magnitude of the venue - "I hope you cancelled the milk" - has a cunning double meaning, alluding hyperbolically to the possibility that they could be navigating its wares for days, while implicitly suggesting that having milk delivered to your door was a redundant service when you might as well pick it up at Safeway.

Harry's charm as an advertising character lay in his being both a child and an adult at once, the delightfully incongruous combination of Hanford's pint-sized form with Clunes' ultra-dry delivery. Innocence by way of sardonicism, he became the avatar for the inner child of every Safeway consumer whose gut reaction, on seeing balloons handed out, was to anticipate that some kind of party should follow. As it turns out, Safeway had two different parties (of sorts) to offer inside of its stores. One was the more subdued party targetted at adult patrons, a celebration of service and expansive convenience comprised of petrol stations, coffee shops, dry cleaning and all the things that you're expected to embrace as a grown-up. The second was located in the soft play area that serves as the ad's punchline, with the revelation that these Safeway superstores came with a crèche where you could dump the kids, the ultimate dream of any parent who didn't want to have to deal with a fussing toddler and a trolley full of dried penne and tinned peaches at the same time. Harry speaks so deftly to the adults who are still kids at heart that it's actually a little heart-rending, seeing him gazing longingly at the tots on the other side of the glass, unable to access this particular Safeway perk on account of his mum yanking him in another direction. He asks her not to take it the wrong way, but he'd rather stay in the crèche next time, with his repeated unanswered imploring leaving doubts as to whether it's going to happen. He articulates the desires of the wistful adult viewership more than their hyperactive children. Because admit it, no matter what your age, there is a very visceral part of you that likewise envies those kids, as you find yourself yearning for a simpler time when you could bounce relentlessly off of soft surfaces while someone else took care of your material needs. Alas, dry cleaning is where you're at now. You've got to be satisfied with the excitement in that.

Bart's Girlfriend (aka You Can't Trust Your Perception At This Altitude)

"Bart's Girlfriend" (2F04) is yet another Simpsons installment where it might be pertinent to begin our coverage by bearing in mind where everything within is eventually headed. Bart closes the narrative by claiming to have learned something from his experience, but is unable to define what exactly, simply that he's "a little wiser and a little less naive". Based on what actually happens in that final scene, it's safe to say that he hasn't learned a damned thing, and this much shouldn't surprise us. He did, after all, initiate his ill-fated relationship with spotlight character Jessica Lovejoy by demonstrating what a fatally short memory he has, finding himself entranced by her beguiling aura and proclaiming, "I've never felt this way about a girl before". Obviously, this isn't true; when "Bart's Girlfriend" debuted, on November 6 1994, we weren't even a full two years away from his previous crush on hip teen next door Laura Powers in the Season 4 installment "New Kid on The Block". What's more, we had only recently been reminded of the events of said episode in the love-themed collage job "Another Simpsons Clip Show", where the family reflected on their failed romances from the past five years (and with Bart notably having forgotten how his crush on Laura had played out until Marge prompted the awareness back into his brain). The lesson Bart explicitly took from the reminiscing in "Another Simpsons Clip Show" is that being on the pointy end of Cupid's arrow invariably screws you up, and while he would have done well to have heeded his own words, after laying eyes on Jessica he evidently couldn't help himself. Well, that's amore. Suddenly the entire interlude with Laura has faded into irrelevancy and he's ready to get his tender heart ripped out all over again. And if he thought the outcome of "New Kid on The Block" was emotionally wounding, the kid hasn't seen anything yet.

Despite the familiar subject matter, "Bart's Girlfriend" certainly never feels like a retread of "New Kid on The Block", not least because it is a vastly more bitter, more toxic tale than its predecessor. "New Kid" had a fundamental earnestness in its depiction of young infatuation, even in its somewhat sour resolution, which had Bart sabotaging Jimbo's relationship with Laura for entirely petty reasons, and under entirely petty circumstances. It dealt with Bart's nascent attractions in a way that was about looking backwards fondly on the innocence of youth. Bart's victory over Jimbo was in not losing Laura to her adolescent stirrings, convincing her to keep goofing around with him and making prank calls to Moe's when she was at risk of transmuting into the kind of indifferent babysitter who ignores her charges to make out with her boyfriend. "New Kid" ends with Bart and Laura laughing in unison; a two-way romance might be off the table on account of their age gap, but they share a kinship that's affirmed as more enduring and sincere than Laura's ephemeral pull to Jimbo. Bart is also heard laughing during the fade-out from "Bart's Girlfriend", but here that laughter is deceptive and crucially, he laughs by himself. He closes the episode in a lonelier, more inauspicious position than in he did in "New Kid", but seems determined to convince himself that he is somehow the victor. The frustrations that "New Kid" touched on were those primarily associated with childhood and with the anguish of being taken less seriously than your elders, whereas the injustices "Girlfriend" addresses with are implied to be of the ilk that are going to translate into the chronic injustices of life. Bart's insistence that he's come out his ordeal less naive doesn't disguise the fact that he hasn't escaped the cycle at all by the end.

Jessica Lovejoy is at least of the same age as Bart, and in that regard more attainable than Laura before her. The initial roadblock is that she also happens to be the daughter of the town's most prominent religious authority, and there's an assumption that she would gravitate toward someone who is as upstanding a citizen as she is purported to be. Bart's infatuation is so commanding that he's willing to rein in his natural tendencies toward roguery in an effort to impress her, but she still won't give him the time of day. He then discovers the scandalous truth about Jessica, which at first seems better than he'd ever dared to imagine. She's actually a thoroughgoing gremlin who hides behind the facade of sweet-spoken innocence, and Bart thinks he's found in her a kindred spirit - that is, until Jessica's lawlessness transpires to be far more treacherous than even Bart can handle.  

The first of two extraordinarily awesome things about "Bart's Girlfriend" is that the basic plot was inspired by the 1968 film Pretty Poison, starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld. Perkins (typecast from his Psycho association, as is evident from the first minute of the film) plays a young delinquent who falls for the seemingly guileless Weld, only for her to out herself as the more dangerous and predatory of the two. They go over this a little on the DVD commentary, noting that this was the significance of having Jessica twirl a baton in a scene where Bart is confronting her about her behaviour (a nod to Weld's entrance as part of a marching band). The second is that Jessica was voiced by Academy Awards darling Meryl Streep, who achieves something that's honestly very rare among Simpsons guest stars, in that she gives a performance that allows her to disappear completely into the character. As you're watching Jessica, I don't think you're ever consciously aware that it's Streep you're hearing, and if you hadn't looked at the credits, would you even have guessed that it was her? The only other guest voice who leaps out as doing anything halfway comparable would be Streep's Kramer vs. Kramer co-star Dustin Hoffman, as Mr Bergstrom in "Lisa's Substitute" - in his case, he was so set on disappearing into the character that he insisted on being credited under the puntastic moniker of Sam Etic, a move that probably undid his attempts at discretion in the long run (the script also teased him by working in a moment that winkingly evoked his role in The Graduate). With how endemic guest celebrities had already become by this point in the series' lifespan, there was something to be said for any actor who simply wanted to put their all into becoming a denizen of the Simpsons universe, without drawing overt attention to their real-life brand.

I'll admit to having some reservations about how the episode opens. John Collier's script gets things off on a note that's inventive, subversive and a whole lot of fun but then, much like our featured antagonist, insists on taking it to an uncomfortable extreme. I speak of the sequence where the children of Springfield are fleeing the clutches of their parents, desperate to get out of having to spend a sizeable chunk of their precious weekend mired to a church pew, and it turns into an allusion to the scene from Planet of The Apes (1968) where the apes pursue Charlton Heston and friends through the cornfields. The build-up to the gag is simply beautiful. The children are hard at play at the local Veteran's Park (named, according to its signage "in honor of some veterans") when their japery is interrupted by the ominous sounds of church bells and the distant cries of their parents beckoning them to the Sunday service. We first hear Marge call out from off-screen: "Bart! Lisa! Time for church!" Then Luann Van Houten chimes in, with "Milhouse! Time for church!" Finally, an anonymous Jewish voice breaks the pattern: "Shlomo! Time for your violin lesson!" The Apes homage commences, with an inspired shot of Marge stalking Bart through the grasses, where only her hair is visible; the sight of her towering beehive inching closer to the terrified Bart is at once ludicrous and downright menacing. It's when Kirk Van Houten gallops by on horseback and bundles his son up in a mesh while Marge has Bart and Lisa shackled by the neck that I'm thinking that the allusion has maybe become a mite overplayed and the entire sequence suddenly crossed that fine line between energetic waggishness and all-out inanity. Are we to conclude that Marge has literally taken to affixing manacles to the throats of her offspring, or is the moment intended to be at least somewhat impressionistic? At this stage it was difficult to say quite where the line should be drawn in terms of the show's internal reality. But then again, it's hard to deny that the overblown nature of the sequence isn't fully in keeping with how adult authority is characterised throughout "Bart's Girlfriend". Take the ridiculous "Scotchtoberfest" sting operation Skinner uses to bust Bart for a cheeky prank involving helium balloons and Groundskeeper Willie's kilt - a prank that Skinner deliberately went out of his way to orchestrate an opportunity for with the sole intention of slapping Bart with three months' detention (Willie, meanwhile, is far more outraged over Skinner exploiting his Scottish heritage in such a manner). Uglier still is the Hannibal Lecter treatment given to Bart when he's falsely accused of the nefarious crime of stealing from the church collection plate. All in all, there's a cartoonish heavy-handedness to how rules and boundaries are enforced on Springfield's youngest denizens that borders on the grotesque, and seems to nullify any professions on the part of the enforcers to be upholders of righteousness.

 

Adult hypocrisy is at the heart of "Bart's Girlfriend", even with the prepubescent romance being in the foreground, and the episode takes assorted irreverent jabs at the role of organised religion in sustaining these hypocrisies. Marge's assertion that the entire purpose of having the children attend church is to instil in them morals, decency and love for their fellow men is promptly undermined by the sermon Reverend Lovejoy is delivering, which concerns how the Aromites slaughtered their fellow men with flaming swords and cannibalised their pulverised eyeballs (and if you think Jessica comes across as sociopathic, you should check out the bright-eyed glee with which Rod and Todd are receiving his lurid narration). On a more personal level, the incorrigible Jessica is heavily insinuated to be a product of the Lovejoys' reliance on external virtue to cover over more heinous realities. By the show's sixth season we still knew next to nothing about the Lovejoys' private lives (other than that they were repeatedly beleaguered by phone calls from a frantic Ned Flanders), so it wasn't a terribly egregious cheat to reveal that they have a daughter who had been hitherto hidden away at boarding school. Timothy and Helen themselves get only minimal screen time in "Bart's Girlfriend", but the little window Jessica offers into the unseen dynamics of their household is nevertheless illuminating. At first glance, she serves as an extension of the Lovejoys' social superiority, in being a seemingly perfect daughter about whom they can brag ad infinitum. When Bart is invited by Jessica to have dinner with her family, Helen asks him how school is going - a genial enough question in itself, except that she immediately adds, "Jessica always gets straight As", as if to pre-emptively show Bart up for whatever answer he's about to give. Watching the sequence with the episode's numerous twists in mind, it becomes even easier to read this as a knee-jerk denial on Helen's part; she cannot so much as raise the delicate issue of school without having to reassure herself that the situation with Jessica is as flawless as everything else about her. The truth is that the Lovejoys are sitting on a myriad of bombshells when it comes to their daughter, the biggest and most explosive of them all being that Jessica has come home from boarding school because she was expelled. It's a fact that the Lovejoys cannot bring themselves to look in the face, even as it's living right under the same roof as them, and even as Jessica pushes ever more defiantly for her parents to acknowledge her imperfections.

"Girlfriend" also works as a nice little character study for Bart, in examining the nature of his own wayward tendencies and where he senses that the line should be drawn. As Lisa puts it, he's already cemented his reputation as the Devil's cabana boy, a sheep so unrepentantly far from the flock that the church's Sunday school have written him off as a hopeless case. This leads to another of those mistreated hamster jokes that the Simpsons writers are so fond of for some reason, with the implication that Bart had a history of making life difficult for the Sunday school hamster - a gag that frankly feels out of step with Bart's characterisation, since animal abuse is not ordinarily something he goes for, a factor that seems important in establishing that his deviancy is fundamentally about mischief and not malice. He's all about punching upwards at the admonishers of the world, not downwards at tiny creatures that couldn't defend themselves. The itch to sock it to authority in all of its forms is so hard-wired into his neurons that it takes all the restraint he has to spare the Sunday school teacher when she opens up a golden opportunity by handing him a replica of the slingshot David used to slay Goliath before turning around to straighten her desk (an appalling waste it is too, since I'll admit to having a really strong dislike for that teacher, although she's probably at her most tolerable in this episode). Ultimately, he can't even fake it; even when he's intent on making a good impression during his dinner with the Lovejoys, he gets himself unceremoniously ejected for repeating a joke he heard on Fox that contained gratuitous use of the word "butt". Bart clearly isn't one for the angels. But it's those very impulses that make him such an amoral menace in the eyes of the parishioners that also make him vulnerable to the calculating Jessica, once she cottons on to what an ideal fall guy he would be for her lower-key depravity. It's a ready-made narrative the town is all too eager to devour; as she words it to Bart, "I'm the sweet, perfect minister's daughter, and you're just yellow trash."

Jessica, it has to be said, is one heck of an unsettling antagonist. The only Simpsons villain who has her bested in that regard (outside of the Halloween shows) is Ms Botz from "Some Enchanted Evening". She works as well as she does, in part, because the episode is willing to take its time in building up a full picture of her character, so that the viewer is never more than a step ahead than Bart in comprehending quite what he's dealing with. Our first impression of Jessica is that she's a reticent, unassuming kid who's put off by Bart's forwardness, but is willing to extend him her sympathies on witnessing him fall victim to Skinner's sting operation. At the same time, we get miniature hints that there might be more going on with her than meets the eye, such as her somewhat sassy response to Bart's overreaching suggestion that they stay after Sunday school and help the teacher clean up ("Do you ever think anything you don't say?"), and if you look closely, you can see that she's enjoying the way Bart is inadvertently ruffling her parents' feathers at the dinner table. When she reveals to Bart that she's drawn to his unruly nature, for deep down inside she's cut from the same miscreant cloth, it's a natural assumption that she likes him because he represents such a breath of fresh air next to the uptight, excessively pious environment she's been raised in. There's a fleeting interlude where the two are depicted as equals, roaming the streets of Springfield after dark and letting their puckishness hang out to the theme from Pulp Fiction. It becomes apparent that Bart is way out his depth, however, when Jessica later coaxes him into skateboarding down a perilously steep hill, informing him (more tauntingly than reassuringly) that "You can't trust your perception at this altitude." The ensuing sequence is every bit as ludicrously cartoony as the opening Planet of The Apes homage, but the sharp direction and array of slick visual gags are able to sell it as an inspired metaphor for the critical power imbalance that's destined to characterise this relationship, and the disaster for which Bart is now irreversibly headed. Jessica savours the adrenalin rush, while Bart endures a royal grazing on his way down to the bottom, before coming to a (literally) sticky end when a truck full of glue unleashes its contents on him.

At this point, it is still possible to give Jessica the benefit of the doubt, even as we can see that she's clearly not the soul mate to bring validation to Bart's playfully deviant urges. Maybe she's having too much fun and expects Bart to keep up with that, but isn't being purposely cruel. Still, when she commits her most egregious misdeed - pocketing the contents of the church collection plate and setting up Bart to take the rap - I don't think we're particularly shocked, for the girl blatantly has no limits. It's here that the line is explicitly drawn between Bart and Jessica's respective values, for this is a low to which Bart would never stoop; in his words, "You're turning me into a criminal when all I want to be is a petty thug." He might have been tempted to undermine the individual authority of the Sunday School teacher, but swiping the income of the town's most sacred institution is on a whole other level. That plate does, after all, represent the goodwill and generosity of the entire parish (including Homer, who slips in a coupon for 20 cents off Shake n Bake), making it an affront to the community at large. For Jessica, it's something else entirely. It's discernible from the outset that her theft isn't motivated by avarice. She doesn't want the money per se. She is instead playing two games at once, getting to live out her resentment toward her parents, whose authority is intertwined with that of the church, whilst having the thrill of seeing how far she can string her human plaything along. Jessica delights in the power she holds over Bart, and in his inclination toward silence even when he recognises that it is not in his interests to protect her. But then, as she points out, it's not as though Springfield are a particularly understanding or non-judgemental bunch (even when associating with a religion that, as Lisa argues, has something to say about not judging, lest ye be judged). If Bart did speak up, his protests would fall on deaf ears. The town has immediately accepted him as their sticky fingered churchgoer, and are only too eager to inflict on him their typically grotesque and heavy-handed wrath.

As noted, the adults are presented in brutally caricatured terms for much of the narrative, although tempering that are a series of scenes in which Homer and Marge are able to weigh in from the sidelines on Bart's situation. Initially, they echo the optimism of his budding puppy love (at least until Homer's train of thought takes him to the more haunting prospect of having no bananas), before Marge picks up that something in Bart's world has gone sour, but is unable to pinpoint what - although this too takes a bizarrely disturbing turn, when Homer misinterprets Marge's concern about potentially smothering her son all-too literally (and prior to that is so inattentive to the basic details that he attributes Bart's malcontent to glasses that he doesn't even wear, unless he's still got the subplot of "The Last Temptation of Homer" in his head). Even when the adults are trying to be compassionate, an underpinning of unsettling inhumanity can't help but work its way into the proceedings. Marge does at least accept Bart's assertions of innocence over the theft of the collection money, but she also stands back and lets the town do its evil the following Sunday, by trussing him up like a cannibalistic serial killer, in spite her concerns about what it could do to his self-esteem. It fits in with the broader themes of the episode, which have to do with passiveness being adopted as a response to cruelty. On an individual level, Bart is learning helplessness as a means of navigating Jessica's abuses. He lays out a bleak future for himself when he proposes putting up with it for the time being, in the hope that she'll eventually come around to treating him better once they're married and have children. ("After all, I deserve it".) The way this dovetails into the abuses he endures at the hands of the town points to a wider culture of callousness he's expected to fall in line with, of which Jessica is both a product and the tip of the iceberg.

Naturally, Bart finds his strongest alley in Lisa, who urges him not to stay with Jessica on the assumption that he can temper her depravity over time (wisdom she would later go against in "Lisa's Date With Density", although to be fair that was on the insistence of Marge) and who summons the gumption to confront Jessica, but not without having her own values tested in the process. Lisa enters into the ring with the intention of not directly exposing Jessica as the culprit, but instead getting her to confess voluntarily by appealing to her guilty conscience. She immediately runs into a problem, in that Jessica doesn't have a conscience, so Lisa is forced to switch up her tactics and encourage the town to ransack Jessica's bedroom for the stolen money. One bed check later and the evidence is irrefutable, and yet Reverend Lovejoy still persists in attempting to bend the narrative so that it points away from the obvious conclusion. "Bart Simpson has somehow managed to sneak his bedroom into my house!", he protests, before imploring the townspeople to use their imaginations when not even they prove ridiculous enough to buy it. It's here that Jessica comes clean and admits to her father that she did it, describing it as a classic cry for attention. Some viewers have doubts about the sincerity of this plea - we know by now how manipulative she is, and it is a little suspect how she's able to turn on the waterworks in the moment and then switch them off as abruptly - but I think the mask is well and truly dropped when she attempts to make her father face the facts about why she left boarding school, while he very tellingly refuses to listen, preferring to reflexively cover his ears and flee the vicinity. We're left to conclude that Jessica's antisocial behaviour stems from her distaste at having to live up to the predetermined version of herself that suits her parents' social standing, and which they would evidently sooner convince themselves is there than have to engage with their daughter as a complex and sometimes messy human being. The collection plate theft, the glee club brawl and the pipe bomb incident all amount to disaffected attempts to combat her own powerlessness by taking control of her own narrative. The problem being that her parents only become more withdrawn into their delusions, prompting Jessica to go for bigger and more shocking transgressions, in an ever-escalating arms race between denial and audacity.  

There are, it seems, two competing objectives to Jessica's fun and recreation. On the one level, she wants to get caught, and for the sham that is her family's spiritual and domestic purity to be thoroughly exposed, not least to her family themselves. But she's also getting a tremendous kick out of setting Bart up as the scapegoat for her wrongdoing. If the opportunity to rewrite her narrative is continuously denied her, then she'll settle for the next best thing by taking control of Bart's. In some respects Bart and Jessica really are kindred spirits, since both are rebelling against a system that's boxed them into its antithetical preconceptions and believes it already knows everything about them that it ever needs to know. The key difference is in the targets that they choose - Bart (Sunday school hamster notwithstanding) punches directly upward at the disapproving scolds looking down on him, while Jessica punches both upward, to truly dizzying heights, and downward without mercy at the tiny creatures that couldn't defend themselves (ie: Bart). 

By the final scene, we see that the Lovejoys have conceded enough to their painful reality to have tasked Jessica with the punitive responsibility of scrubbing clean the church porchway. It's here that Bart shows up to weigh in on his takeaway from their entanglement, with the moral outcome being deliberately muddied. Bart purports to have learned something, but does not articulate what. Jessica, on the other hand, is able to specify exactly what she's learned - that she can make men do whatever she wants. Bart objects that this means she really hasn't learned anything, but that's his small-mindedness on display. Jessica has figured out where her talents lie, she recognises what a screwed up world this is, and you can bet she's going to hone whatever weapons she has to stay afloat in it. She exits the episode as a true survivor, last seen riding off to freedom with a brand new beau while Bart is left doing her dirty work, having instantly complied with her suggestion that he scrub the porchway in her place. Important question - is the guy Jessica rides off with supposed to be the same well-read snarker from the library with whom Lisa was besotted in an earlier scene? Nah, it couldn't be. There is definitely a striking resemblance between the two, but something about that scenario doesn't add up. The kid we see at the end is clearly a child of around the same age as Bart and Jessica, whereas the guy in Lisa's library flashback looks older and surely has to be older, on account of the fact that he's in the library's employment. I deem them to be separate persons, with the joke being that they are both visibly modelled upon James Dean's character from the 1955 film Rebel Without A Cause, and are thus both part of the same "bad boy" archetype that gets the girls' stereotypical hearts a flutter. Having Jessica flee her parents' command with such an archetype reaffirms her as an outlaw for life. For all intents and purposes she has escaped them for good, since it's not like she's going to stick around and become a recurring character anyway.

It is a rather peculiar ending, and one that I've walked back on over the years. Ostensibly, the last laugh goes to Bart, who declares that, unlike that Jim Stark wannabe over there, he wouldn't do anything for a pretty face, and that Jessica might be surprised when she sees the second-rate job he does in cleaning the porchway. As a kid, I took that to mean that Bart's subservience was merely feigned; that he was in total control of the final situation, with the goal of getting back at Jessica through more underhanded means, which I guess was all a reflection of my own naivety. Now, I think the whole point is that this is a pitifully hollow rebellion on Bart's part, the clue being that he says "second-rate", not "third-rate". His scrubbing won't be of top standard, but it won't be abysmally terrible either. His first instinct is indeed to submit, and the expression he allows himself comes from squarely within the limits of that compliance - he knows that Jessica has played him, but reassures himself that it's okay because his cleaning abilities will only be so good anyway. This is a world in which you either eat or be eaten, and Bart's laughter comes from deep within the belly of the beast.