The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #29: Down The Rabbit Hole of Tetley's Bitter

Something I didn't mention in my recent coverage of "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie" is just how out-and-out terrifying I find that "Sabre Dance" tune that Lisa (for some reason) puts on while Bart is doing his reckless denture spin on the ceiling. For that, I have to thank this ad for Tetley's Bitter from 1997, which features a man disappearing down a figuartive rabbit hole to the frantic sounds of the aforementioned Khachaturian composition, before finding salvation at the bottom of a glass. Goading the protagonist along his journey into hysteria is a white animatronic rabbit who wields a pocket watch and bleats on about lateness, an obvious allusion to the character from Lewis Caroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. To call this ad the televisual equivalent of a particularly head-splitting fever dream would be a serious understatement - it has a sweltering, disorientating tone that sets the viewer immediately on edge. In that regard, the ad seems fairly characteristic of its time, as back in the mid-to-late 1990s, TV advertising went through a full-blown love affair with all things arty and unsettling, and ad breaks became a constant race, with each installment looking to out-art the others in terms of leaving prospective consumers the most confounded (sometimes to the point where they didn't even clearly link the content of the ad to the product they were selling). In this case, the basic message is easy enough to decipher (life is stressful, except where alcoholic beverages are involved), but the ad is nevertheless bewildering for the relentless manner in which it strives to replicate the sensation of a nightmare - a nightmare which, conversely, begins with our protagonist being rudely awakened and ejected into a demented version of reality. What follows is so frenetic that you can practically feel the man's perspiration dripping off your own neck.

What's clever about the ad is the way it constructs a convincingly mind-warping Wonderland out of mostly mundane elements. The various bugbears that harry our protagonist throughout the sequence are caricatures of everyday irritations (being unable to find your way around featureless architecture or being tormented by the sound of a ringing telephone that remains tauntingly out of your reach) viewed through the lens of sheer delirium. The first half of the ad plays out predominantly from the protagonist's perspective, as he navigates his way through a seemingly endless corridor with various rabbit warren-style twists that defy all logic (up leads down, down leads up, and each Exit door takes us directly into another) and fails to reach a phone box in time to answer a call. Quite why our protagonist feels so compelled to answer a call made to a public phone box, or indeed where he is in such a hurry to get to, is not made explicit - the implication is that his rabbit-powered urgency exists for purely its own sake, and that he is running around in any given direction, fruitlessly following whatever impulse happens to command his attention, until he literally runs into a brick wall. The most overtly surreal image in the advert is the rabbit itself, who is the antagonist of the piece, being the personification of everything fraught, wearing and ultimately futile about contemporary existence. We know straight off the bat that this rabbit is bad news, as it ignites the spark of anxiety by invading the protagonist's alarm clock at the beginning of the ad, but there's an unexpectedly sinister moment where the protagonist, who appears to be on the verge of slowing down, encounters the rabbit out in the street among a marching band, and has his frenzy reinvigorated by a wink that does not exactly convey amiability.

The second half of the ad stands as a pointed contrast to the first, once the featured product enters the arena and establishes itself as a direct counterpoint to that antagonising rabbit. Following our hero's collision with a conveniently-placed stop sign, this twisted, frenzied nightmare fades and resettles with a shot of the reddish brown liquid swirling inside a pint of Tetley's, giving us the impression that we've entered a whole new state of consciousness, and emerged fully cleansed through the other side.

In his (presumably temporary) refuge, the protagonist finds not just calm but also connection, the pub atmosphere characterised by the gentle activity of nondescript bar-goers interacting and wetting their respective whistles. The outside world from which we've just retreated isn't exactly devoid of life, but there is a disturbing emptiness to the various features that whizz by so rapidly our eyes can barely register them. A table is set for what appears to be a street party, which might explain the marching band, but hardly anyone is in attendance, giving us only the visual eccentricities of a party with no genuine sense of celebration - the marching band, as indicated by the presence of the rabbit, is just another vexation, serving only to bolster our disorientation with its loud and relentless sonic attacks. The missed telephone call and the unknown caller likewise signify a lack of connection. The pub, by comparison, offers a modest environment, but a peaceful and non-threatening one that enables physical companionship. And yet, and in spite of the pleasant ambient music that has taken the place of "Sabre Dance", it manages to be every bit as disconcerting in its way. Whatever else you can say about that unnerving rabbit, it yields the only instance of discernable dialogue throughout the ad - all there is to be heard within the pub is the sounds of eerily repetitive laughter at non-existent jokes and unintelligible babble. It creates the weird sensation of being adrift in a world that is fundamentally alien and in which we are, in spite of our ostensible company, perpetually cut off and on our own, but for the common veneration its inhabitants have for the product in question. In here, Tetley's is the universal language. As long as it's around there exists some semblance of clarity.

At the very end, we get confirmation that our hero has vanquished his leporine demons, when the rabbit reappears inside his glass, discarding its (now defunct) pocket watch and trudging away through the suds in frustration, reinforcing the ad's stance that downing a pint of Tetley's will neutralise the stresses of the world beyond. Somewhat paradoxically, we find ourselves gazing directly into yet another rabbit hole, this one formed by the inside of the glass, which becomes a tunnel into which the rabbit literally disappear, and we might ponder what this conveys in terms of the Wonderland allusion. It could be that the rabbit is retreating back into the dementia of ordinary living, while we are left grounded in the cool comfort of our Tetley's-induced sanity. Or perhaps, on a more subliminal level, we are being prompted to follow the rabbit, a la Alice, downward ever deeper into the alternative wonders lurking at the bottom of the glass. After all, if that's the kind of demented phantasmagoria that mere adrenalin can drum up, then just imagine what a little intoxication can do.