How Morbid Are You? Take The Food Standards Agency's BBQed Sausage Test

First of all, a disclaimer is in order. This piece concerns an advertisement created by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) for the summer BBQ season of 2006 to warn the public about the dangers of eating improperly-cooked meat. In a way this is highly unusual material for me to be covering, since I am a vegan, I haven't eaten a sausage in almost a quarter-century and, irrespective of all that, I abhor the general atmosphere at BBQs. So it goes without saying that I was never the target audience for this thing. But then, who doesn't love an emotionally-scarring public information film to remind us just how delicately the balance between life and death is constantly hanging? And this one managed to hit me where it really hurt by factoring in a subject about which I am very passionate - that is to say, disco music - and distorting it to fit its own exceedingly warped ends. The resulting PIF may contain quite possibly the most disturbing amalgamation of upbeat music track and incongruously perverse punchline that I've ever come across. Just how perverse? Well, there is a bit of a twist to that particular tale. As it turns out, my own mind is perhaps slightly more macabre than the FSA's.

The song in question is "When Will I See You Again", a 1974 hit for The Three Degrees, the lyrics of which convey the perspective of a hopeful romantic questioning if their happy encounter with a charismatic individual signals the beginning of a promising new relationship, or if their two-way magnetism has already reached its natural expiry date. The song is tinged with its share of anxiety and uncertainty, but overall it's a nice, non-threatening listen. That was before the FSA got their hands on it and projected all-round darker implications onto the song's titular lyrics. Most of the 30-second ad was taken up by the mundane sight of a batch of sausages cooking on a BBQ grille, while an off-screen chef intermittently prods them. It's not an especially riveting set-up, but I think there is just enough that's slightly off-kilter about it to put you on vague alert. The placement of that Three Degrees song alongside a bunch of sausages definitely feels odd, even before its meaning becomes apparent, and there is something automatically unsettling about the fact that we can't see the person controlling those cooking implements. Our anxieties are not unfounded - there is something less than savoury going on beneath the surface of this picture. Sure, those sausages appear crisp and well-done on the outside, but what do their innards look like?

Oh the humanity.

I remember being pretty horrified by this ad back in the day - less by the sight of that pink-centred sausage than by the sheer snarkiness of that final tagline, and by the gleeful manner in which it totally subverted the significance of that seemingly wholesome track. My immediate thought was that there were some seriously twisted people working at the FSA. The knock-on effect for me, unfortunately, is that I've never been able to listen to that Three Degrees song in quite the same way again. It's no longer a bittersweet song about the possibility of new love hanging in the balance, but a taunting reminder of my own mortality, and of the grievous dangers lurking in the most banal of places (ie: precisely the opposite of nice and non-threatening).

That could soon change, though. I recently came across an article on the advert on the BBC's website, and I was rather taken back, after all these years, to gain a window into the actual thinking behind the ad:

"James Brandon, head of marketing for the FSA, says when they are looking at campaigns which are designed to change people's behaviour, there are two possible directions. One is shock tactics, and the other is humour. For something like food poisoning, which most people do not take seriously as an issue unless they get sick, research had shown that shock tactics were not well received...

...Would an advert which threatened people with a possible - but remote - chance of death be more effective than one which promises the more realistic - but not so serious - chance of spending the night with one's head in the toilet bowl?"

Whoa whoa whoa, back up the truck there, James. Are you telling me THAT was the intended subtext of the advert all along? That the inferred "you" in the song's personalised usage of "When Will I See You Again" was actually referring to the underdone sausage, implying that whichever unlucky BBQ attendee ingests it will be seeing it again later that day in semi-digested form when their poisoned body opts to violently reject it? That all these years, I've been haunted by a PIF threatening me with something as trivial as vomiting? This really does come as a revelation to me, because that's totally NOT the message I took from it. I assumed that a possible but remote chance of sausage-related fatality was indeed what you were going for. Although a quick glance through the comments in that article would suggest that not many people shared my confusion.

So yes, it turns out that I may have misread that particular punchline, but...it can't just be me, surely? Did nobody else think that there was perhaps a more morbid subtext to be gleaned from the ad's juxtaposition of "When Will I See You Again" with the taunting response, "Sooner than you think"? I mean, think about it. (If you still don't get it, then here's a hint - as per my interpretation, the scene is pervaded by an eerie sense of death having already occurred, with the horrifying reminder that you could be the next to go, if you're not more attentive to what you're putting in your mouth there.)

I will concede that the vomiting subtext would be much more germane to the specific threat of food-poisoning (it also gives fiendish new meaning to the line "Will I have to suffer and cry the whole night through?"), whereas my own personal interpretation would be more generic, and could be applied to any number of PIFs across a broad range of subjects. But there's something particularly hair-raising about the thought of death calling through something as banal as a poorly-BBQed sausage - which, of course, is the mark of a truly effective PIF. The best (worst?) PIFs are always terrifying because they accentuate the mundaneness that contextualises much of life's genuine horrors (the Three Degrees song also contains the line "Or is this the end?", which arguably emphasises the dicey nature of the subject's culinary incompetence). This ad has a bleak power that I don't think the FSA even realised it had. Either way, I suppose what matters is that they got their point across. Even if it is a moot point in my case.

I fear that the Three Degrees song is still ruined forever, however. Associating it with someone throwing a seven in one sense is no more pleasant than associating it with them throwing a seven in another. Ah well, at least you didn't get "The Runner", you creeps.

I also suspect that James Brandon or somebody else in the FSA's marketing department in the 00s had a soul fetish because I also have vague memories of another (slightly less horrifying) ad from earlier in the decade conveying the same message using "Give Me Just A Little More Time" by Chairmen of The Board. Only I now can't find a trace of that ad's existence online. Did I merely dream that one?