Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Christmas Pudding

I've not yet attempted to sit down and give my definitive ranking of the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" series from best to worst, but I've no doubt that this particular Christmas-themed PIF (circa 1993) would land somewhere within the top five. Of all the shorts in the series, this one does the grandest job at straddling that delicate line between the everyday and the catastrophic, depicting the precise moment in which a mundane situation crosses over into the stuff of full-blown nightmares. It achieves this through a hard-hitting blend of unassuming realism with just the slightest dash of uncanny excess; we get a fleeting glimpse of a busted vehicle going up in flames, a rarity for a campaign that generally aimed to steer clear of violent spectacle - although this, surprisingly, does not end up being the most disturbing element of the short. The horrors here are to be located in the hedonism of a family wolfing down their platter of Christmas indulgences, gleefully oblivious to the carnage unravelling in the streets outside. This is a PIF that deviously flips the Yuletide euphoria on its head, warping it into the basis of a good psychological scarring.

"Pudding" opens so innocuously that you would not, at first glance, be likely to distinguish it from the usual deluge of Christmas-themed advertising clustering up the airwaves all throughout December. We've joined a family at the tail-end of their seasonal feasting, where the only hint of impending trouble is in the acknowledgement of a vacant place at the table; our young and unsuspecting protagonist is asked by a relative (presumably her father) if her boyfriend David is still intending to make it. Her response - that David has "stopped for a quick drink at his sister's" - is our first really solid clue as to where this might be headed, although there is nothing as yet to explicitly implicate David as a drink driver (for all we know, he's getting there by foot, or someone else is driving him). The real giveaway that we're not watching some anodyne spot for anti-indigestion tablets is when the host wanders back from the kitchen, carrying a blazing Christmas pudding and wearing a facial expression that seems a little...over-animated? There is, immediately, something disconcerting about the wide-mouthed giddiness with which she regards the mass of smouldering suet and raisin at her fingertips, and that's going to pay off shortly. The telephone rings and, while everyone else is leering in the darkness at the flaming dessert, the protagonist goes to answer; we never hear the person speaking on the end, but whoever they are they clearly have unfortunate news to share about David's journey going awry. How awry? We cut to a close-up shot of the pudding, which momentarily morphs into the blazing wreckage of a crumpled vehicle wedged up against a streetlight, and then back to the protagonist's pallid face, as she struggles to process what she's hearing (and, we suspect, her Christmas lunch is at dire risk of making a sudden reappearance). It's at this point that the festive atmosphere takes a turn for the borderline demonic, as the laughter and merriment of her family in the backdrop becomes wildly inappropriate, appearing to mock the unspeakable tragedy with which she's just been blighted.

"Pudding" contains what's arguably the most conventionally dramatic shot of all the D&DWL series (no other entry, even of the few that showed us any visuals from the accident itself, went so far as to feature a vehicle being engulfed in a fiery eruption), but it still amounts to only a teaser of the adjacent calamity that's been slowly but surely creeping its way in to make mincemeat of this ingenuous young woman's Christmas. Much of the film's success is rooted in its restraint, and its willingness to stage its pivotal accident from what is still predominantly a distance. We start out, much like the protagonist, having already made it safely to our destination, only to discover that this does not, in fact, make us safe. The fleeting transformation of pudding into burning vehicle serves to obliterate the barrier between innocent domesticity and the omnipresent threat of death and destruction. But the most devious sleight of hand lies in the transformation of the party ambience into an air of cruelty and oppressiveness, as the protagonist's knowledge of what has happened to David sees her shut out abruptly from the celebrations. The sanctity of the occasion offers no refuge, becoming instead a reinforcement her entrapment, as her prospects of further inclusion in the joyfulness and triumph, along with whatever future she'd envisioned for herself and David, goes up messily in smoke, like both pudding and vehicle.

"Pudding", like "Summertime", offers a rare D&DWL scenario in which the drink driver themselves is shown to be the one who perishes as a result of their actions - although since David receives no corporeality, featured victim status, for all intents and purposes, ends up being delegated to our protagonist, the helpless receiver of bad news. The film's most chilling detail is in how this victimhood renders her the butt of a joke that the entirety of the world around her appears to be in on - far from offering her comfort in a time of despair, her family betray her with their continued merriment. The juxtaposition of pudding and wreckage, coupled with their diabolical laughter, makes it difficult to shake the interpretation that the family are in the process of sacrificing David at their festive alter, evoking the sense that they are, in some way, complicit in the disaster. While drinking and driving is clearly being posited as a corruptive force, poisoning the Yuletide cheer and transmuting it into something more sinister, I've no doubt that the film is, on another level, attempting to forge a link between the carefree revelry of the family's feasting and the heedless indulgences that have engineered David's ruination, reminding that us that, however innocuous our intentions, there comes a point where we risk tip-toeing over the line. Hence the significance of having the family cackle like hellspawn at the end - what's happening up the road with David is really just the darker underbelly of what we've seen playing out in their dining room.

A superior PIF, and I'm sure that, back in 1993, catching it amid a round of festive viewing was more than enough to ruin anybody's day.