Picture the scene: a fashionable high-rise apartment in the twilight hours, where the owner, a woman with an eye for extravagant decor, receives an unexpected caller in the form of a beguiling gentlemen who just moved in next door and is short of a particular hot beverage. So irrepressible is the spark of mutual attraction between the two that she invites him in to join her for a cup then and there. The early beginnings of a passionate, slow-brewing romance between the chicest souls on the block? Nope, the scenario ends with a defenestrated Yorkshire terrier and the man making a sharp exit to the nearest boozer to drown his frustrations in the featured lager. Don't worry, though, the Yorkie survives...somehow or other. Guess he embraced his inner cat on the way down.
To get the full benefit of this bizarre spot from 1989, it helps if you're acquainted with the Gold Blend couple, or "Love Over Gold", a contemporary campaign from Nescafe depicting the numerous titillating encounters between Tony and Sharon (Anthony Head and Sharon Maughan), also inhabitants of neighbouring apartments, over their shared weakness for Gold Blend instant coffee (or Taster's Choice as it is branded in the US). Beginning in November 1987, the campaign caught the public's attention for its unusually narrative-driven format - it was effectively a soap opera told in bite-sized chunks, chock full of assorted misunderstandings and near-admissions (the campaign was heavily inspired by the Will They/Won't They arc from the US series Moonlighting). Nescafe managed to eke more than five years from this protracted caffeine-fuelled courtship ritual before finally allowing Tony to profess his love for Sharon and calling it a night in 1993 (although a spiritual sequel focussed on a different prospective couple appeared shortly after). A VHS tape comprising the complete collection of ads was made available through a special mail order promotion, although copies of the tape are tricky to come by now - I've been waiting for the damned thing to show up on eBay for years and still no luck. It also received a novelisation by Susan Moody - by contrast, copies of that can be sourced from just about any second-hand book shop. The 1980s being a time when soap operas centred on the cultural elite, such Dallas and Dynasty, were very much in vogue, there was great emphasis on having the awkward mating dance between our two caffeine-craving love birds take place amid an air of sophistication. The urbane banter exchanged by Sharon and Tony as they flirted over the prospect of downing another cup of freeze dried beans was enough to mask the somewhat incongruous fact that their hormones were bubbling over something as hopelessly prosaic as instant coffee...so how good could it be?
This ad for Harp Lager was a cheeky parody of the initial ad in the Love Over Gold campaign, which saw Sharon calling at Tony's door in the hopes of borrowing some instant coffee for the party she was hosting across the hall. Here, the scenario has been reversed, with our dapper gent being the one doing the calling, although our first real disturbance occurs when our caller makes a request for tea instead of coffee. Straight off the bat, this wrong-foots the situation and takes us into some freaky mirror universe, in which we sense that things are not destined to end quite so genteelly for our leaf-loving pair. Our suspicions are confirmed when a third wheel enters the picture in the form of Randy the Yorkshire terrier (he, naturally, had no counterpart in the original campaign, where neither of the couple owned a dog). The appearance of that dog instantly gets our hackles up. There's a level on which Randy seems to act as a furry manifestation of the raging animal magnetism surging beneath not-Tony and not-Sharon's display of cultivation (there has to be some kind of in-joke buried in that name of his), and his defensive reaction toward the former marks him out as a rival to the latter's affections. What's really off-putting about Randy, though, is that the assortment of yips ostensibly emitting from his canine vocal chords were very blatantly provided by a human tongue, which naturally throws a cold wet blanket over our sensuous atmosphere. Make no mistake, we're headed for a truly twisted outcome here. Sure enough, Randy's ultimate purpose is to be the butt of a sick little gag involving a wad of misfortune befalling a particularly small and fragile animal; the prospective Love Over Typhoo is stopped dead in its tracks when our would-be suitor inadvertently sends Randy plummeting out of an open window (here's where the establishing shot indicating that the action takes place in a high-rise apartment finally pays off). Realising that a slow-brewing romance with not-Sharon just isn't in the cards in this reality, not-Tony hits the proverbial exit button and retreats to the earthier atmosphere of his local pub to indulge in a very different beverage. He does not do so alone, however, for Randy continues to drag out their rivalry from atop the bar counter. The ad is mean, but not so mean as to sign off with the implication that the pugnacious dog ended up a stain on the pavement below.
The purpose of this spot, other than to have some fun at the expense of Love Over Gold, is to posit Harp as the kind of unromantic, down-to-earth antithesis to the lush soap opera fantasies of the aforementioned coffee campaign. With that in mind we might as well view Randy's defenestration as symbolic for not-Tony's realisation that he has to come down from Love Over Gold's airy nonsense eventually. There is a lingering aftertaste, however, in the form of Randy, who insists on showing up to bug this man wherever he goes. At the height of our protagonist's dizzy euphoria, he provided a voice to his raging hormones, while here he acts as a mirror to his self-loathing and defeat. In both cases, the message is clearly impressed that this guy is his own worst enemy.
Incidentally, I didn't mention this when I covered the campaign two years ago, but the opening installment to Love Over Gold was also sent up in one of the individual adverts featuring the PG Tips T-Birds. There, Tom the Owl received a call from a sultry neighbour who professed to be from upstairs (somewhat confusingly, as it's not totally clear to me whether the birds rent a flat or a house proper), only to shut the door on her when she confessed to wanting to get her hands on his tea bags. Sorry tea drinkers, but I guess your preferred beverage just doesn't beckon Cupid's arrow like that seductive bean.
No comments:
Post a Comment