Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: In The Summertime

 

Content warning: car wreck, dead bodies

Another summer is nearly behind us, but before it closes there's still time to pay tribute to one of the most emotionally-scarring presentations you were likely to encounter if you tuned into UK ad breaks in the early 1990s - the "In The Summertime" installment of the contemporary "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" campaign (courtesy of Safety On The Move), which took advantage of the dubious advice given in the titular pop track to bring you a nightmarish vision of what you might go out and find along the roadside on a balmy summer evening, should that advice be taken too literally.

On the whole, the 1990s aren't renowned for being a particularly prosperous era for traumatic public information films - you could still catch them before BBC closedowns if you fancied a few pre-bedtime jitters, but given how rampant they were throughout the two preceding decades, it was seemingly an art form on the wane. The first half of the 90s did, however, see the continuation of "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives", the banner given to a series of particularly hard-hitting government ads created to put the spotlight on the potentially grave consequences of drinking and driving, which ran between 1987 and 1996. Few of the films focussed on the immediate horrors of the crash itself (although "In The Summertime" is one of those exceptions), the emphasis being squarely on the longer-term emotional wreckage faced by those affected, be they the victims or the perpetrators, the families of either, or the first responders. The idea was to give some sense of the far-reaching web of devastation brought about by an act born entirely out of thoughtlessness. Earlier films were very austere in form and tone, consisting largely of monologues delivered by bereaved friends and family, but as the campaign progressed they became a fair bit more creative, making clever use of perspective, overtly nightmarish imagery and even, on occasion, allowing room for a little morbid humor (as this ad demonstrates). The campaign is credited with doing a significant amount to alter public attitudes toward drink driving, which was formerly regarded as none too serious an offence - as is reflected in "In The Summertime", a 1970 hit for British rock band Mungo Jerry, which includes the line: "Have a drink, have a drive, go out and see what you can find." In the wider context, the song's lax attitude toward getting behind the wheel whilst intoxicated is celebrated as indicative of a Carpe diem philosophy, with the suggestion that those inclined toward drink driving are simply misunderstood. Insist Mungo Jerry: "We're not dirty, we're not mean/We love everybody, but we do as we please." (It should be noted that, by 1995, such an attitude would definitely not fly on popular radio - when the track was covered by Jamaican reggae artist Shaggy, the lyrics were updated to the more politically correct "I'm gonna drive and ride and see now what I can find".) The success of D&DWL in helping to challenge such perceptions is really nothing to be sneezed at, given that, try as they might, I'm not sure any equivalent campaign was ever quite able to have the same effect upon public attitudes toward speeding.

By the time "In The Summertime" debuted (circa 1992), the campaign was well-established enough to be trading on its own familiarity. You'll notice that the tagline, in this instance, has been modified to "In the summertime, drinking and driving wrecks even more lives", which marks it out as a response to a broader discourse. My understanding here is that drinking and driving warnings had become so characteristic a part of the winter festivities that it had led to a bit of a misconception in itself that it was something you only had to worry about at Christmastime (despite summer too being a peak time for such accidents). And while the idea of an ill-judged drive ruining multiple parties' Christmases is an undeniably upsetting one, there is something just as disconcertingly incongruous in depicting this roadside carnage as occurring in the broad light of day, amid the vitality and prosperity of the warm summer glow. "In The Summertime", which shows the patrons of a pub's beer garden blithely downing alcohol, before a bunch of them go out and meet their gruesome demise, is a brutal little exercise in disparate horror. It may also be the most thoroughly, gleefully sardonic creation the campaign had to offer.

 

 

"In The Summertime" is a fairly atypical addition to the D&DWL campaign, in that it's structured around the build-up to the devastating occurrence, with no focus whatsoever on the emotional aftermath (most D&DWL films would do precisely the reverse). It's also one of the few films in the line-up in which the drink driver themselves is shown to perish as a result of their actions - the more common approach was to have the perpetrator survive relatively unscathed so that they would have the privilege of getting to live with what they had done. In this case, the driver takes two passengers with him (or maybe just one - I'm not 100% sure if the long-haired blonde woman who waves farewell is meant to be riding along with them), but those passengers are implied to be somewhat complicit in the mindless indulgence that leads to their doom, judging by the collection of emptied beer glasses they leave behind them. Even the survivors who remain at the beer garden don't seem entirely innocent in this equation, being participants in the hedonistic culture that apparently sees no issue with the actions suggested by the accompanying track. Rather, the vibrant, outdoor atmosphere of that pub garden is presented as a kind of fool's paradise, always teetering on the brink of ruination. It's this lack of any obviously innocent party that lends "In The Summertime" a somewhat more blackly comic tone than any of its brethren - the intention isn't exactly to illicit laughs, but the interplay between the imagery and soundtrack has the ad wrapped up in a bitterly taunting irony that almost seems to relish the characters getting what's coming to them. Also unusually for a D&DWL film, which were generally upfront about their subject matter, it enters in seeking to disguise its intentions, with an atmosphere so warm and vibrant that the opening moments could easily be mistaken for an endorsement of the characters' hedonistic consumption - possibly a promotion for a brand of beer - although those well-versed in public information films might spot what's wrong with this picture ahead of the grisly twist, what with the increasing juxtaposition of characters waving goodbye with close-up shots of the beer glasses from which they've been swigging. The effectiveness of the ad rests in how it manages to use the naivety of the featured lyrics to its advantage, transforming it from a celebration of the carefree, sun-soaked lifestyle into something altogether more sinister.

 

"In The Summertime" also boasts what could arguably be described as the single most confounding moment in any D&DWL installment - really, just what is going on during that moment, twenty-four seconds into the ad, when we get a close-up shot of the grinning pub patron whose smile suddenly dissolves, alongside the music grinding to a moribund crawl? It's the pivotal moment, signifying the ad's sharp tonal shift, but it's not entirely clear what we are meant to assume has happened, in-universe, to knock that smile off of his face. Oh sure, it's revealed immediately afterward that two or three of his drinking buddies' bodies are lying further up the road in an ugly smoking wreckage, but he isn't looking at that - notice that he'd turned his gaze away from the direction his friends had travelled, having waved them goodbye and watched them veer out of sight. If he's reacting to the sounds of an off-screen collision (inaudible to the viewer), then funny how the blurred figure of the patron right behind him doesn't seem in the least bit perturbed. An alternative option would be to suppose that he is having a premonition, and that the ad's horrifying epilogue should be interpreted as a foreboding vision on his part, as all of a sudden his more prudent instincts take over and he remembers that drinking and driving maybe isn't such a good idea. What makes the moment especially quirky is that his expression doesn't exactly convey shock or horror, but rather vague irritation. It's a strange scene - at this point in its lifespan, D&DWL was willing to go to evermore disconcerting and experimental territory, but this particular instance feels more like a product of faulty execution than anything else. I recall it being a popular joke in the PIF community that what he was actually reacting to was the pub's jukebox breaking down (hence the music getting all jammed and corrupted), and that may as well be what's going on, albeit in a way that handily jibes with what's happening just down the road. The fazed look on his face indicates that a disturbance has occurred, bringing about an abrupt end to the summer celebrations. The slowing of the soundtrack - unsettling in its own right - substitutes for the collision itself, confirming our mounting suspicions that this ostensibly upbeat song is heralding something very cursed and twisted, and leaving us with only a deathly silence and a haunting inertia.

 

"In The Summertime" isn't quite as dark as it could have been - at the very least, it stops short of having the couple with the baby get inside the car - but the ending still packs a lingering punch that's all the more impactful for omitting the violent spectacle of the crash and focussing instead on the stillness of the aftermath, which seems eerily removed from the scenes of vibrant carousing that precede it. The bravado of the accompanying anthem stripped away, all we have to chew on is the vulnerability of own fragile forms - an image of mortality that seems all the more troubling for the picturesque beauty of the surrounding greenery. As for the Mungo Jerry track, thanks to this PIF I inevitably associate it with a creeping sense of impending catastrophe. So D&DWL succeeded in not only rebutting a contrary piece of popular culture, but completely rewriting its meaning.

 

Anyway, if you liked this write-up then lucky you, as I still have fourteen more D&DWL shorts to get through. What else did you think I had in store for you this Christmastime?

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #45: Canary In A Coalmine (Marmite)

Content warning: The canary dies in this one. Such is the unenviable lot of the sentinel animal. Except here it wasn't carbon monoxide that dealt the fatal blow. What killed the canary was hatred. But also love. The canary's sorry fate was but one snippet in an ongoing war between love and hatred that, when the ad aired in 2002, had been waging for a full century - that is, the war between the Marmite lover and the Marmite hater. 

Ever since the spreadable yeast extract, a by-product of the beer manufacturing process, had graced the world with its being in 1902, the haters have somewhat resented having to occupy the same reality as anyone outlandish enough to put the sticky, strange-smelling black substance into their mouths. Myself, I am a card-carrying LOVER. But I've encountered enough Marmite haters in my lifetime to know what kinds of passions it arouses in people. Where you stand on the Marmite equation has become another badge of identity, supposedly saying as much about you as a person as whether you prefer dogs or cats or think pineapple belongs on pizza. This is something that Marmite themselves have been only too happy to encourage and capitalise upon, ever since the genesis of their "Love it or Hate it" campaign in the back-end of the 1990s, which was based on the premise that, when it comes to the black stuff, centrism simply isn't an option. This has led to some pretty unique and creative marketing that, humorously, gives the haters as much representation as the lovers, if not more so. "Low Rider", a 1975 hit for American funk band War, was adopted as the anthem for this century-old conflict. "Why Can't We Be Friends?" might initially appear to be a more apt option, but then that supposes that an understanding between the Marmite lover and the Marmite hater was a possibility to begin with.

In 2002, Marmite celebrated its centenary with a series of ads depicting scenes from the yeast struggle in various times and locations across the past hundred years, with each helpfully titled at the start of the advert. Each scenario invariably involved a Marmite hater getting grossed out upon finding themselves within the vicinity of the foodstuff, usually with a lover to further step on their toes. Haters came in all shapes and sizes and, as we saw from at least two of the ads, didn't even have to be human. Sometimes a bird or a zip-faced puppet could voice their objections to the unnerving consumption going on around them. My favourite of the series (even better than the Zippy spot) was the one centred on the freak show attraction, "Marmite Man", an ostensibly respectable gent who repulses spectators with his willingness to eat spoonfuls of yeast extract directly from the jar. Some years ago, I had the exact same effect on a couple of housemates whose passionate aversion to the product regularly conflicted with my own addiction. I feel that the Marmite Man could've been myself in another life. Another ad depicted a trio of mountain climbers stranded at an Everest Base Camp in 1951 amidst harsh weather conditions; in the meantime, they have vast quantities of Marmite they can live off, but only one of the three is actually amenable to eating it. I suspect that this trio might be headed for a bout of Marmite-induced cabin fever before the storm has subsided.

The canary spot was easily the darkest of the lot, in that it was the only instance in which the Marmite division went so far as to claim a casualty. In this case, the action took place in in the colliery at Llanhilleth, Wales in 1932, and showed a group of miners on their lunch break. At their side is their sentinel canary, brightly singing away to indicate a safe environment, but I think from the outset we already have the sinking feeling that this is not going to go well for the canary. After all, a canary in a coal mine has one of only two things to do - either to keep on singing, or to keel over dead. Sure enough, one of the miners has something in his lunch box that suddenly makes the bird a whole lot less chipper. Which is to say a Marmite-filled sarnie. The inevitable result is a stiff canary. As you might have gathered, campaigns for Marmite tend to have an unusually self-depreciating bent, although this one goes particularly far in treating the product as basically analogous to poison. Perhaps it's intended as a play on that old adage that one man's meat (or yeast extract, in this case) is another man's (or bird's, as it were) poison. Or maybe the canary is reacting more to the implicit discord, the contention that Marmite entails being the actual lethal disturbance in the atmosphere. Either way, the miners don't seem to notice, despite a non-singing, inert canary being the one thing that really ought to get them freaking out. Unless they're already well-accustomed to Marmite having this effect on their sentinels - in which case, maybe not the most sensible thing to be lunching on down in a colliery in the first place? Suppose you had carbon monoxide coming at you from all angles, but you dismissed it as being all down to the Marmite?

Ads that require cute and innocent animals to suffer upsetting fates in order to flaunt their wares generally risk overstepping the bounds of good taste - you remember how it was with Kevin the Levi's hamster - so all things considered I'm surprised that Marmite managed to air this one without ruffling too many feathers. Then again, the link between the product and the unfortunate creature's demise is far more discernable than in the Levi's ad. All the same, while I wouldn't rate the depiction of the canary's death as being quite as disconcertingly unsettling as that of Kevin the hamster, there is a grimness to the final arrangement that feels all the more salient for that little "1902-2002" title hanging directly above the ex-canary. Obviously, this canary wasn't nearly so long-lived, but juxtaposing this image of mortality with the dates in question does give them the unintentional sensation of denoting a concluded lifespan. Combine that with the starkness of the black and white aesthetic and the hummed, atypically downbeat variation on "Low Rider" (presumably intended to be reminiscent of a Welsh male voice choir, although it would not seem at all out of place at a funeral procession), and we have an ad with a heavy sense of mourning about it - an unusual tactic for a campaign that was all about celebrating Marmite's longevity. Unless the tiny, fragile canary represents something that was snuffed out with the proliferation of Marmite, a means by which the world would never quite be the same again, having been graced with a foodstuff with the power to entice and repulse palates with so much discrepancy. What perished with that canary down in that colliery in 1932? Any lingering sense of harmony within the universe, I suppose.

The Dodgiest Episode of Rainbow Ever Made (No, Not That One)

Question: What do they call a McDonald's in that warm, fuzzy patch of childhood utopia up above the streets and houses where the rainbow's climbing high? Answer: Nothing so brand-specific, but in 1983 Zippy, George and Bungle were made aware of the existence of the Golden Arches, boy howdy, did they want their viewers to know that its product was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I promised you some strange and unique fast food promotions to mark the year 2022 (aka the year of the Soylent Green), and I'm not sure they get much stranger than that time an episode of Rainbow was transmuted into full-blown commercial encouraging children to eat at McDonald's. For all the valid criticisms you can make of The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald, and its raison d'être as extended fast food promotions designed to stoke brand loyalty in young consumers, at least with those titles you really ought to know what you're getting from the outset. Zippy, George and Bungle shilling for McDonald's within the context of their regularly scheduled programming is frankly not something I ever saw coming. The only thing that matches it in egregiousness would be that Christmas movie from the mid-1980s that momentarily stops the narrative to show you a vision of how wonderful the atmosphere must be down at your local McDonald's. But we're a few months off December yet.

When it comes to UK pre-school programming of the 1970s and 80s, you would be hard-pressed to find one more charming and non-condescending than Rainbow, the Thames Television-produced puppetry series centred on the adventures of responsible adult Geoffrey Hayes (himself)  and his adopted (well, I presume) children, Bungle the bear (Malcolm Lord, among others), George the gender-bending hippo (voice of Roy Skelton) and Zippy (also Skelton) the...actually, like everyone else I don't know what Zippy's supposed to be. As a child, I assumed he was some kind of reptilian (possibly a tortoise short of a shell), but he has the most unusual distinguishing feature of having a zipper for a mouth, meaning that the other characters can forcibly silence him, should he get on their nerves. Which he does, frequently, although I'll confess that whenever I revisit Rainbow nowadays I'm usually privately rooting for Zippy. He may be a punk, but he's blatantly the black sheep of the Rainbow family, and as such he has a lot to be rebelling against. Besides which, when I was a pre-schooler, Zippy was the character to whom I best related. Time and experience may have made me increasingly like George, but Zippy will forever feel like the imprint of the exuberant tot I once was.

A regular feature of each Rainbow outing were its trio of residents musicians, Rod (Burton), Jane (Tucker) and Freddy (Marks), would intermittently drop by to provide musical interludes, and episodes typically had Geoffrey or a friend of the family reading the puppets a story. Topics ranged from guinea pigs to narrowboats, and occasionally episodes would touch on some fairly weighty issues, such as unemployment and conservation. Then there was this one really dubious installment that aired on 18th November 1983 (as per Wikipedia) under the title "Fast Food", suggesting that Thames Television's mission to bring children a quality educational show could be intermittently compromised by the lure of the mighty pound. The premise is that Geoffrey (looking very sun-burned) is out shopping for flowers with a couple of young children, Rory and Daisy, whom he treats to a dine-in McDonald's, before ordering take-out to compensate for arriving home too late to prepare dinner for Zippy, George and Bungle, who are awed to have something so miraculous right there on their doorstep. I kept waiting for what seemed like the inevitable disclaimer, for Geoffrey to smile at the camera and say, "Yes, fast food makes for a nice treat now and then, but it's important to eat a balanced diet and also to exercise regularly." But it never came. Apparently they really were going with the angle that fast food was the great innovation of our age, and why on earth would you be going to all the trouble of preparing your own meals when you can just stroll into your local burger joint and pick up an unforgettable luncheon in a brown paper bag? The caveat seems to have been that they weren't allowed to mention McDonald's by name, but they do just about everything else in their power to shove the big Mc in your face. 

Before I talk about "Fast Food", a couple of disclaimers of my own are in order. Firstly, I have the YouTube user VideotapeFTW to thank for uploading this episode, otherwise it might never have come to my attention. Secondly, I have no actual evidence that McDonald's provided any kind of monetary incentive for Thames Television to create an episode of Rainbow singing its praises, and I am not going to claim as such for a fact. There are, however, more than enough tip-off elements in "Fast Food" as to arouse suspicion. And I do find it entirely plausible, given that Rainbow aired on commercial children's television, and the entire commercial children's television enterprise was being propped up by salt and sugar money (as became apparent when stricter regulations on junk food advertising were put in place in the early 00s, and CITV immediately went down in flames). A more charitable interpretation of the episode is that it was aspiring to look at some aspect of modern life to which kids could relate, and by 1983, visits to their local fast food joint were now a regular feature of many a British child's day to day experience (the first McDonald's in the UK having opened in 1974). The problem there being that there's very little in "Fast Food" that could be conceivably described as educational - it isn't looking at how fast food is made (though that's probably for the best) or why preparation times are so much faster than those of a more traditional restaurant experience. Nor is it attempting to put the consumption of fast food into a broader nutritional or lifestyle context. The point it's really eager to impress is that fast food is easy and convenient, while also letting you know of the variety of food you can buy at your local McDonald's. It has all the educational depth of a regular McDonald's ad, and it certainly isn't accomplishing anything more.

The other possible defence you could make is that this kind of programming was par the course for the 1980s, when extended advertising for popular toy lines accounted for a sizeable chunk of children's content. That's certainly true, but then Rainbow was branded as an educational series and primarily targetted at very young children, and this kind of flagrant product placement does strike me as an abuse of that particular format. All the same, watching "Fast Food" in the 2020s, I have rather ambivalent feelings toward the episode. On the one hand, my moral compass dictates that what Thames Television were attempting here was off the charts in its odiousness. And yet, this long after the fact, and with this kind of unashamed product shilling firmly regulated to the "Well, you couldn't do that now" bin, it's probably okay to laugh at just how egregiously unsubtle "Fast Food" is in pushing its "McDonald's is the greatest!" agenda.

"Fast Food" starts out innocuously enough, with Zippy, George and Bungle stuck at home, all wondering where Geoffrey has gotten to and complaining of their hunger pangs. Zippy has already set the table, less out of a desire to be helpful than as an act of protest against the universe's apparent insistence that they will not be fed this evening, as if placing the plates on the table increases the likelihood that food will come along to fill it. It's here that we get the only aspect of the episode that could reasonably be described as educational, when Bungle points out to Zippy that chips are made from potatoes.

We then cut to Geoffrey, Rory and Daisy (are they just a pair of random kids Geoffrey is with, or do they show up again in other episodes? If so, is it ever established what their relationship is to Geoffrey?), who'ved parked themselves conveniently right outside a McDonald's just as Rory declares that he's hungry. As noted, they were clearly unable to identify the restaurant by name, so the shot has been cunningly framed to cut out the lettering in the McDonald's signage, but with most of the Golden Arches logo still in sight. And on the windows, posters featuring one Ronald McDonald. You're certainly not going to mistake this venue for a Wimpy Bar. Noting how little time they have, Geoffrey declares that what they really need is some fast food. Rory or Daisy are both blissfully unaware of the meaning of the term, so Geoffrey leads them into McDonald's to get them started on their brand new unhealthy eating habit.

Here are all the tell-tale signals that we've just crossed the threshold from a pre-school educational show into a bona fide commercial:

• As we go inside the restaurant, we're greeted by even more visual brand reinforcement, by means of a close-up shot of the Ronald McDonald mural on the wall of the restaurant. They really were doing everything in their power to make sure you knew that the magic was happening at McDonald's.
  
• Geoffrey reads out a list of the menu items available at McDonald's...twice. "You have sandwiches, hamburger and chips, hamburger without chips, cheeseburger and chips, cheeseburger without chips, an extra big cheeseburger, you have ham and egg in a bun, fish in a bun, you have milkshakes and apple pie, coffee, milk..." This is worked in under the guise of a dubious gag wherein Geoffrey initially says everything too quickly (since it's meant to be fast food and all), meaning that he has to repeat everything at a pace with which his two young charges can keep up. Actually, I heard everything he said perfectly clearly the first time around.
  
• The second time, when Geoffrey goes through the menu items more slowly, we're shown close-up pictures of a number of the items on offer, juxtaposed with shots of Rory and Daisy licking their lips in an exaggerated manner. Are those Pavlovian urges kicking in for you kids at home yet?
  
• You'll also notice that Geoffrey apparently has no qualms about offering the children coffee. I don't know if children were big coffee drinkers in 1983, but it would appear to indicate that he's giving viewers a general pitch of what's available at McDonald's, as opposed to one catered specifically to the two small children at his side. Offering children coffee is, it itself, is another thing I suspect you wouldn't do nowadays - not so much for the caffeine content (in my experience, the UK was never as concerned about that kind of thing as the US), but for the scalding risk.
• The speed at which you receive your meal is...somewhat exaggerated. Geoffrey literally gets handed a tray of food right immediately ordering, with the packet of French fries strategically directed at the camera so that you won't miss those Golden Arches on the front. Geoffrey then turns buoyantly to the camera to ask the viewer if they've ever been to a place like this.
  
• Once Geoffrey and the kids are done eating, Geoffrey demonstrates the versatility of the McDonald's experience, by ordering three additional meals to take home to Zippy, George and Bungle.
• When Geoffrey surprises his trio of Muppet children with this unexpected bounty, Bungle asks where he got it all from. "I went to a cafe where you can buy food and take it home, and they served me very fast," says Geoffrey, still being reticent with brand specifics, but by now there can be no ambiguity as to which venue he's promoting.
  

After that, the episode eases up a little on the shameless commercialism. Having been fully indoctrinated into the brilliant innovation that is fast food, Zippy, George and Bungle are inspired to role play that they are running their own fast food restaurant, leading us into a fantasy musical sequence with Rod, Jane and Freddy, but the McDonald's brand shilling is momentarily put on hold. If anything, I think their sloppy presentation methods make the fast food on offer look positively unpalatable. And then in walks Geoffrey's friend Kat to read us today's story, about a witch named Mildred who opens her own fast food business, MacMildred's. In real life, Mildred would obviously have been fast-tracing her way toward a lawsuit, but here it's just another stealth means of impressing that more prolific Gaelic-sounding brand name upon the Rainbow audience. On the surface, the goal here was blatantly to make children hungry for McDonald's, and to pester their parents to take them for an extra big cheeseburger with coffee. The underlying narrative, though, is clearly one for the parents themselves, in emphasising just how easy and convenient fast food is when you've got a bunch of hyperactive kids to feed. This is reinforced by Zippy and Bungle's discussion at the start of the episode about the impossibility of having chips when you've no potatoes in stock. It is the only part of the episode to establish a connection between the raw ingredients and the final product, yet it implies a redundancy in so much as having to contemplate that connection - that dealing with potatoes is an absolute faff when when McDonald's are on hand to take care of all the peeling and slicing for you. Just as our relationship with what we eat becomes increasingly distant so too does our relationship with those we meet. Something noticeably absent from Geoffrey's visit to McDonald's with Rory and Daisy is any kind of meaningful interaction with the human employees. Although customer-employee interaction is a feature of the role-playing game assumed by Zippy, George and Bungle, in the scenes inside the actual McDonald's, employees are non-entities. Geoffrey gives his order to an off-screen employee who immediately hands him a tray without a word. Dealing with strangers is as undesirable as dealing with potatoes, and one of the implicit perks of the fast food experience, as presented by Rainbow, is a world in which all of that human-to-human messiness has been conveniently streamlined out of existence.

To give "Fast Food" some credit, it does at least promote good etiquette by showing Rory emptying the debris from his tray into one of the on-site bins, rather than leaving it for the staff or next customer to deal with (the poor kid actually has some difficulty with operating the bin handle with one hand and emptying the tray with the other). In fact, there's something charmingly quaint about how Geoffrey insists on certain dining formalities that should, in theory, have also been made redundant by the fast food procedure. Zippy ups his protest by hurling his fork to the floor, only to be reprimanded by the returning Geoffrey, who insists that he'll need to use it to eat the take-out he's brought him. Actually, I thought part of the appeal of this kind of fast food is that it's mostly finger food and you can bypass the use of cutlery (and plates) altogether, but I guess Geoffrey's too civilised to allow that kind of behaviour in his home, even when he's dealing with a bear, a hippo and a zip monster.

Rainbow ran on for the rest of the 80s, although budget constraints at the end of the decade meant that they had to axe the segments with Rod, Jane and Freddy (even with all that salt and sugar money on their side). Then came the 1990s, which were a dark time for Zippy & co - oh sure, the characters appeared in an episode of The Word doing a toytown techno version of their iconic theme song, but that was absolutely where things peaked. The original series was cancelled in 1992, with various ill-fated attempts at revival projects across the decade (sans Geoffrey and most of the original puppeteers and voice actors, who ended up working on a rip-off show, Mole in The Hole). The 2000s proved much kinder, now that the franchise was old enough to be considered a hot nostalgic property among the kinds of people who hung out at student unions or shopped at Birthdays; Rainbow merchandise started popping up everywhere, and it wasn't long before the characters were featuring in legitimate advertising designed to take advantage of that rejuvenated interest. In 2002, Zippy appeared in an (actually quite good) advert for Marmite, in which he revealed the spreadable yeast extract to be the one thing that could make him self-zip, thereby outing himself as a passenger on the "Hate It" train. Around the same time, Geoffrey Hayes was the subject of a surprisingly mean-spirited campaign for Virgin Money, lampooning the real-life downward trajectory his acting career had taken after Rainbow, to the point that he was currently driving taxis for a living. More recently, Zippy, George and Bungle were featured in an ad for Pizza Hut, as part of a wave of particularly noxious advertising in which nostalgic characters are flaunted heavily but only tenuously linked to the product in question. Unlike that aforementioned Marmite ad, it didn't feel like the work of people who understood the appeal of the Rainbow characters. Like Bungle would ever use the word "traitor".