Good Will To Men '55 (aka Oppenheimer's Deadly Toy)

Peace On Earth, Hugh Harman's classic 1939 animated short about a community of pacifist sciurines inheriting the Earth after humankind's war-induced extinction, had such a powerful message that it bore repeating sixteen years later. In 1955, a new version of the story materialised, directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera and co-produced by Fred Quimby, and titled after the other phrase that the animals in Harman's film were especially fond of saying, Good Will To Men. The original short came about during the early days of World War II, and reflected the apprehension of a world about to relive the nightmare of global warfare. Good To Will To Men, meanwhile, explores the technological advances that had since modified the face of warfare, encompassing concerns regarding the Cold War, and the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation that humankind, having inflicted on itself, seemed forever saddled with. Like its predecessor, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short, but also lost, this time to Warner Bros' Speedy Gonzales.

While the alternate title suggests that Good Will To Men is to be viewed more as a companion piece to Peace On Earth, it is a direct recycling of the latter's narrative, with many of the individual sequences, such as the owl reading out Biblical passages in the ruins of a church, being recreated more-or-less faithfully. A number of the finer details have been slightly tweaked - the family of squirrels have been replaced by a chorus of murine choir boys (and very characteristic Hanna-Barbera mice they are too), while the patriarchal figure old enough to recall the horrors of humankind's dying days, and of Earth's regeneration via the friendly woodland folk, is now a mouse deacon. Although the conclusion he reaches is very much the same, the focus of his speech has shifted, moving away from humanity's propensity to fight about anything and everything under the sun, to humanity's talent for devising increasingly diabolical methods of mass slaughtering one another - everything from bazookas to flamethrowers to finally "the biggest, the most awfullest bomb ever...and while one of them was dropping the bomb over here, the other was dropping the bomb over there!" Now that the apocalypse has been explicitly linked to the work of Oppenheimer, the scenario is somewhat muddied by the practicality of whether, having nuked themselves out of existence, the humans would have left the Earth in an inhabitable state for whichever lifeform fancied taking up the mantle as the next dominant species. Good Will To Men makes vague concession to this point, by indicating that the natural world suffered heavy damages along with the human world (the deacon specifies that the new society was made up of "those of us that were left"), but the problem of nuclear winter is largely untouched on.

Good Will To Men is on all counts the inferior of the two films - other than fine-tuning its narrative to comment more specifically on the nuclear threat, it doesn't do or say anything that its predecessor didn't accomplish more proficiently sixteen years prior. The post-apocalyptic world is admittedly established with greater efficiency than in Harman's film (remember how many times Grandpa Squirrel had to say "Peace on Earth" before getting to the point?), but the framing device with the mouse deacon and his choir singing underlings rather lacks the same degree of warmth and intimacy as the domestic sequences in Peace On Earth. With the squirrels you got a strong enough sense of the bonds between the individual family members; there was something almost heartbreakingly vulnerable about their small and personal unit, even in perpetual peacetime. The young sciurines being lulled to sleep at the end, to their mother's assurances of heavenly peace, seemed such fragile beings that you could practically feel your own contaminating presence as a human onlooker casting a threatening shadow across their utopia, even if, in-universe, we were long out of the picture. Here, the same basic idea is conveyed - the older generation, who have witnessed the horrors of old, passing the torch to the younger - but with less of the same emotional connection to its protagonists. The image of those resting infants strikes such a powerful chord, in part, because of the sense that they could be our own children; the question Harman implicitly raises has to do with the discrepancy between the world we want for our offspring and the world we may in fact be fostering, a point evoked with overall less sharpness in Good Will To Men. What the latter does push more vigorously, and to its detriment, is the story's religious overtones. These same overtones were present in Peace On Earth too, but Harman managed to incorporate them in a manner that was both authentically moving and comparatively light on heavy-handedness; approaching the film from a secular perspective, the basic message feels no less accessible and, beyond the owl calling the Bible "a mighty good book of rules", I can appreciate the film without getting too strong a sense that it's trying to overtly sell me on a particular religious ideology. Good Will To Men, by contrast, has moments where it plays itself as an unsubtle advert for Christianity, with the deacon mouse holding up a Bible directly to the camera and proclaiming "It still is a good book of rules!"

Which is not to say that Good Will To Men is lacking in clout - the narrative set-up of a post-apocalyptic society of innocents attempting to wrap their heads around just what the hell their war-mongering predecessors were thinking is such an intrinsically powerful one that it's impactful in any form, and Hanna and Barbera's film incorporates a few new images that have a harrowing potency all of their own, in particular, a quiet, lingering shot showing the tombstones of the innumerable causalities of war. The sequence in which the A-bomb travels in both directions is depicted with understated but sickening horror, as the two opposing blasts coded red and green gradually merge into a single, deathly grey, signifying mutual defeat (although it doesn't have quite the same raw, brutal intensity as its equivalent sequence in Harman's film, with the metaphorical image of the last two humans on Earth choosing to continue their vendetta to the end, which was admittedly hampered by its own uneven execution). Another chilling new addition is the deacon's observation that, after the bombs had fallen and the last of the humans were wiped out, "Everything was quiet and kind of peaceful-like", the only point in Good Will To Men where I detect the same degree of vinegary irony that makes Harman's film so beguiling.

One element that was jettisoned from Hanna and Barbera's version, and this surprised me, is the entire "Ye shall rebuild the old wastes" plot point. Instead, the random Biblical passage that ends up becoming the basis for the animals' incoming civilisation is "Love thy neighbor as thyself". It's worth noting that, while they communicate essentially the same moral, the implications of the ending feel drastically altered in Good Will To Men. Surveying the two shorts I can't help but be put in mind of Ed Sullivan's synopsis when introducing Joan and Peter Foldes' classic anti-nuke film A Short Vision on its television debut in 1956: "what might happen to the animal population of the world if an H-bomb were dropped" feels like a more fitting plot description for either of the two MGM shorts, although it goes without saying that neither is intended as serious speculation as to how our beastly friends would make the most of a post-human Earth. In both films, the anthropomorphic animals are holding up mirrors to our own ornery human conditions, but it is not the same mirror in either case. Peace On Earth depicts a fantasy image of a peaceful society that is all the more upsetting for the fact that is is a fantasy - it suggests a fairy tale innocence far out of reach. In Good Will To Men, the animals play more explicitly as analogues for the choices facing humankind in the present - when the mouse deacon tells his underlings, "Love thy neighbor as thyself...on those words depend the future of us all," he is extending his message to his real world human viewership, and to their own predicament, with a reminder that the outcome has yet to be determined. Hanna and Barbera's film expresses implicit hope that the rebuilding aspect can be rendered moot, if a more peaceful solution is found.

Good Will To Men ends in a different place to its predecessor - it is now the children who regale the adults with the cheerful promise of perpetual peace (a signal that such values have been successfully transplanted into the generation set to lead in the future), as members of their post-apocalyptic community gather for a Midnight Mass and greet one another cordially. This is a fantasy image as much as anything in the 1939 film, but expressed with an optimism to which Peace On Earth seemed deliberately ambivalent. Whereas the happy ending in Peace On Earth was tempered with the uneasy knowledge that the enemy is us, in Good Will To Men there is a greater sense of inclusiveness, as if we are being invited to join these critters in their benevolent festivities. For a film that's ostensibly about the end of humankind, it's certainly got its fingers crossed that the best is yet to come.

Peace On Earth '39 (aka The Meek Shall Inherit)

You would be hard-pressed to find a more beguilingly incongruous Christmas-themed cartoon than Hugh Harman's 1939 MGM short Peace On Earth (excepting, maybe, its 1955 remake, Good Will To Men). It is a work of exhilarating contradictions, a sincere plea for pacifism related via a deliberately quirky narrative device, one that thrives on the juxtaposition of innocence with trauma, and an ending in which the closing words of optimism seem drenched in vinegary irony. The film, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short but lost out to Disney's The Ugly Duckling, remains a captivating oddity from the Golden Age of animation, a singular piece that still has tremendous power to surprise and perturb.

Peace On Earth unfolds in a society populated by anthropomorphic squirrels and rabbits, and boasts the most deceptively innocuous of set-ups - a grandfather squirrel (voice of Mel Blanc) has gone to visit his grandchildren on a snowy Yuletide evening, and explains to them the origins of one of their society's most prominent festive traditions: saying "Peace on Earth, good will to men." It's indicated that this is customary because a group of carollers are heard chanting it over and over, and then Grandpa himself goes and says it incessantly - so much so that, within the first two minutes of the film, you'll be a mite weary of hearing those words. The fluffiness of some of the short's establishing moments (Grandpa also sits on a needled ball of yarn for seemingly no other reason than to add a dash of filler slapstick to a film that otherwise has no use for it) is counterbalanced by the discordantly grim turn taken by the three minute mark, although it would misleading to suggest that this comes out of nowhere. From the start there are tinges of darkness - the film wastes little time in cluing us in that the animals' warm and gentle society was built upon the rubble of a much crueller one. The opening images show a wrecked chapel and an array of abandoned weaponry, set (as incongruously as anything else in this short) to a calming rendition of "Hark The Herald Angels Sing", as we span across the winter landscape and finally settle upon the array of miniature houses inhabited by our friendly protagonists - constructed, somewhat troublingly, from combat helmets. Any sense of lingering complacency is shattered when one of the young squirrels goes and asks the bombshell question: "What are men?" As it turns out, "What were men?" would be much more pertinent phrasing, because as Grandpa Squirrel states upfront, humans have long disappeared from this world, although their extinction was a recent enough occurrence that he has vague personal memories of how it came about. As he recounts the story to his grandchildren, we find ourselves plucked from the safety of the animals' world, in which a pair of misplaced knitting needles represent the absolute peak of hostility, and plunged directly into the heart of the apocalypse, a minefield of relentless carnage populated by murky human figures who lurch about with bayonets, their facial features buried beneath the deadpan gaze of gas mask lenses. Even with the early set-up, the shift is startling, a contrast furthered by the use of rotoscoping for the human sequences, giving their movements an intensity and a realism that, conversely, feels so far removed from the grounding of those cuddly, Disneyesque squirrels as to play like the kind of nightmarish monstrosity that, in their world, could only exist in the most unsettled of fever dreams.

Humans died out, simply put, because warfare came so naturally to them that they couldn't help blowing themselves off the face of the planet. There was usually a human war waging about something or other, and for the most arbitrary of reasons (apparently there were wars between the flat-footed and the buck-toothed, and between vegetarians and meat eaters), but one day they got themselves into a particularly cataclysmic squabble, with bombs and artillery flying in all directions and obliterating everything in their path. This went on until there were only two men left, and they too persisted in battling it out until the end, both mortally wounding one another and sealing the fate of their species (of course, by this point the human race would have been doomed anyway, since both of these would-be survivors are assumed to be male, but y'know, symbolism). The Earth was left to be reclaimed by the natural world, but the animals were unsure about adapting and surviving in the war-torn landscape. A group of them (including our grandpa squirrel, who was a juvenile at the time) wandered into the remains of a church, where they found an owl gazing contemplatively at the page of an opened Bible. The young squirrel approached the owl and asked him what is written on the page in question; the owl read out: "Thou shalt not kill."  The owl then flicked through the pages and stumbled upon a random passage, "Ye shall rebuild the old wastes", which inspired the animals to resurrect the fallen human civilisation, with the intention that, this time around, it be dedicated to the values of peace and cooperation. At least three generations in, and the animals have remained true to their aim; we return to the present day, with Grandpa rounding off his history lesson by telling his young charges that this is why they make such a point of saying, "Peace on Earth, good will to men." By the end of the film, though, I remain somewhat puzzled by the full significance of the of the phrase to the animals' post-apocalyptic culture - while the "Peace on Earth" part is self-explanatory, the "Good will to men" portion is, as one of the squirrel children flags up, an obsolete curiosity, given that there are no humans left to wish good will upon. The squirrels' world is comprised heavily of artefacts borrowed from the world that came before, but one wonders why they haven't modified this particular term to better serve their own needs within the present. Unless, of course, these animals appreciate a generous serving of sarcasm with their Yuletide cheer.

Peace On Earth debuted on December 9th 1939. To put that into historic context, Nazi Germany had invaded Poland just three months prior, marking the beginning of World War II in Europe, although America was still neutral at this point, and the short reflects the trepidation of a world about to be plunged (once again) into omnipresent warfare. As a commentary on that specific conflict, there's an argument to be made that some of the film's well-intentioned sentiments now seem quite naive - in particular, the suggestion that these squabbles invariably came down to petty differences, in which both sides were equally culpable (questionable in a scenario where one side advocated genocide). And yet the basic message is so powerful, and so evergreen, that it's difficult to disagree with its lamentations on the tremendous human cost of war, and the elusiveness of peace among a species that values it as highly desirable but seems so much more inclined toward division and destruction. Besides, there are multiple regards in which Peace On Earth seems positively ahead of its time. It preceded the creation of Oppenheimer's deadly toy, which made the possibility of humankind wiping itself out through warfare frighteningly plausible. Its depiction of humankind as a destructive force that misuses technology, and a scarred nature attempting to heal itself in the aftermath of its inevitable collapse, resonates as much today for its ecological implications as for its explicitly anti-war message. And its reminders of the futility in attempting to divide the world into camps comprised of "us" and "them", and in defining our neighbours according to superficial differences, as opposed to the common ground we certainly share, seem as bitingly relevant today in the age of social media.

There is an unmistakable religious undercurrent to Peace On Earth, with the owl endorsing the Bible as a "mighty good book of rules", although this is implemented in a much less heavy-handed fashion than in its remake Good Will To Men - to my atheist sensibilities, it plays less like proselytising than an underscoring of the importance of heeding one's own words. Hence the significance of the short's pivotal phrase - "Peace on Earth, good will to men" is a familiar festive saying in our own world too, so much so that's easy to regurgitate the words without giving any real consideration to their meaning. We might find our patience tried by how frequently the animals say it in the earlier portions of Peace On Earth, but following our distressing excursion through wartime we're left with a greater appreciation for their refusal to take their state of harmony for granted. The challenge Harman appears to have been extending to audiences in 1939 is to contemplate what those words actually meant to them, in light of what was then going on in the world around. Did they have any significance at all on an Earth that was already in the process of being violently cleaved by bombshell and artillery?

Peace On Earth bows out with this final puzzle - is it an optimistic film or not? It leaves us with a hopeful vision of a world in which conflict has been eradicated and innocence reborn, in the form of the benign forest animals; in that regard, it is a much more upbeat short than Joan and Peter Foldes' 1956 apocalyptic animation A Short Vision, in which the natural world perishes along with the human world and a prospective rebirthing immediately fails. The fact that the animals choose to model their new society on the obliterated human civilisation likewise suggests the vindication and survival of the human world, however vicariously - Harman expresses hope that it still has the potential to be a force of benevolence over destruction. There is, nevertheless, something extraordinarily harrowing about the closing frames of Peace On Earth, which show the mother squirrel rocking her children to the gentle lullaby of "Sleep in heavenly peace..." It is a utopia that Harman fears may be forever beyond us due to something fundamentally within our nature, inaccessible to those realistic human soldiers and attainable only within the fantasy image of the society of anthropomorphic squirrels. The mother squirrel's final reassurances seem at once touchingly pure and quietly taunting; as much as we might identify with those cartoon rodents, in wanting our children to sleep soundly in a world freed from conflict and fear, there's little getting around the fact that we are the disturbance in this particular scenario. The happy ending, when it comes, is facilitated explicitly by our own exclusion, and that's not a thought likely to leave us at peace with ourselves.

Marge Be Not Proud (aka THIEF checked the chest. Wow! This is a nice chest!)

One of the first things we hear on the DVD commentary for "Marge Be Not Proud" (episode 3F07) is that The Simpsons was, for a number of years, reluctant to revisit the festive season, owing to the significance of the holiday in the series' personal history. "Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire" had established their hugely successful run as a stand-alone act in 1989, and for a while it was felt that the most reverent thing to do was to let the episode itself stand alone, and not attempt anything that would immediately invite comparisons to such an important milestone. In practice, Christmas was hardly being singled out - it's not as though they were in a rush to revisit Thanksgiving in the years following "Bart vs. Thanksgiving", nor Valentine's Day/Presidents' Day after "I Love Lisa". New Year and Easter were not represented at all until Seasons 9 and 10 respectively, with "The Trouble With Trillions" and "Simpsons Bible Stories". Halloween was the only calendar date on which The Simpsons had carved out a fine little niche in acknowledging year after year - perhaps because it's an occasion dedicated to embracing the more warped and off-kilter side of existence, and that's where the Simpsons are right at home (something also born out in "Marge Be Not Proud", where we're not a minute into the episode before we've gotten a joke involving implied cannibalism). Come the show's seventh season, and the production team were feeling confident enough to take a crack at another seasonal installment - hence there was "Marge Be Not Proud", an episode that, rather than consciously try to evoke the eminence of its predecessor, tells a story that feels deliberately small and unassuming, but no less intent on leaving an emotional crater. It aired December 17th 1995, which by coincidence happened to be the sixth anniversary of "Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire". Was it a worthy successor?

Not everybody would say so. One particularly prominent venue in the online Simpsons community (I'm sure I don't need to say which) infamously condemned this installment as the "one bad episode" of the first seven seasons, an objection that stemmed largely from how earnestly it treats the morality play element of its narrative, arguably to the point of being worthy of the dreaded "very special episode" tag; in other words, not much higher up the evolutionary ladder, in terms of selling the idea that thievery is bad, than the in-universe anti-shoplifting PSA fronted by Troy McClure (who apparently indulged in some criminal acts of his own at a Foot Locker in Beverly Hills). In my experience, their position is a minority one - "Marge Be Not Proud" might not occupy the top spot of many a favourites list, but overall it seems to be a well-respected episode, and not an especially common contender for the prestigious title of "Worst. Episode. Ever.", even restricting options to the classic era - but nevertheless prominent enough to have had a sizeable enough impact on the discourse surrounding the episode in recent years. I should establish upfront that I am in strong (but respectful) disagreement - to my mind "Marge Be Not Proud" is a very special episode, although not in the sense intended by its most vocal of detractors. It's a special episode by virtue of it being an ultra-rare Simpsons episode in which the main conflict is structured around the relationship between Marge and Bart. In fact, so dominated is the episode by the Marge-Bart dynamic that input from the rest of the family is kept to an utmost minimum. Homer makes his famous observation about eggnog obtainability, but he isn't heavily involved in the plot here, and (as with "Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire") Lisa is given barely anything to do outside of one really sharp moment in which she demonstrates her psychological astuteness (that, and get sick from overexposure to fake snow and eggnog). Elsewhere, Maggie gets to freak out when Marge insists on depriving her of her pacifier, and Abe makes one of his more random cameos.

Earlier in 2021, when I reviewed "Moaning Lisa", I noted that Season 1 was extremely lopsided in terms of the spotlight afforded each individual family member. The focus was overwhelmingly on Bart and Homer, with Marge and Lisa receiving only one episode each in which their personal needs were truly at the centre. It's also the case that the relationship between Homer and Bart was, at this point, treated as the crux of the series (as it was in the original Ullman shorts), which is why so many episodes tended to centre on them as a duo. As the series got a better handle on who the other members of the family were, we saw things branch out a little - in the back-end of the season, the series suddenly became very preoccupied with the state of relations between Homer and Marge, Marge and Lisa got some heartfelt bonding time in "Moaning Lisa" and Bart and Lisa were depicted as this formidable team in "Krusty Gets Busted". There were, however, two family relationships that went completely neglected in the show's first season (other than the entire family's individual relationships with Maggie, which unfortunately goes without saying) - Homer and Lisa and Marge and Bart. The writers seemed to figure out very quickly that Homer and Lisa had a lot of potential as a pairing, since they're polar opposites, and the majority of Lisa-centric episodes in Seasons 2 and 3 dealt extensively with her relationship with Homer (to the extent that her relationship with Marge took a backseat). Marge and Bart, though, remained under-utilised, even as the series gathered steam and the characters' personalities became better defined - whenever their relationship was explored in depth, it tended to be regulated to B story fodder (eg: "Homer Defined", "Lisa The Greek", "Whacking Day"). Before "Marge Be Not Proud", the closest we'd come to an episode in which their relationship was actually driving the main narrative was "The PTA Disbands", where Bart's desire to prolong a teacher strike is compounded by having his mother as a substitute teacher. Even then, it's a bit of a stretch to call "The PTA Disbands" a Marge/Bart episode - this particular conflict isn't established until quite late in the game and we don't get a lot of focus on what makes them tick as a pairing.

A shame too, because their relationship is such a poignant one. Marge loves the imperfect child she raised, and she's supportive of him in ways that no other character really could be. Marge is well-aware of what a trouble-maker Bart is, but she's also got a clear window into his better qualities, and his vulnerabilities. As such, when the rest of the world is quick to see the worst in Bart, Marge is fully capable of weighing this up against the bigger picture. "Homer Defined", for example, has a lovely subplot where Marge intervenes on Bart's behalf after Luann Van Houten deems him a bad influence and forbids Milhouse from playing with him. "I can't defend everything he does," Marge tells Luann, "But let's face it, all Bart and Milhouse have is each other. They're too young for girls, they're a popular target for bullies, and in the Christmas pageant they're always sheep." At the end of the story, when Luann softens her position, Bart thanks Marge for standing up for him; Marge asks why he supposes it was her doing, to which he responds, "Who else would?" What would happen, though, if Bart took his mischief-making a step too far, further than Marge had ever anticipated he could go, and this prompted her to reassess her entire perspective of him? Here, we have a scenario in which Marge once again takes a heartfelt stand for her son, only this time it doesn't pay off - he is guilty of the one thing she was confident he would never do.

"Marge Be Not Proud" opens during the rundown to Christmas, with Bart catching a commercial for the latest video game phenomenon, an explosive new fighting simulator named Bonestorm, and his heart going wild with desire. Getting hold of the game, however, is a tricky matter - there's no way he can afford it, it doesn't look as though he'll be able to convince Homer and Marge that the game is worth its $70 price tag, The Android's Dungeon is out of rental copies (although there is still a lot of Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge to go around), and Milhouse has the game but seems deeply averse to letting Bart hustle in on his playtime. So great is Bart's desperation that his inability to experience Bonestorm begins to feel like a great cosmic injustice (the way it does when you're a kid and you really want something you can't have), and when he runs into Jimbo and Nelson at a local department store, the Try-N-Save, and receives a demonstration in just how easy it is to grab items and sneak out without paying for them, it momentarily strikes him as a very practical solution for rectifying this injustice. In his case, it doesn't work out nearly so well - he makes it all the way out of the store with the game, but is immediately accosted by an intimidating security guard (voiced by guest Lawrence Tierney), who leaves a message on the family's answering machine reporting Bart's attempted theft and warns him never to set foot inside the store again. Bart manages to leg it home before Homer and Marge, and squirrels the incriminating evidence away in a place where he's convinced nobody will ever discover it - a cassette case for Allan Sherman's 1963 novelty pop hit "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduah" (poor Allan Sherman, he did not deserve that jab). Bart now wants nothing more than to put the matter behind him, but that's not happening - the following morning he's forced to return to the scene of the crime, when Marge takes the family to be photographed at a booth in the Try-N-Save. Tierney's guard spots and challenges Bart, whereupon the ugly truth he'd tried so hard to bury comes gushing out messily before his family.

Part of what makes "Marge Be Not Proud" so effective is the overwhelming empathy it engenders for Bart, even when we know he's done something totally unjustifiable. The scenario would frankly fall flat if we were sitting there tutting and shaking our heads at him the entire time. Instead, it does a wonderful job of taking you back into the mindset of a 10 year old and depicting the offending action as a relatably human error of judgment - Bart's old enough to know that shoplifting is wrong, although not necessarily wise enough to appreciate the nature of that wrongness beyond it being something he could get into serious trouble for doing. For a moment, he's naive enough to believe that if he can do it without anybody noticing, then it might be okay. And when somebody does notice, and take him aside, the horror and fear is completely mutual. It certainly helps that Don Brodka, the security guard voiced by Tierney, is legitimately terrifying. Technically, he does show mercy in choosing to take the matter to Bart's parents and not the police, but he's exactly the kind of hard-nosed, unsympathetic authority figure we don't want bearing down on us when we've done something we've immediately recognised to be a terrible mistake and would like to be permitted to bail out of.

"Marge Be Not Proud" is in many respects, a more downbeat, down-to-earth counterpart to "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie", which explored similar ideas about consequence, accountability and things never being quite the same once certain lines had been crossed, only in the context of Bart's relationship with Homer. There, the precipitating incident (Bart fails to keep an eye on Maggie, leading her to escaping and going for an unlikely joyride in the family car) is not taken at all seriously - the episode is more preoccupied with the punishment than the crime, and there is no sense whatsoever of Bart feeling remorse because he sees any particular wrongness in what he did; the pain he feels comes purely from Homer's disciplinary measure in refusing to let him see a film he was really looking forward to. In "Marge Be Not Proud", Bart's misdemeanour is less over the top, and therefore has much more gravitas than Maggie's ridiculous escapade - it has the sting of realism, as it's something a child actually could do that would make their parents feel sorely let down. When Bart takes the game, both he and the viewer understand that he is behaving in a manner extremely out of character for him; Bart may be a prankster who delights in undermining authority, but he recognises that there are boundaries, and shoplifting is not something he would typically be tempted to dabble in. It would mean crossing a clear line between the playfully mischievous and the unambiguously criminal. Whereas "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie" begins with the problem of Bart feeling free to create havoc with wild abandon because he's so used to Homer failing to assert meaningful authority, this time Bart knows in advance that there will be consequences if he is caught and his parents find out, but he misjudges the nature of those consequences severely. He gets the angry tirade he was expecting from Homer - Homer, though, can't follow a train of thought very far and seems to forget about it almost instantly. Marge is less resilient; unlike Homer, she doesn't get angry, which initially leads Bart to believe that he's being let off lightly, but Lisa warns him that Marge's hurt feelings might manifest in different ways. Indeed, the news has come as such a bucket of emotional ice water to Marge that she reacts with a protracted numbness that turns out to be even more unbearable. Suddenly, she becomes a lot more distant in her treatment of Bart - not because she's looking to punish him or even to teach him any kind of lesson, but because she sincerely believes that her oversolicitous parenting, which Bart had objected to earlier in the story, had a major hand in pushing him astray. Bart begins to worry that he might have damaged their relationship irrevocably. And that hurts a lot more than not getting his hands on some dumb old video game.

As with "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie", the premise hinges around Bart's assumptions that he's missing out on something monumental, in this case a video game touted as the ultimate in pixelated violence. The reality is that Bonestorm (much like the in-universe Itchy & Scratchy Movie) probably isn't all that good - despite his initial enthusiasm, Thrillho loses interest in the game very quickly - and definitely not worth the trouble that Bart puts himself through in order to acquire a copy. It's not really the point of the story, but nestled at the back of "Marge Be Not Proud" there is a definite condemnation of the crass consumerist culture that's rampant all year round but becomes a particular behemoth during the Christmas period (note the sign on Try-N-Save's window about the store's seasonal opening hours). During a fantasy sequence in which various iconic video game characters come to life and urge Bart into doing the dirty deed, Donkey Kong suggests that, "It's the company's fault for making you want it so much," and while this is clearly not being lauded as legitimate justification for stealing, the barrel-throwing ape does nevertheless raise a valid point in that Bart has been suckered into insatiability by aggressive corporate marketing strategies that thrive on making children (and adults) feel inadequate with what they have. (Note: as hilarious as that sequence is - particularly with Lee Carvallo weighing in as the lone dissenter - if you ask me they missed a trick in not including Link from The Legend of Zelda. That little punk was a shoplifter - or at least he was whenever I played Link's Awakening.)

Despite the omnipresence of holiday paraphernalia all throughout, "Marge Be Not Proud" is not, for the most part, too intrinsically linked to its seasonal setting - unlike "Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire", the basic premise could have happened at any time of year. I'd be tempted to suggest that the decision to make it into a Christmas episode was, in part, a calculated tactic to give the story a little more leeway in terms of its melancholic value, which is considerable. "Marge Be Not Proud" is as well-stocked with razor-sharp writing as the next Simpsons script, and yet it seems a stretch to call it an especially funny episode. It's not that there's a shortage of laughs, just that they're offset by the overwhelming glumness of the narrative - there's no attempt to downplay the pain felt by Bart and Marge respectively, nor the seriousness of the rift between them. It plays itself pretty straight, as a drama with comedic touches, as opposed to a comedy first and foremost. In that regard, it could be seen as a throwback to the show's fist two seasons, where episodes often incorporated a more conspicuous element of dramatic honesty, but I don't think they were ever quite this woebegone about it. I would have few qualms in labelling "Marge Be Not Proud" the most downbeat of the series, and I think this has a lot to do with the episode's somewhat decisive reception - it's so naked on the emotional front that it occasionally makes for genuinely uncomfortable viewing. Perhaps that's what makes the story so well-suited for the festive period, when we as a culture are traditionally at our weakest for tales of naked sentiment and intense hardship alike. We all know that nothing goes down more nicely with the mulled wine than a little human misery...provided there is light at the end of the tunnel, of course.

The episode's unusually stark emotional candidness can also be attributed to the fact that it was rooted in such a personal place for writer Mike Scully. If you listen to Simpsons DVD commentaries, then you'll know that the premise of "Marge Be Not Proud" was lifted directly from his own childhood experience - apparently there was an occasion on which the young Scully succumbed to the temptation to shoplift (motivated, he says, more by peer pressure than uncontrollable desire) and was caught and apprehended by a store employee. The employee telephoned Scully's household, but his parents weren't home - instead, they got through to Scully's younger brother, who was instructed to pass on the message. Scully was then released from the store and told never to come back. Scully spent the rest of the day absolutely terrified as to how his parents would react when they heard the news - in his case, though, that never happened, as his brother failed to give them the message. As Scully relates the story on the commentary, it's not particularly clear to me if his brother's silence on the matter came from extraordinary loyalty or just extreme absent-mindedness; there can't be many siblings out there who would withhold information as juicy as that without demanding something in return, but maybe his brother was an unusually good egg. For the time being, Scully assumed he'd gotten away with it. Then came the day when he was out shopping with his mother and she took him into the very store where he'd been caught shoplifting. Scully was, of course, absolutely powerless to explain why this was a bad idea. While inside the store, he was approached by the employee who had apprehended him, who asked if he was not the same child they had explicitly banned a short time ago. Scully flat-out denied the charge and, fortunately for him, the employee was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Scully indicates that his mother passed away without ever learning the truth, and with that in mind, "Marge Be Not Proud" can be seen as his own indirect atonement to her, an acknowledgement of how things might have gone had that second encounter worked out differently, and the store employee had been more confident in their accusation. (Note that, in spite of Scully's sorry tale of childhood anguish, the DVD commentary ends up being one of the funniest on offer, because it's one of the very few in which the production staff make no bones about what an all-out nightmare it was to work with the episode's guest actor Lawrence Tierney. Most of the time, they seem genuinely appreciative of anybody who's willing to take time out of their busy schedule to appear in their silly cartoon show, but in Tierney's case...well, the erstwhile Dillinger, who was at the time enjoying a revival in interest following his casting in the 1992 film Reservoir Dogs, had a reputation for being an incredibly loose cannon. He sure did give an immaculate performance, though.)

A good chunk of the episode's distinctly downbeat feel comes from the tremendous sense of isolation that trails Bart throughout. He spends the first third of the episode feeling he's being shut out of a big cultural phenomenon, and the final third from something much smaller in scope yet so much more immense, which is to say his own family unit. When Bart is excluded from family rituals by Marge, on the presumption that he is getting too old for them, he is, by extension, shunned by the entirety of his clan. And with Bart regulated to the sidelines they never look like anything less than a picture of perfect family bliss, something that bothers him profoundly. At one point, Bart complains about being seen as the "black sheep" of the family, although earlier in the episode we'd received a reminder of how, ordinarily, Bart wears his badge as family miscreant with pride. Marge points out that she's never had a perfect family picture before, and we can see from her gallery of previous fiascos that this is purely Bart's doing - his gravitation toward mayhem makes sabotage irresistible, and finding increasingly creative ways of subverting their efforts to look like a well-presented family has become a personal challenge to him. Bart clearly does not see these actions as detrimental to the family's image, but as evidence of a healthy sense of humor that adds liveliness to their routines, but his latest, ill-judged act of rebellion calls all of that into question. Suddenly, Bart feels insecure about his place within the unit, and the possibility that he could be this toxic little seed of destruction whom the others grudgingly tolerate but would privately function better without. There is a sense that, in spite of their imperfections, the family's unity has always prevailed in the past; the preceding portraits are mildly titled, but overall look relatively balanced compared to the newest addition, which immediately slants when Marge hangs it above the fireplace, an obvious reflection of something being drastically out of whack within the Simpson equilibrium, and Marge's personal despair regarding her ruptured connection with her son. An equally poignant visual metaphor, this time reflecting Bart's perspective, occurs when he arrives home to find that the rest of the family have built snowmen in their likeness in his absence (with Homer employing somewhat more artistic licence than the others). Bart wants to build one too, if only to reassert his position as a valid member of this family, but all he has left to work with is the cruddy snow retrieved from under the car. Despite his best efforts, Bart's snowman ends up looking like a grotesque monstrosity, painfully out of sync with the meticulously sculpted specimens with which it rubs shoulders. As a manifestation of Bart's sense of inadequacy compared to the rest of his family, it couldn't be more searing.

The Yuletide setting pays off more directly, in narrative terms, in the final scene, when resolution is facilitated by an exchange of presents between Bart and Marge. Bart has returned from his third excursion to the Try-N-Save with something visibly concealed inside his jacket; Marge, fearing that her son is now a repeat offender, demands he hand it over, and receives a framed photograph of Bart himself, an attached receipt demonstrating its honest acquisition, which Bart had intended to give Marge for Christmas to compensate for her disastrous photo shoot. The earlier set-up of the slanted family portrait is also resolved satisfyingly, when Marge places Bart's picture at the edge of the frame, covering the previous blemish and restoring the balance both literally and metaphorically. Marge is so moved by the gesture that she wants to give Bart an early present in return - knowing how much he loves video games, she went to the local electronics outlet and asked the clerk for the hottest title going. Bart and the viewer alike are momentarily taunted into thinking that he's getting Bonestorm after all - until the wrapping is off, that is, and he finds himself staring at a copy of Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge (incidentally, I like the implication that the clerk might have lied to Marge in an effort to shift a copy of a slow-selling game). This is less a cruel slap around the face than the story concluding in the only way it logically can - honestly, if Bart had been given Bonestorm at the end, it would have felt profoundly wrong. He needed to demonstrate that he's risen above the kind of voracious materialism that started this whole ordeal. His interest in Bonestorm hasn't completely waned and he would accept the game in a heartbeat if it was offered to him. But he no longer places it at the centre of universe as he did at the start of the episode; instead, he's happy in simply having that reassurance of Marge's unconditional love. Bart has, in a way, taken another step toward adulthood, in being initiated into that most prevalent of grown-up Xmas traditions, one summed up deftly in the song "Christmas Time (Don't Let The Bells End)" by The Darkness - "Feigning joy and surprise/At the gifts we despise". Marge herself has already been set up for such a disappointment, albeit one that's going to have to play out off-screen - we might have forgotten about this, what with all the emotional trauma we've been through in the third act, but earlier on we saw Marge drop a hint to Homer that she wanted a watch for Christmas. We also know that he's actually planning to give her an ironing board cover. I suppose it's a step up from giving her a bowling ball with his own name engraved on it, but all the same, I couldn't imagine a more underwhelming gift to receive instead of a shiny new watch.

The episode closes with an extra festive cherry in top, in the form of an end-credits epilogue where we see footage from the Lee Carvallo game, as Bart attempts to make the most of his new present. This sequence really resonates with me as, growing up, the first console my family owned was an Amiga Commodore, which had a ton of cheesy sports-related titles. Later, we upgraded to a Sega Mega Drive and got Mortal Kombat, the title I presume Bonestorm was spoofing. I played it enough, but looking back, I have to admit that I have far fonder memories of those sports titles, in all their unabashed dorkiness. In my heart of hearts, I know I would have preferred to receive Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge over Bonestorm.

Finally, there is a small but important point I wish to make regarding the 1997 book The Simpsons: A Complete Guide To Our Favorite Family. Inconveniently, I don't have a copy to hand right now, but I seem to recall that, in Marge's character profile, it was stated that she briefly "stopped loving" Bart during the events of this very episode. But that's ridiculous. Of course she didn't - the bedroom scene with Marge and Homer makes it clear that the former's revised treatment of Bart wasn't motivated by a reduction in love on her part. As beautiful and invaluable a resource as A Complete Guide was, it had its faults like any other tome. The unfortunate wording seems to have been lifted from one of the episode's most underrated moments, when Bart attempts to articulate to Milhouse his fear that he might have lost his mother's devotions, only for Milhouse, who is still in the privileged position of getting to take his parents' displays of affection for granted, to not get it at all and to start spouting some delicious non-sequitur about piranhas (which, as we've discussed, are generally only worth fearing if you've been mangled by a jaguar in advance). I couldn't tell you why, but I was, for the longest time, under the erroneous impression that he was describing a scene from an actual existing movie, which I had in mind to seek out and watch some day. Alas, I've come to the regretful conclusion that no such flick exists, although maybe that is just as well - I doubt that any fully realised piranha periscope movie with a prophetic old lady could ever match the one I'd always been left to picture inside my head.

Father Christmas (aka What If Claus Was One Of Us? Just A Slob Like One of Us?)

In some respects it's all too easy for me to take the 1982 animated masterpiece The Snowman for granted, because as far as I'm concerned, it's always been there. I was born into a world in which the short was still fairly young, but already there was a firmly-entrenched cultural worship of it, and growing up it was an inescapable part of my Christmases, as intrinsic to the season as holly, ivy and the Wizzard cash register. But this is not the case for the short that could be described as its first real successor. Despite the positive reaction to The Snowman in 1982, and how much of a lucrative merchandising property it remained in ensuing years, it took the better part of a decade for anybody to attempt any kind of subsequent festive animation based on the works of Raymond Briggs (I think we can all agree that When The Wind Blows from 1986 was aiming for a very different demographic). I'm old enough to personally remember when it was announced that The Snowman was finally getting a follow-up, a spin-off focusing on a character who made a small but all-important cameo in the 1982 film. The Snowman was a completely dialogue-free experience (save for that bemusing prologue in certain broadcasts where David Bowie appears and introduces it as something that happened to him), but here our protagonist was to be given a voice, courtesy of comedian Mel Smith. Father Christmas was directed by Dave Unwin and debuted on Channel 4 on 24th December 1991; I was watching, and I've never forgotten the gleeful anticipation I felt seeing it fresh and new, forever cementing the film as a nostalgic favourite of mine.

By Briggs' standards this is a rather jolly old special. No death and no heartbreak of any variety, just a comedic 25-minute window into the private life of Santa and what he does on the 364 nights of the year when his uncanny talents for flight and infiltration aren't in hot demand. Turns out, Father Christmas (Briggs' version of the legendary gift-bearer is a Brit, and it's established at one point that this is the moniker he prefers) gets as worn down by the daily grind as the next person, and requires a vacation every now and then. As an added bonus, he doesn't have to worry about the cost of travelling - all he needs to do is convert his trademark sleigh into a caravan and fly to whatever destination takes his fancy. Still, FC is a fickle tourist and it doesn't take many inconveniences to convince him he'd be better off elsewhere. The first half of the special follows FC as he travels from locale to locale, hopping around from a campsite in France, to a coastal town in Scotland and finally a glitzy hotel in the USA - Las Vegas, Nevada, more specifically (yes, Santa has a thing for showgirls and gambling, although he isn't particularly good at the latter) - before returning home at the end of the summer to find a stack of letters from children already piling up in his doorway. From then on, he doesn't have time to even think about anything else other than preparing for the busy night ahead of him.

The special was an amalgamation of two separate Briggs books, Father Christmas (1973) and Father Christmas Goes On Holiday (1975). The story has also been expanded ever-so-slightly so as to function as a loose sequel to The Snowman - at one point, FC takes a short break from his annual rounds to drop in on his enchanted snowmen friends at their Christmas bash, where the young David Bowie (yes, I know that "officially" his name is James, but I'm not calling him that) and a familiar frozen cohort are also in attendance. Upon seeing them, FC quips, "Glad you could make it again...the party, I mean, not your Snowman!" Given how much childhood trauma and emotional devastation was unleashed by the Snowman's untimely demise at the end of the aforementioned film, that really seems a bit flippant to me, but the very implication that he was reincarnated on subsequent Christmases and reunited with Bowie certainly helped take the sting off. This isn't the only point in the special where the story intersects with another of Raymond Briggs' properties - there's another, much subtler nod elsewhere in FC's adventures, with potentially darker ramifications, but we'll hold off on that for now.

Briggs' story offers a fairly unique take on the Santa mythos, in that his Saint Nicholas is depicted as a more humanised figure than we're accustomed to seeing in our seasonal media. For one thing, he's not much of a Saint - indeed, he has one or two filthy habits that might even rub some modern sensibilities the wrong way (see below). This Santa is human like the rest of us, meaning that he shits and pisses like the rest of us (and, in his case, his intestines are seriously ill-equipped for an over-indulgence of gourmet French cuisine - I'm not 100% certain, but I think this may be the only animated family special in which Santa suffers from a bout of explosive diarrhoea). He's also a bit of a grump and is constantly muttering under his breath about everything and anything that gets under his skin ("Blooming" being his favourite adjective). The pivotal humor, though, is in the extremely wry manner in which Briggs' Father Christmas is shown functioning within the mundane realities of every day life. This Santa doesn't live in the far-off regions of the North Pole; instead, Briggs proposes that there is something every bit as magical in the notion that, for the other 364 days of the year, Santa could be just your typical bloke next door (albeit easily recognisable to his legions of young beneficiaries through his portly figure and fluffy white beard). He lives in a nondescript English neighbourhood with nary an elf in sight, and if Mrs Claus was ever involved then she either died or packed up long ago (there is a portrait of a woman on his wall, widely speculated to be the departed Mrs Claus, which I guess tells its own sad unspoken story, but this is never confirmed). Magical flying reindeer are an indispensable part of the Santa lore even in Briggs' (relatively) down-to-earth vision, so FC does have a couple of those hanging out in a shed in his backyard. Otherwise, his sole companions are the nameless black cat and Jack Russell terrier who wait devotedly on the sidelines for FC to return from his numerous adventures; FC treats them with a genuine affection, demonstrating that, for all his gruffness, he's a softie deep down inside. Although perhaps that much is already evident in what he's willing to do for the world's entire young populace by flying out every night before Christmas and leaving them all presents, a profession that's here regarded as as matter-of-fact as anything else about his daily existence. It's not at all clear what higher power, if any, tasks FC with completing such a gargantuan endeavor year after year - for all we know, he's compelled to do this simply because he's that much of a philanthropist and delights in bringing the children of Earth a bit of seasonal magic and joy, even if it comes at a conspicuous cost to himself. It only happens once a year, but it is, nevertheless, an obligation that dominates his life throughout the remaining 364 days. And as much as FC might persistently grumble about that fact, in the end we sense that he wouldn't have it any other way. 

Although Father Christmas is by and far the most gentle of the Raymond Briggs animations, there is an understated sadness in the subtle implications that FC's devotion to his singular profession prevents him from leading the kind of ordinary life with which he intermittently flirts. I suspect that this is why there's no room for Mrs Claus in Briggs' version of the mythos - this Santa is a decidedly lonely individual who isn't able to get close to and form relationships with other people, in part because his job places such heavy demands on his time, but also because he has a secret identity to keep under wraps. This is a major factor in why he's unable to settle for long in any of his chosen vacationing spots; remaining an anonymous tourist isn't an easy task when you've got one of the most recognisable mugs on the planet. The dilemma is particularly salient during his time in Scotland, where he visits a pub and does a pretty good job of integrating with the locals, only to be reminded almost immediately of how badly he risks letting his guard down when he's identified by a passing bairn. This isn't exactly The Last Temptation of Santa, but the closing sequence, which shows the exhausted and solitary FC retiring to his prosaic bedroom while the world around him wakes up excitedly to a brand new Christmas morn, is a surprisingly poignant means of rounding off such a light-hearted narrative. He does monumental work and is loved and admired the world over, but strictly from a distance; the man himself exists purely on the sidelines, a total unknown. And that's fine - one gets the impression that he's perfectly happy with just his dog and his cat and his bottle of brandy from Uncle Bob. All the same, the number of parties and celebrations happening in the world that FC brushes up against but can never be a part of gives you an idea of how much he's sacrificed in order to make this work. Even his stopover at the snowmen's shindig is cut short by an urgent last minute delivery to Buckingham Palace.

Briggs' take on the legend is charming and refreshing, but it does leave a few lingering questions about how this FC operates that probably won't bother the special's target audience, yet inevitably plague my less credulous adult brain. For one thing, it's never established how he makes a living in this universe. True, you could query how any version of Santa manages to be financially viable, but this one has a penchant for some seriously splashy indulgences, and I'm wanting to know how he finances his expensive French lunches and luxury hotel stays in Vegas. Moreover, with the elves and the big fancy workshop taken out of the equation it's not explained where the sleigh-load of toys he delivers every year even comes from; he simply has them ready on the night in question, and that's that. If the implication is that he buys them himself then that's an even bigger drain on his seemingly endless pocket. And who puts up his reindeer during his tenure in Vegas? Is nobody bothered by the fact that he's bypassed customs to bring two unquarantined animals onto French and American soil (again, Santa does that every year anyway, but here he's meant to be passing himself off as a regular tourist)? Some of these absurdities are weaved quite knowingly into the story - for example, the fact that numerous letters addressed only to "Santa Claus, The North Pole" are able to inexplicably find their way to this seemingly ordinary urban household. Clearly, there are greater forces at work here that we're not let in on, even if it is just some arrangement he has in place with the world's postal services - it's noteworthy that adults in this universe seem hilariously nonchalant about FC's existence; he shares an amiable exchange with a passing milkman after finishing his delivery, and at one point accidentally walks in on an adult party and is casually directed to the correct room (although the attendees do share a snicker over his cliched get-up).

Like The Snowman, the special went on to become a long-running fixture of Channel 4's seasonal line-up (it's certainly better-remembered than subsequent Briggs specials, like The Bear and Ivor The Invisible, which in spite of their merits seem to have fallen between the cracks; they still keep trying to push that sodding Snowdog, but we'll see how much he longer lasts). I do, however, know at least one person who showed the special to their children in recent years and felt that it had aged poorly, with its depiction of an "everyday" Santa who's into smoking, boozing, gambling and lusting after women (I assume that nobody has a problem with the diarrhoea, though?*). The "lusting after women" charge was a mite exaggerated in my view - there's a brief moment where FC is seen dancing with a chorus line of girls at a Vegas stage show and giggling inanely, and he later dreams about lying on a lilo and being surrounded by female admirers, but that's as far as it goes - but I'll concede that if this special was made today then FC's penchant for cigar-puffing would certainly be excised. The alcohol? Possibly - although, unlike in the US where children traditionally leave out milk and cookies for Santa, in the UK it is customary to leave him a glass of sherry, so there is an argument to be made that a boozing FC is all part of the mythos there anyway. The idea is that he's supposed to be a flawed Santa (though not a bad one), and giving him a handful of muted vices is one way to show that, but I suppose I can respect why some parents with young children might feel uncomfortable with seeing such behaviours modelled by a bastion of childhood innocence. Then again, between this and the Father Christmas we meet in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, who dispenses weapons to children and comes out with explicitly sexist spiel, I know which incarnation I prefer. Personally, I only have one real issue with how Briggs' Father Christmas is characterised, and it's much the same problem I had as a child back in 1991 - there's a scene where he goes to a dry cleaners to collect his iconic Cola Cola-endorsed reds and is unduly brusque to the woman who serves him. She's doing nothing more egregious than attempting to make pleasant conversation, and is visibly shocked by his reaction. This moment has never sat well with me - I get that the whole idea is that FC doesn't have much of a social life and therefore isn't always great in situations that require him to deal with people, but this is the only point in the special where he comes off as an unpleasant old geezer as opposed to a lovably gruff one. Seriously, FC, this a tough season for those working in customer service too; maybe show a little solidarity?

Although Father Christmas is in many respects a very different kind of seasonal special to The Snowman, it takes an obvious cue from its predecessor in one regard, in climaxing with a musical sequence as our protagonist takes to the skies and embarks on an epic overseas journey; here, we get a montage showing FC transporting presents to numerous households around the world, all while expressing his thoughts on the process in song. The song itself, "Another Blooming Christmas", is upbeat in tone and blatantly not looking for comparison with the haunting and sombre "Walking In The Air", but it is infectiously catchy. And the animation, in which FC and his reindeer are seen swooping across various snow-covered buildings and landscapes, while not as starkly immersive as that of its counterpart, genuinely does make me gasp in places.

Oh yes, and that slightly darker nod to another Raymond Briggs property I mentioned - when FC goes into the pub in Scotland, who else would be wetting their whistles in the backdrop but Jim and Hilda from Gentleman Jim and When The Freaking Wind Blows? Now, I'm perfectly fine and dandy with this special taking place within the same narrative universe as The Snowman, but for the sake of FC and his pets, and for young David Bowie and his snowman friend, let's hope that this is an alternate timeline where they didn't drop the bomb. The last thing we need to think of is Santa perishing in the nuclear winter.

* I say that, but actually, the upload of the special that can be found on YouTube right now has been carefully edited to remove the part where we actually see him on the john.

I Think I'll Drive To Work Today, Mrs Jones... (Nissan Primera)

The immediate aftermath of Peugeot's "Drive of Your Life" ad saw a number of interesting (or utterly banal, depending on your outlook) attempts to replicate the formula, not least from Peugeot themselves. Few of these imitations launched with quite the same degree of grandiose self-indulgence as the Peugeot spot - booking out an entire three minute News at Ten ad break for its debut in February 1996 was a stunt that seemed to turn enough heads while garnering little adulation from the press - but the intrinsic narrative was set in stone. Your everyday journey from Point A to Point B was represented as an opportunity for spiritual cleansing - the time when you got to cast off your established identity and embrace your full aptitude as the kind of liberated soul who drives X vehicle. The idea, I suppose, being that your car was a transitory vessel for moving in between two static poles, your time therein a precious and ephemeral phase in which nothing was fixed and solid and you could momentarily defy definition and simply be an individual riding a wave of unspent potential. The outcome of your diurnal routines were unlikely to change in any substantial way just because you were embarking on them in a flash new set of wheels, a fact that I doubt many consumers were truly unwise to - what auto manufacturers were attempting to sell you (besides the obvious) was a moment, and how to purportedly make the most of it.

This ad for the Nissan Primera feels more modest in tone than its Peugeot counterpart, ditching its more abstract elements (there's no obvious equivalent here to our so-called average person's Nicolas Roeg-drenched fantasies of pursuing a girl in a red coat), although the central energy is much the same. A nondescript businessman's morning commute to work becomes a transcendent ritual in which he gets to revel in his yearning for some kind of higher fulfilment. "Lifted" by Lighthouse Family is used as an analogue to M People (both acts were commonly lumped into what at the time was derisively categorised as "coffee table music"), with the succession of pretty accompanying visuals once again evoking the sensation of watching a truncated music video (on the subject of the actual "Lifted" music video...anyone else consider it slightly curious that it takes place in an arid desert when the lyrics explicitly and repeatedly reference rain?). The grand twist here being that our protagonist works from a home-based office, alongside his wife, meaning that he was out there facing the world just for the hell of it. The Nissan answers a very different need in his life - one which, having been working from home for the better part of two years now, I can certainly comprehend. When, early in 2020, venues that encouraged mass gatherings became forbidden territory and we were all regulated to our own private spaces, the loss of that daily commute came as an unexpected blow; more than just a functional necessity, it provided an opportunity to connect with the outside world and reaffirm that we were all a part of something larger. I know a number of people who were still setting out every morning, if only to immediately turn tail and head back home - if nothing else, it offered alleviation from staring at the same four walls all day. In this guy's case...well, a person could do a lot worse than having to stare at the swanky-looking walls he has around him. But the basic human need is duly recognised.

Viewing this ad in 2021, it's hard not to see it through the lens of the post-COVID world, in that the great outside the hero traverses seems puzzlingly deserted. You do see the silhouettes of what looks like a trio of cyclists as he first sets out on his journey, but otherwise he's got the entire road, and the world as a whole, entirely to himself. Even when he reaches the city, which we might initially assume to be his stopping point, there's nary another soul in sight. The brand new morning looks fresh as a daisy, golden and picturesque, but there's something very eerie, even borderline post-apocalyptic about the conspicuous lack of life stirring therein. The obvious answer is that the outside world exists here purely for the benefit of our protagonist; when he heads out for his symbolic commute, he isn't so much escaping his self-contained bubble as wallowing in an extension of it. The bigger picture is, for all intents and purposes, his own private and personalised backyard, with no other humans with their own intersecting agendas there to smudge up his pristine view.

Still, what really intrigues (and unnerves) me about this spot is how the couple therein play like worldlier counterparts to our minimalist chums who, at around the same point in advertising history, were down in their spartan lair, struggling to come to terms with their shameful addiction to Imperial Leather. Again, same energy. This couple, in direct contrast, have an unashamed hankering for luxuries, but the world they inhabit seems every bit as jarringly surreal, cut off from anything resembling conventional civilisation and steeped in a mind-bending artificiality. As the ad opens, and we find our leads contemplating the day ahead from the comfort of their ultramodern bedroom, their reflections are fleetingly glimpsed amid the bizarrely fluid purple mise en scene, cluing us in that there is an element of duality at play. Like those minimalists, they speak to one another in a stilted manner that suggests both are playing up to their assumed roles; visually, there is enough of a contrast between the couple's casual and working environs, even if they are apparently both situated underneath the same roof (one is flamboyant, borderline illusory and something of an eyesore, while the other is ordered and decorous, if no less elaborate), although it is curious that they insist upon the formality of addressing one another as "Mr Jones" and "Mrs Jones" in both modes (thus telegraphing the ad's plot twist at the start). I would hazard a guess this done to facilitate a closing echo, so that the viewer would be crystal clear on the revelation that his wife and his colleague are indeed the same person - and besides, compared to the Imperial Leather couple, I suspect that their repeated insistence on these austere monikers is intended to come off as more playful than sinister (implying that the novelty of being both marital and business partners has yet to wear off for them). The suggestion of artifice does, nevertheless, go along perfectly with the general queasiness of that purple decor; it plays like an illusion, a dream from which our protagonist is required jar himself loose every morning as he eases himself down to Earth, traversing the open and unpopulated road back to reality (and, potentially, on into some other falsehood) in his trusty Nissan. Which Mr Jones and Mrs Jones, if either, represent the "real" people and which are just roles they are obligated to play in between is immaterial - as with the Imperial Leather ad, human relationships are depicted as a drawn-out ritual of gestures and insincerity, with intimacy with the product in question representing a momentary gasp of clarity amid it all. Our protagonist finds his release in an act of ostensible play pretence - that he needs to drive himself to work - by intermittently purging his identity to that of a Nissan driver on his way to somewhere. That he isn't discovering much out there except a mirror to his own wanderlusting ego is likewise immaterial.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #38: They're Dogs! And They're Playing Poker!

What exactly is the deal with those dogs playing poker anyway?

We're all familiar with the gag in the Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror IV", where Homer is so unsettled by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's demented visions of canine recreation that he's driven to delirium. Like so many perfectly-executed and enduring Simpsons moments, what we're inevitably left with is a case of full-blown cultural hijacking - it's now virtually impossible to lay eyes on Coolidge's works in any other context and not immediately have Homer's hysterical objections bellowing through your skull (much as it's now impossible not to think of Marge's reaction upon seeing another infamous and much-replicated specimen of animal-orientated visual art). In the case of Homer and those poker-playing dogs, there was always one question lurking at the back of my mind that, for a long time, I was never quite able to satisfy - what, precisely, is the joke here? Other than the really obvious gag (one that I'm confident Coolidge was 100% in on) that the entire premise of dogs playing poker is kind of inherently absurd? No question that they are silly paintings, and at least part of the sequence's appeal lies in the incongruity in seeing such silly images evoking such strong reactions - not only does Homer completely lose his marbles over the thing, but Bart, spoofing Rod Serling in Night Gallery, informs us that the original story that would have tied directly into the Coolidge painting had to be scrapped because it was too horrific. And yet the intensity of Homer's shrieking has me oddly convinced that there is an intrinsic evil to be unpicked from the images - so much so that when the same image (a replication of Coolidge's most famous dog painting, A Friend In Need) later resurfaced in "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds", it lends a sinister undercurrent to what would otherwise be a fairly twee sequence of Disneyesque pet courtship. Coolidge's pictures depict a wholly innocuous anthropomorphism - the dogs are behaving like humans, one assumes, for no deeper reason than it making for a cute and amusing visual (compare it to Sir Edwin Landseer's 1840 painting Laying Down The Law, commonly cited as a conceptual forbearer to Coolidge's pictures, which also has naturalistic-looking dogs participating in distinctly human activities, but with a more obviously satirical bent). Homer's visceral reaction to the painting seems to stem from the idea that this kind of lightweight anthropomorphism is, in fact, highly disturbing, as it represents a grotesque subversion on the natural order of things - a point that is later echoed (albeit possibly unintentionally on The Simpsons' part) at the very end of the episode, when Santa's Little Helper engages in what is supposed to be a Snoopy-style jig, but it looks more as though he warrants an urgent visit from Dr Karras.

Still, the effectiveness of the gag is rooted in something quite a bit juicier than Homer detecting evil in an ostensibly dubious source. The Simpsons' was, after all, far from the only cultural voice to send up the works of Coolidge with a fervour that walks a fine line between derision and fascination. The paintings were previously a source of contention between Sam Malone and Diane Chambers in the sitcom Cheers, with the former guilelessly professing to notice something new every time he looked at them. In Larry Shue's 1984 play The Foreigner, a character objects to being put up in a motel room where Coolidge's pictures adorn the walls. In 2002, the Chrysler Museum of Art's idea of an April Fool's prank was to issue a press release claiming that they intended to acquire and exhibit all of the original paintings in their galleries - the mere suggestion that images of dogs playing poker belonged in an institution dedicated to serious art was intended to put you in bawling hysterics not altogether dissimilar to those modelled by Homer. Clearly, there is something about the seemingly harmless gambling mutts that touches a nerve in a lot of people. Coolidge's paintings are an iconic part of Americana, yet America as a whole has a curious love/hate relationship with the images; this much appears to rest on an intuitive consensus that the pictures, while immediately recognisable and highly ubiquitous, are - in total honesty - not actually all that good. They're cute, certainly, but they exude a seedy vulgarity that lets you know, wherever you see one, that you're not in the classiest neck of the woods. Perhaps it's this combination of conceptual fluffiness and visual vulgarity that makes them so successful, and that has enabled Coolidge's dogs to worm their way into so many houses and derelict hotels - there is something undeniably compelling in their unabashed kitschiness. They are, in the words of Jackson Arn of Artsy, "the very definition of a guilty pleasure, the artistic equivalent of a Big Mac and fries." I suspect that this is the real reason why Homer is so terrified by the sight of them - they represent a kind of cultural nightmare, a gleeful celebration of bad taste as it is ceaselessly reproduced and permitted to permeate walls far and wide.

Here's a fun fact about Coolidge's dogs - not only are they horrifying animals, they are Horrifying Advertising Animals, and might even be seen as precursors to the 37 specimens I have covered prior in this series. See, Coolidge didn't create so many images of poker-playing dogs because he found the idea amusing - he had a ulterior motive, in hoping that these wily mutts would charm you into changing your shopping and consumption habits. Coolidge created his original dogs-playing-poker painting, Poker Game, as a stand alone piece in 1984, and might never have revisited the concept had he not later been approached by publishing company Brown & Bigelow in 1903, and commissioned to create sixteen further images as promotional tools for cigars. Not all of the subsequent sixteen show dogs playing poker (some show the dogs at baseball games, ballroom dancing and grappling with a broken-down auto-mobile) but it's the card-handling curs that became the most deeply ingrained in public consciousness. Perhaps it's because these images are the most prominently narrative-driven of the bunch - we get a glimpse into the tensions of the game, and of the underhanded tactics being deployed by the dogs in their tabletop war.

The images have become so iconic in their own right that it was somewhat inevitable that a modern advertising campaign would eventually capitalise on that cultural recognition and appropriate them to their own ends. In the late 1990s, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network ran a series of promos for their Monday Night Football slot that brought Coolidge's dogs to life, using a combination of real dogs and the wonders of cutting-edge technology. CGI was used to animate the characters' mouths - in case you ever wondered what those dogs actually spoke about in between their poker pursuits (as it turns out, nothing of substance). The premise here was that the dogs got together for their Monday night poker sessions and had televised sports blaring in the backdrop, momentarily commanding their attentions from the cards on the table.

The ESPN promos were directed by Joe Pytka, and were recreated from two particular Coolidge paintings, A Bold Bluff and Waterloo, in which the poker participants are a St Bernard, bulldog, boxer, collie and Great Dane. As with the original images, the main tension at the table appears to be between the St Bernard and the bulldog (who has an instantly familiar voice - has it cropped up previously in our tour of advertising critters, per chance?). The one prominent detail in Coolidge's art that has been omitted from the ESPN promos is that the dogs have all kicked their unhealthy smoking habits. Unsurprisingly so - the dogs might have been designed with the very intention of instilling such habits, but sensibilities had moved on, and contemporary viewers were less likely to be charmed by the sight of a cute dog puffing on a stick of nicotine. The promos got around the big issue these dogs would have come up against, even if they could comprehend the rules of the game - that is, they would never be able to survey their hands with their opposable thumb-less paws - by creating a pair of animatronic paws for each dog. The paws look kind of stiff and jerky, and it's an amusing stretch to entertain them actually being attached to the dogs in question, but any commercial using Coolridge's art as its basis is obviously going to benefit from a little low-rent grotesqueness.

Indeed. It is perhaps also entirely befitting for a campaign lifted from such a notoriously unrepentant slice of low art that the promos have a distinctly ersatz flavour to them. Don't get me wrong, Pytka and his team did a splendid job in recreating the Coolridge originals so lovingly in a three-dimensional world; it is, nevertheless, difficult to watch the ads without being put in mind of the Swamp Gang campaign that was making such waves for Budweiser at the time, and which was built upon much the same formula - wacky talking animals giving their sardonic commentary while the product in question is hawked in the backdrop. The ESPN promos were fun and likeable, but with a whisker less wit and invention than their reptilian/amphibian counterparts down at the bayou. Then again, it's not as though these poker-loving mutts had very much to prove. Their status as a cultural juggernaut was already long cemented; so long as they captured enough of the source's weirdly delectable kitsch, it would be enough to set tails wagging (or curling between your legs, depending on your impressions of said source). Only time will if, come the dawn of the 22nd Century, artefacts from the Swamp Gang are inspiring such farcically mixed emotions in the hearts of onlookers.

Living In The Bottle: Timeless Time (One Foot In The Grave)

Let's talk about another television staple that holds particular fascination for me: the bottle episode. Like our old buddy, the clip show, the budget-friendly nature of the bottle episode has made it a popular go-to across the decades for producers looking to squeeze out an installment or two with as little fuss as possible. The term "bottle episode" was coined by Outer Limits producer Leslie Stevens, who likened the experience of creating such an episode to coaxing a genie out of a bottle - the idea is that you're looking to generate magic from extremely limited resources, with bottle episodes typically restricting their action to a single location and to non-extra cast members (although there are no hard rules about what you can and cannot do). As such, there tends to be something about them that resembles the aura of theatre as much as television, with their slow-burning, minimalist emphasis on enclosed spaces and intensive character dialogues, and there is often tremendous relish to be had in seeing how they rise to the challenge. TV shows of all stripes have tried their hand at the form, and there are certain shows that consist of nothing but bottle episodes (eg: the anthology series Inside No. 9, which was directly inspired by the enjoyment its creators Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton had in making a bottle episode for their preceding series, Psychoville) - I can, however, think of relatively few series that perfected the art of the bottle quite so beautifully and as hauntingly as David Renwick's classic BBC sitcom, One Foot In The Grave.

One Foot In The Grave follows Victor Meldrew (Richard Wilson) a sixtysomething ex-security guard forced into premature retirement (aka redundancy), who now spends his days attempting, entirely in vain, to reassert his value in a society that has callously discarded him, butting heads with just about everyone he encounters and frequently getting the goat of his similarly peevish but more reserved wife Margaret (Annette Crosbie). Other recurring characters include Jean Warboys (Doreen Mantle), Margaret's insufferably scatter-brained best friend, Patrick and Pippa Trench (Angus Deayton and Janine Duvitski), the younger couple next door who seem sadly fated to become Victor and Margaret later in life (giving a healthy shot of irony to the long-running enmity between Victor and Patrick) and Nick Swainey (Owen Brenman), the Meldrews' other neighbour, a deeply eccentric, excessively upbeat charity worker who presents as if he were the bastard love child of Ned Flanders and Norman Bates (and was compared to the latter in the episode "In Luton Airport No One Can Hear You Scream"). The humor blends absurdism (Victor is often the victim of freakishly bad luck) with periodic morbidness - the topic of mortality was an oft-explored one (in fairness, the series title is a dead giveaway), and the series demonstrated just how squeamish it was prepared to get on the matter right from the second episode, "The Big Sleep", when the Meldrews have an emotionally scarring experience at a yoga class. One Foot In The Grave could get very dark in places, to a point that regularly tested the sensibilities of its viewers (my own personal threshold was reached in the episode "We Have Put Her Living In The Tomb", which is the one episode I cannot bring myself to revisit; I do not do dead pets, sorry). A particularly laudable aspect of the series was its willingness to stick to its guns in its thoroughly unsentimental depiction of ageing, relationships and humanity in general (the first Christmas episode, "Who's Listening", being a glaring exception where it surrendered to sentimentality wholesale...on the flip side, you've really got to admire the balls of any sitcom that would exhibit a story as horrific as "The Man Who Blew Away" as festive entertainment).

It's become something of a cliche to point this out when discussing the series, but Victor is a misunderstood protagonist, in that he's often represented in popular consciousness as an unpleasant old man taking knee-jerk umbrage with everyone and everything around him. No question that Victor has a mean temper. But he does not, in all other regards, strike me as a mean person. The thing about Victor is that he's actually quite good-hearted underneath it all. He has a strong sense of justice, and a large deal of his indignation at the general indifference and inconsideration of the world (in his words, "the bloody-minded soddishness of people") is honestly righteous - it's more that he doesn't make life easy for himself with his tendency to leap head-first into confrontations he can never win. On occasions where Victor is excessively cruel (as he was to a bereaved video store clerk in "Who's Listening" and to his brother in "The Broken Reflection") he will end up recognising this and feeling remorse. On top of which, the more closely you watch the series, the more apparent it becomes that Margaret is actually the more bitter and cynical of the two - living with Victor and the perpetual calamity he brings is certainly no picnic, but she's cold to Victor in ways that he does not reciprocate. Then again, Margaret has suffered some pretty appalling misfortunes in her time (and would continue to do so throughout the course of the series) - misfortunes that extend well beyond her marriage to the impossibly accident-prone Victor, and of which the initial bottle episode, "Timeless Time", merely scratches the surface.

One Foot In The Grave debuted on 4th January 1990 and ran for six series, the last of which aired on 20th November 2000 (note: there was a long hiatus between Series 5 and 6, although a number of stand alone Christmas specials appeared in the interim). From Series 2 onward, it became a tradition to have one bottle episode per series, and these were typically written to a formula - they took place in real time, with Victor and Margaret trapped in some kind of unpleasant or claustrophobic situation that, toward the end of the episode, they would reflect on mournfully as an apt metaphor for the trajectory their lives had taken in general (usually foreshadowed in the episode title). Inevitably, the central situation was never resolved, and the episode would fade out with it still continuing. The series liked to mix up this formula - one such episode, "The Trial" of Series 4, dispensed with Margaret altogether and consisted simply of Victor murmuring to himself in his living room for half an hour (it wound up being one of the funniest episodes of the series, too). An advantage of bottle episodes, besides their frugality, is that they allowed for more in-depth character contemplation - with all this dead space to fill, Victor and Margaret were given the opportunity to expand on their backstories in greater detail than a regular episode would have had room for. "Timeless Time", which debuted on 15th November 1990 as the closing episode of Series 2, is notable not only for being the very first of the bottle episodes, but also the only occasion in which the Meldrews openly discuss a personal tragedy from their past that, while never brought up again, inevitably puts a whole new lens on our interpretation of the characters in the present. Not a lot happens in "Timeless Time", and yet it feels like one of the most monumental of all the series.

"Timeless Time" takes place entirely in the Meldrew's bedroom in the early hours of the morning; Victor is suffering from a bout of insomnia (potentially triggered by a bad reaction to the dubious dish of Spaghetti Al Pacino served the previous night at his mother-in-law's), and as an inevitable knock-on effect, so is Margaret. In its sleep-deprived state, Victor's mind begins wandering into all kinds of ludicrous territory, as he attempts to make sense of some of life's most troubling paradoxes - namely, the elusiveness of time, and the inexplicable teaspoon he always discovers while draining the sink after washing up (Victor's fixation on the matter is such that at one point he even drifts off long enough to visualise the Loch Ness Monster as a 60-ft teaspoon). Naturally, "Timeless Time" is a mostly dialogue-driven affair, although it does incorporate some elements of the absurdist slapstick for which the series is well-known - most notably, when Victor is forced to venture outside to turn off his car alarm, loses a slipper and accidentally puts on a semi-decayed hedgehog carcass (I noted that the series could be quite brutal in its treatment of animals, but at least in this instance the hedgehog would have been long out of its misery before Victor got to it; not so much the cat who later has the disintegrating hedgehog dumped on it). Which does make me wonder what kind of cheap and nasty slippers Victor must be accustomed to wearing, if he seriously couldn't tell the difference. "Timeless Time" also contains (I think) the first reference to Ronnie and Mildred, a couple of "friends" of the Meldrew's who would later appear in person (much to the Meldrew's revulsion) in the Series 3 finale, "The Worst Horror of All". Here, it's established that the Meldrews have a stash of unopened Christmas presents from Ronnie and Meldrew in their closet; Victor's boredom reaches such unendurable heights that he seriously contemplates tackling this, but ultimately decides that he hasn't the stomach for it. In the 1996 Christmas special "Starbound" it was revealed that their hoard of unopened gifts has only increased and that, worryingly, one of them has started to smell.

The scenario of "Timeless Time" entails the Meldrews lying still, both literally and figuratively, as time continues to pass them by. With their prospects of a restful night's sleep seeming increasingly doubtful, they're left with only two options - gaze helplessly into the darkened void all around them, or jabber inanely about whatever of life's various annoyances or banalities happen to worm into their fatigued heads. All five of the series' bottle episodes deal, to some capacity, with Victor squaring off against stagnation, but "Timeless Time" may be the entry in which that stagnation is most saliently reflected in his surroundings, with a predominant feeling of nothingness. Nothing, so Victor tells us, is all that exists, before elucidating his theory on why time is merely an illusion - "The future doesn't exist, because it hasn't happened yet. The past doesn't exist, because it's already over. And the present doesn't exist, because as soon as you start to think about it, it's already become the past." Victor's frustrations on the impersonal nature of time, along with his seeming inability to seize the moment and live meaningfully within it, are entirely relatable. And yet what he and Margaret articulate throughout the course of the episode would appear to disprove all of his assertions. Clearly, the past and the future are very existent, as two equally oppressive states between which the Meldrews are perpetually sandwiched. They are haunted by the emotional baggage they have accumulated in their six decades on Earth, and by the inevitability of their own demises - and Victor is troubled to hear that he has already been consigned to the grave, or rather his cremated remains to the floor of Allied Carpets, in the distorted perception of a former acquaintance. Or perhaps it's more a case that Victor and Margaret live in the Eternal Now, the eternity of that now having become more inescapable as time has gone on. From their assorted journeys down memory lane, there are numerous ways in which their present situation seems largely unchanged from its humble beginnings - at one point, they reminisce about the first night on which they ever slept together, which was also defined by its sleeplessness. For Victor, the standout memory of the evening was being kept awake by a dripping tap, while Margaret recalls Victor's bed-hogging inconsideration as the source of her own insomnia (although at the time she had somehow convinced herself that this was all part of the romantic ritual). The paradox at the heart of the episode is how Victor and Margaret have remained trapped in their personal inertia while still feeling the onslaught of the relentless flow of time. Time has taken its toll on themselves and the world that they once knew, just as it has taken its toll on the world in which "Timeless Time" itself takes place (referenced in "Timeless Time" and no longer with us: Stephen Hawking, Mike Hope, Albie Keen, Reg Varney, Allied Carpets). The world may keep on turning, but where have they actually gotten in any of this?

The major revelation occurs toward the end of the episode, when Victor, ranting about the indignities of tabloid journalism, makes some flippant reference to the Biblical slaughter of the innocents ("no British babies believed to be involved") followed by an awkward silence where he realises that he's broached a forbidden subject and has upset Margaret. He apologises for going too far. Margaret responds by admitting that, "I was thinking about him just this morning," and talks about her chance encounter with a man named Michael, who works for an insurance firm and has a daughter just starting at secondary school. She then refers to somebody named Stuart and wonders if he too would have pursed a career in insurance. It's never explicitly stated, but we're given enough information to piece together that Stuart was Victor and Margaret's son, who died as a child. Michael, meanwhile, was the baby of another woman Margaret met in the maternity ward where she gave birth to Stuart; seeing him as an adult decades later has clearly been an eye-opener for her, not just as a further reminder of the unabating passage of time, but because he provides a ghostly mirror to the point in life where Stuart would have been if he had lived.

As noted, the loss of Stuart and the grief with which the Meldrews have lived ever since was never touched on at any other point in the series. The closest we'd previously gotten to addressing the matter of their apparent lack of descendants was slightly earlier in Series 2, in the episode "Who Will Buy?", when Victor rebuffed a door-to-door salesman, whose sales pitch contained a reference to their hypothetical grandchildren, with the rejoinder: "How do you know I've got grandchildren? I might be completely sterile!" Which at the time might have passed as nothing more than your typically churlish Victor-ism, although with this information in mind it's easy to see how the salesman's presumptions might have touched a nerve in him. Surprisingly, Stuart is not brought up in the one episode where some reference to him would have felt entirely pertinent, ie: the 1991 Christmas special "The Man In The Long Black Coat", where Pippa is pregnant but ultimately suffers a miscarriage. From what little we learn in "Timeless Time", it seems that this is a subject the Meldrews prefer generally not to talk about; life has gone on since Stuart and their bereavement is something they've had to accommodate in that, but the rawness of that loss is still every bit as potent, demonstrating how the past is indeed alive and kicking in the present. It is unknown how old Stuart was when died, but Margaret's line, "she was coming out just as I was going in", gives me the ominous feeling that he possibly didn't even make it out of the hospital. It's in Michael and his mother and the wistful feelings they inspire in Margaret that we see another facet of time not factored into Victor's earlier equation - namely, the future that once might have been - and how this too has heavy bearing upon the now. Judging by the tenderness with which Margaret describes her encounter with Michael, the meeting has been of some comfort to her, as if she has glimpsed vicariously, through Michael's entirely prosaic existence, a parallel universe in which Stuart survived to adulthood and the two of them were able to enjoy a relationship that spanned so many touchstones in both of their lives. There is, nevertheless, one element in which his mother's life seems to synch up hauntingly with Margaret's own - Michael will soon be leaving the area, prompting the empathic remark that: "She'll miss him; she never had any others". Life is comprised of meetings and partings at all stages, but perhaps in this statement we also see an indirect acknowledgement of Margaret's own need to come to come to terms with her loss and accept that this outcome never was.

The mention of Stuart segues into a broader discussion about how easy it was for the characters to take life for granted when it seemed that they had all the time in the world. Margaret makes a particularly astute observation when she recalls that, "A year was an eternity when you were a child. The time between one Christmas and the next." In the end, the absent Stuart seems emblematic of the more general sense of thwarted potential that pervades the episode. The central problem of a sleepless night becomes a metaphor for grand life plans that never came to fruition; Victor's frustrated tallying of the number of prospective hours' sleep he still has remaining an acknowledgement of his increasingly limited time on Earth. Meanwhile, the rattle of distant milk bottles that Victor bemoans as "the beginning of the end" is a comical shorthand for the cold hand of death slowly but surely crawling its way toward him. There is something wryly paradoxical in seeing the dawning of a new day, more conventionally interpreted as a symbol of renewal, posited as a prelude to impending oblivion. This duality is emphasised in a visual gag at the end of the episode, when we see the light of dawn through the bedroom window, accompanied by the last of the intrusions they have to deal with from the neighbourhood fauna, a sparrow energetically heralding the new day. Having plumbed the depths of the Meldrews' darkest, most tightly-guarded sorrows, we are apparently being offered our light at the end of the tunnel - Victor is quick to dismiss the sparrow (who has apparently woken him on previous mornings) as yet another in his endless list of daily annoyances, but Margaret suggests that the bird's singing might hold the key to their salvation. And as affecting as that fleeting talk of Stuart is, it's in its final three minutes that I personally feel that "Timeless Time" comes into its poignantly understated own, as Victor and Margaret figure out where to go from here.

The sparrow at the end of "Timeless Time" recalls the titular Darkling Thrush described in Thomas Hardy's 1900 poem (originally titled "By The Century's Deathbed"), in which Hardy relates his apprehension on approaching the end of a cultural era. The narrator of Hardy's poem describes walking through a barren winter landscape, in which most of the natural world appears to reflect his own nihilistic outlook. The song of a solitary thrush provides the sole contradiction, a twitching of life in overwhelming decay, causing the narrator to ponder if perhaps there is a small glimmer of hope that lurks beyond his comprehension:

"So little cause for carolings

      Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

      Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

      His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

      And I was unaware."

 

Like Hardy's thrush, the sparrow sounds out at what the Meldrews presume to be the irrevocable waning of their time, and Margaret shares the narrator's romantic interpretation of the significance of birdsong, as a beacon of hope amid a wasteland of endless despair. Ostensibly, "Timeless Time" might ultimately be perceived as a meditation on finding the courage to face a new day in an ongoing cycle in which monotony, misery and mortality are all so omnipresent. This seems to be the conclusion Margaret points toward when she suggests that the sparrow's life is no less gruelling or humdrum than their own: "All he does is eat burned bits of toast and a few worms...still got plenty to sing about, evidently." It is an observation with which Victor does not disagree. Nevertheless, the episode's fade-out offers a disturbance to this glimmer of optimism, in characteristically sardonic One Foot In The Grave fashion. Margaret chooses this moment to raise with Victor the first of the many (we presume) troubles he can expect to face in the incoming day: "You won't be able to have porridge for breakfast tomorrow. We're out of milk." The dwindling resources in the Meldrews' food larder serves as further indication of the ever-decreasing cache of things they have to look forward to in life, but Victor isn't quite willing to throw in the towel. He insists that he'll settle for the powdered milk they had previously discussed receiving as a free sample, whereupon Margaret drops her final bombshell: "We're also out of porridge." Victor then proposes that he might try worms on toast "for a change", having previously ruminated on whether the bird's unpalatable diet was directly responsible for its morning enthusiasm - this, though, registers less as a resolve to find a brand new outlook on life than it does a grudging resignation to his miserable lot; in his own bitterly sarcastic way, Victor conveys a Zen-like acceptance for the drudgery that undoubtedly lies ahead. "We'll open a new can in the morning," says Margaret stoically. "Yes," Victor murmurs, "We always seem to...", and the episode ends. 

The final punchline of the episode is a play on the idiom "to open a can of worms", meaning to create a whole new set of problems in attempting to solve an existing one; a closing expression of pessimism that naturally tempers whatever willingness the Meldrews might have displayed in bracing themselves for the imminent new day. Rattle of distant milk bottles aside, the new morning brings not oblivion, but a continuation of their daily routine, and the need to go out and engage with what Victor had only just described as pure ritual. The real horrors that Victor anticipates, however, are to be located in life's unpredictabilities - the assortment of opportunities for things to go spectacularly wrong as he and Margaret attempt to make the most of their ostensible new beginning. The quest for variety, and the possibility of a fresh start, so "Timeless Time" tells us, is all worms. And it makes for one heck of an unappetising breakfast on burned toast.