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.
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