Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Eyes

As the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" series goes, the 1992 offering "Eyes" is a particularly unlovely one to have to look at, although it starts out, deceptively, by emphasising the apparent beauty of its subject. The young woman at the centre of the film looks perfectly pretty in her opening close-up, as though she could be staring off dreamily into the distance. Straight off the bat, however, are clues that we haven't walked in on an innocuous scenario, if we should happen to notice that one of her pupils is dilated, or the strange objects protruding from her mouth. The film pivots on a simple technique - a gradual pull-back from the face of the woman, shortly revealed to be the victim of a road accident, as paramedics attempt, to no avail, to revive her. We continue to move away, but her expression remains unnervingly static. Interspersed with the paramedic's procedural commentary is the voice of the driver, who stays off-screen for the duration. What we have is a juxtaposition of two parallel narratives, in the woman's unresponsive form and the driver's disembodied voice, with each conveying their own individual despair. The driver's account is an entirely familiar one - almost word-for-word identical, in fact, to the circumstances that reportedly convinced Mark he was okay to drive on that fateful Christmas night.

D&DWL was never an especially gory series, preferring to seek out horror from the emotional debris of each featured calamity, although "Eyes" might be considered a slight outlier in that regard. It offers only minimal blood, yet it still ranks as the most disturbingly graphic of the D&DWL canon, being the entry that's most fixated on the blunt physicality of death, and in the sheer discomfort of watching a body slip past that queasy barrier between being and corpse as its last waning flickers of function are slowly extinguished. Technically, the protagonist is never actually dead for the span of the film - at the end the paramedic pronounces her asystolic, which isn't exactly the same as death but does mean that her chances ought probably to be considered non-existent. In practice, it makes very little difference - with her pallid skin and stationary gaze, it's an exercise in horror as worthy as any video nasty. The technique used in "Eyes" is something of a variation on an earlier D&DWL film, "Kathy", which also had a character affected by a drink driving incident stare directly into the camera while a disembodied voice filled in the narrative gaps and impressed the moral weight of the scenario. In both cases the fourth wall breaking is implicitly accusatory - the subject, while powerless to change their situation, is utterly merciless in challenging the viewer to return their gaze and to confront the consequences of their own prospective actions (something explicitly evoked in the film's print counterpart, which instructed spectators to "Look her in the eye. Then say a quick drink never hurt anyone"). In the case of "Eyes", the subject's expression is entirely vacant, conveying absolutely nothing, and yet so much at the same time. There is a certain ironic tension between the subject's physical inertia and the stony relentlessness of her stare, her seeming refusal to back down from presenting us with the impacts of drink driving in their harshest, ugliest detail. Who this woman is and the repercussions of her demise go unexplored, which here only adds to the impact; we do not venture outside of this very specific moment in which she is reduced to only a stagnant image, as all prospects of progressing beyond this are tragically shut off to her.

"Eyes" was, along with "Kathy" and "Arrest", part of a sequence of D&DWL entries that bucked the trends of the opening wave of PIFs by shifting the focus more toward the offender's side of the equation, and of the ramifications (both legal and emotional) for them. Noteworthy is that the driver was still denied corporeality in any of those three films, allowing the outcomes of their poor choices to continue to define visually, although "Eyes" is unusual in actually giving them a voice. The driver is humanised, but through distinctively debasing means, with his final insistence that he "didn't mean it" emphasising his fundamental limpness; we do not doubt the truthfulness of that statement, but it seems a distressingly futile response to such a dire situation - a point underlined by whichever of the first responders (I'm not sure if it's the police officer or the paramedic) is heard to scoff after the fade-out. There is, again, an ironic tension between the evident patheticness of the driver and the harrowing destructiveness of his actions.

What might take the sting off a little, if you find yourself losing sleep over the imagery in "Eyes", is the realisation that the subject in question is actually a teenaged Denise van Outen, who later rose to prominence as a presenter on The Big Breakfast at the latter end of the decade. Her familiarity comes as a reassuring reminder that, for as horrifying as this PIF's contents are, they were only feigned and she did, in reality, progress beyond the gruesome stasis encapsulated here. I fear that stasis may be forever etched into my skull, however.

"Eyes" is, as far as I'm aware, the only D&DWL film to have been made commercially available for home viewing - you can find it on the BFI release The COI Collection Volume Four: Stop! Look! Listen!, along with "Lonely Water". (EDIT: Correction. "Dave" was also released on the sixth volume, Worth The Risk?)

Texas: In Demand (Alan Rickman's Long Night's Journey Into Day)

There are few music videos I'd rate as quite so silently haunting as that of "In Demand", a hit for Scottish pop rockers Texas, released in late 2000 to plug their new compilation album, The Greatest Hits. The video was directed by Vaughan Arnell, noted at the time for his collaborations with Robbie Williams (the psychological scar-fest that accompanied "Rock DJ", where Williams is seen to rip out hunks of his own flesh and muscle and throw them to his screaming cannibal fangirls? That was Arnell's), and depicts an overnight drive from London to Brighton being undertaken by band frontwoman Sharleen Spiteri. Spiteri rides in style, in a chauffeur-driven Bentley Azure, and with actor Alan Rickman (just a year before his tenure as Severus Snape began) as a fellow passenger who intermittently caresses her (no seat belts on either of them, though? Tut tut...). Things reach a tantalising climax when they stop to refuel at a Shell garage and engage in a spontaneous tango out there in the forecourt, before resuming their journey and arriving at Brighton in dawn's early light. At this point, the nocturnal travellers go their separate ways, with the suited Rickman (somewhat incongruously) retrieving a backpack from the boot of the vehicle and heading for a decrepit apartment block, leaving a doleful Spiteri to continue on to her unknown destination with only her chauffeur for company.

This Smooth Radio article sheds some light on how Rickman came to be involved in the project, although there isn't really a whole lot to the story as author Georgina Ramazzotti describes it. Rickman liked the band's output and was willing to be in the video, is the gist of it. There is a heartening epilogue to the alliance, in the acknowledgement that Spiteri and Rickman remained friends in the aftermath, up until the latter's death in 2016, and that the "In Demand" video was not Rickman's only contribution to the Texas catalogue; he also provided vocals for the band's 2015 recording, "Start A Family". The most inflammatory aspect of the article would be Ramazzotti's assertion that the video is currently "forgotten", which...well, it would be to my chagrin if so. Arnell's video is simple but effective - visually captivating, and with the presence of an equivocally contemplative Rickman giving it a persistent air of beguiling uncertainty. Perhaps it's an easy video to take for granted because Texas in general seem somewhat taken for granted these days; despite their various chart successes in the 1990s and into the new millennium, they were an offbeat band to factor into the contemporary music climate, for reasons summarised in Stephen Thomas Erlewine's review of The Greatest Hits: "They may have been able to gain momentum from Britpop, but they didn't really belong, since their sensibility was far too soulful and classy, borrowing equally from the smooth soul of the '70s, Americana fascinations, and, in a roundabout way, the sophisti-pop of the '80s."

The song itself is fairly upfront about its own meaning, with the lyrics detailing the aftermath of a bitter breakup; the protagonist indicates that the relationship did not endure because her ex was not inclined to take it seriously, although now that she has moved on and found a new, more stable partner, they seem to be having second thoughts on the matter. The protagonist chews on the implication that it took their jealousy of a third party (the fact that she is "in demand") for her ex to realise what a catch she truly was, while making it plain that she isn't looking backwards. Muddying the waters slightly is her admission that "when I fall asleep, I see that winning smile", suggesting that she does, on some level, harbor her own wistful fantasy vision of how things might have worked out under different circumstances - although she counters this with the assertion that, "When my dreams just move along, you've lost the race by miles", maintaining that it is, fundamentally, only a fantasy. Nevertheless, the pining, melancholic nature of the tune means that the song is not quite the triumphant kiss-off suggested by the lyrics, with tinges of underlying regret tempering the protagonist's affirmations of having emerged as the winner of the scenario. The first mystery, in terms of how this bolsters our understanding of what's going on in the video, is which participant in this tetchy love triangle Rickman is intended to represent - are we to see him as the third party or the ex? The aforementioned Smooth Radio article seems pretty confident that he's the latter, but I will admit that - in spite of how the video ends - my gut reading was always that Rickman is the doting new partner, and the unseen pilot of the helicopter apparently pursuing them in the second verse represents the voyeuristic intrusions of her jealous old flame..as to an extent does our own inquisitive spectatorship. I guess I'm basing that largely on Spiteri's tendency to nuzzle Rickman and gaze elatedly into the camera whenever she sings about being "in demand", implying that her current position, in the backseat of that Bentley with Rickman, represents the peak of her emotional prosperity, and implicating any onlookers (the viewers, the camera, the helicopter searchlight) as outsiders who can gape upon their one-to-one nirvana but can't get in. I'd also note that Spiteri is seen whispering in Rickman's ear during the song's taunting remark, "There's a side you'll never know", while the helicopter watches from above, aggressively probing but firmly excluded from their private exchange.

What really intrigues me about the video is the interplay between the kind of sultry dream space suggested by Spiteri and Rickman's fairy tale backseat ride - the sumptuous effortlessness with which they glide from Point A to Point B - and the mundane realities that infringe on it. There is, presumably, an intentional irony to the climax, in which the couple experience their most intimate moment in a location as thoroughly banal as a Shell garage in the middle of nowhere (or in Bordon, Hampshire, to be precise). The garage itself makes for a curious ballroom stand-in, a garish onslaught of unlovely reds and yellows littered with signage promoting humdrum consumption, and yet the glare of the forecourt lights seem as hypnotic as any mirror ball. It calls attention to the fact that, a couple of hokey shots of the full moon notwithstanding, the blackness of the characters' world is punctuated mainly by artificial lighting from various sources (streetlights, car headlights, motorway signage), by turns magic and monotonous. Night becomes an open canvas in which the couple have the deserted road predominantly to themselves, with only the occasional freight vehicle travelling in the opposite direction to remind us of the lonely drudgery of nocturnal travel happening on the sidelines of their narrative. The appearance of the helicopter yields the only inkling of prospective antagonism en route, while a squad of motorcyclists travelling their way offer a moment of affinity - they are the only fellow travellers, other than Rickman, with whom Spiteri exchanges any kind of amicable interaction, and the manner in which they flock around the vehicle gives them the appearance of a protective brigade. As for the significance of the Shell garage, I am put in mind of Edward Hopper's Gas, with the garage providing a last refuge for our amorous night owls before they're forced to venture into a forbidding unknown - or in their case, the Brighton seafront in the bleak light of day. The darkness and the journey provide a dreamscape - perhaps the very fantasy space alluded to within the lyrics - the adventure of the open road sheathing the couple in an interval of of idyllic connection, with the emergence of dawn and their inevitable return to civilisation signalling the need to come back down to reality, and to contemplate the diverging roads ahead of them. Rickman, looking notably less kempt the instant he dons his rucksack, leaves the Bentley and Spiteri and disappears into a greyer reality; she rides on, mobilised by her emotional urges but visibly wounded by her companion's departure.

If we interpret the journey as signifying the forward momentum of Spiteri's life, and her time carpooling with Rickman as indicative of the duration of the characters' relationship, then the video can be read as an ode to the exhilaration but also the potential impermanence of such connections, however powerfully felt in the moment (in that regard, the concept is quite similar to the Cartoon Saloon short, Somewhere Down The Line). As with the lyrics of "In Demand", it is built on the recognition that the highs of any relationship may eventually culminate in the need to move on, emphasising the track's unspoken mournfulness of over its proclamations of survival. And if Rickman isn't the suitor Spiteri has spent the duration rebuffing, then I guess it speaks of the precariousness of whatever lies ahead for her, and the inherent but unavoidable risks of starting over.

 

 

As for the chauffeur, he's a total non-entity throughout. Neither Spiteri or Rickman communicate with him at any point, and they even obscure most of his face during the helicopter's offensive. He's window dressing in their little joy ride and he knows it.

Chief Wiggum, P.I. (aka When The Big Easy Calls, You Gotta Accept The Charges)

Something I'm definitely aiming to achieve more of in 2023 would be greater in-depth coverage of The Simpsons' Season 8. I've gone on record as saying that it is my favourite Simpsons season, and yet I'm deeply conscious of the fact that I've had less to say about it, thus far, than any of the seasons before it (except for Season 5, which I also hope to give a whisker more focus this year). And what with Mardi Gras upon us, now seems the perfect time to revisit "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" (4F20), and take look at the first of our trio of possible (though improbable) Simpsons sequels, "Chief Wiggum, P.I.", in which we follow Clancy Wiggum to New Orleans, and his futile attempts to reinvent himself as the star of a gutsy new action series. I covered the second segment, "The Love-Matic Grampa", a number of years ago in this piece, and while Moe and Abe's pseudo-sitcom still endures as my favourite of the three, there's a devoted place in my affections for this one too.

I think of Season 8 as a pretty underrated season on the whole (it has two really formidable fan favourites, "You Only Move Twice" and "Homer's Enemy", but in my experience most viewers tend to prefer Season 7), and "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" may well be the most underrated of them all. When it first aired, on May 4th 1997, a lot of viewers were uncertain what to make of it (like much of Season 8 in general!). A decade or so onward, and I'm not sure if that prevailing sentiment had really shifted - I can recall back when Wikipedia was a wee young thing, and their entry on "Jumping The Shark" cited this episode for lampooning the various ways in which a TV series can slip past its prime, before adding that, most ironically, "Spin-Off" was itself seen as a jump the shark episode by numerous fans "due to its poor quality". "Poor quality", as though it were fact. Nowadays, it's generally appreciated that the writers were up to something intensely meta with this installment, and that if you were taking each segment at face value then you were doing it wrong. And yet I still don't think it gets even half the credit that it deserves. An episode as balls to the wall odd and as doggedly outside of the box as this frankly belongs in more Top 10s than I'm accustomed to seeing it in.

"Spin-Off" was the third installment in what I'm henceforth going to refer to as "The Death Trilogy" (to pilfer a term from Gus Van Sant), following on the heels of "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show" and "Homer's Enemy", episodes all built around showrunners Oakley and Weinstein's increasing preoccupation with the likelihood that they'd inherited the series in the evening of its life ("The Principal and The Pauper" can be seen as a close cousin of the Death Trilogy, but I'm content to look at that one as an outlier that got fortuitously packed off to become Season 9's problem). "Poochie" gives us Denial, Fear and Anger all wrapped up in one highly defensive package - it grapples with the paradox of how a long-running series can be as strong as it ever was, and yet not hit the mark because its audience is no longer impressed by such perfection. "Enemy" is an altogether stranger beast, a commentary on the series' increasing disconnection from reality and its degeneration into the territory of nonsensical cartoons - it represents the Searching/Bargaining stage of Season 8's journey, and is more introspective in nature than "Poochie", even if the answer it ultimately reaches is an indifferent shrug from a hardening heart. "Spin-Off" rounds off the trilogy with a lavish Acceptance party - notably, it feels like it has less of an axe to grind than either "Poochie" or "Enemy", having already vented the worst of its anxieties on Frank Grimes and Poochie the dog, and being more open to embracing the maelstrom of mediocrity it senses will shortly consume it. "Spin-Off" is about the general lousiness of television, but it's made with real love and affection for that lousiness. Some commentators, including Robert Sloane, author of the essay, "Who Wants Candy? Disenchantment In The Simpsons" (featured in the 2004 book Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture), identify a self-congratulatory underpinning to the entire enterprise, asserting that the main purpose of "Spin-Off" is to remind viewers what superior programming The Simpsons is compared to 99% of the dreck they could potentially be watching instead. And while "Spin-Off" is, indisputably, expounding a point about the creative bankruptcy that fuels a lot of the decision-making in the television industry, it avoids coming across as overly petty or spiteful in its observations (except perhaps in the base assumption that a spin-off is an inherently tacky concept, which would be steeped in all kinds of irony). For one thing, all three proposed spin-offs were parodies of archetypal programs from earlier eras in television - cop dramas of the 1980s, fantasy sitcoms of the 1960s, and variety shows of the 1970s - as opposed to reflections of trends in contemporary entertainment. Part of the joke is that these hypothetical series were always going to seem hopelessly out of the place in the television climate of the 1990s. But there's also a level on which the writers appear to have had fun looking back on television's history and reimagining the shows of yesteryear to accommodate their own ingenious Simpsons twists; for an episode so concerned with what Sloane describes as "the general banality of television", it gave the crew leeway to flex some pleasingly inventive muscles.

"Spin-Off" pokes fun at television conventions of all stripes, but in the end (and this may be the single greatest factor differentiating it from the rest of the Death Trilogy), the butt of the joke turns out, in no small way, to be The Simpsons itself. Linking the three segments is a subtle but all-encompassing sense of existential despair, the nature of which doesn't completely reveal itself until the third spin-off, "The Simpsons' Smile-Time Variety Hour", which Kent Brockman introduces as coming from "the family that doesn't know the meaning of the word cancelled." The implication being that "Smile-Time" is to be viewed as a pre-emptive afterlife for The Simpsons following its impending (or so it seemed in 1997) cancellation. This is the most forthright the episode gets in communicating the uncomfortable subtext lurking beneath each hypothetical offshoot - the insinuation that the show is weighing up its options because The Simpsons cannot unreasonably hope to sustain itself for much longer. Troy reaffirms this sentiment in the closing sequence, when he offers a purported preview of Season 9 that includes magic powers, long-lost triplets, and Ozmodiar, a tiny green space alien that only Homer can see. One wonders, with hindsight, if Oakley and Weinstein had had a premonition of where Mike Scully would be taking the series after their departure. Ozmodiar wouldn't have been any more offensive than a lot of what we actually got.

Troy's presence, and his fourth wall-breaking wraparounds, obviously recall the very similar device used in the previous season's "The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular". But the true evolutionary ancestor to "Spin-Off" would be "22 Short Films About Springfield", also of Season 7, an episode heavily rumored to have itself been considered as the model for a potential Simpsons spin-off about the lives of the supporting Springfieldians. It and "Spin-Off" have the same interest in the kinds of parallel stories suggested by the intricacies of the Simpsons universe, and what we could be watching if narrative bias wasn't so heavily slanted toward the titular family, with many of those individual sketches in "22" playing like miniature pitches for their own self-contained series (some with their own introductory credit sequences). The brief running time of each individual spin-off and the "variety pack" nature of the episode appears to mimic, as with the structure of "22", the impatient attention span of a viewer with a finger pounding compulsively on the button of their remote, anxious to know what might be unfolding concurrently on the next channel. What both episodes finally confirm is that all roads eventually lead back to the titular family, upheld as the inevitable nexus of their mutual universe - whereas "22" (perhaps unconsciously) undermines its suggested spin-off potential with its need to keep returning to the happenings in the Simpsons' kitchen, "Spin-Off" knowingly inserts the family into all three segments as a means of reenforcing the inescapability of each offshoot's roots. Not only do the Simpsons get the final spin-off to themselves, they make an awkwardly-implemented "guest" appearance in "Chief Wiggum, P.I.", and Homer drops in for a brief chin-wag in "The Love-Matic Grampa". Cross-overs with the parent series are a common device in spin-offs (recall those divisive appearances from the cast of Cheers throughout the run of Frasier), and are implemented here with a deliberate clunkiness that (in "Wiggum" in particular) echoes the kind of cross-promotional tactics previously used in service of The Critic in "A Star Is Burns". This continued reliance on the family is used as yet another shorthand for a creative dead-end, their familiarity and tried and tested star power apparently necessary to keep these flailing new enterprises propped up...even if (as "Smile-Time" seemingly confirms) the Simpsons were, at the time, finding it a struggle enough just keeping themselves afloat.

Of the three hypothetical spin-offs, "Chief Wiggum, P.I." is the one that feels the least divorced from the series proper, tonally speaking, and as such may be the most palatable to casual viewers more interested in an enjoyable Simpsons story than in anything too arch. The Simpsons was already well within its element spoofing ridiculous action-orientated dramas of this ilk, a practice it initially restricted mostly to footage from "McBain" movies, but which had, in recent years started to bleed over into the dynamics of the Simpsons' everyday existence. There isn't such a world of difference between the climactic boat chase up to Big Daddy's mansion and the kinds of overblown action sequences periodically favoured by Oakley and Weinstein during their run (the part where Wiggum expels Daddy's henchman by blowing him away with the boat propeller in particular feels like a gag that could have happened in any contemporary episode). I've no end of praise for Oakley and Weinstein, for their intelligence and their willingness to take risks, but this is the one aspect of their tenure on which I'm a little more mixed. (Bob swinging off of a dam by holding onto a detonating cord in "Brother From Another Series" is fucking awesome and I will never tire of seeing it; by contrast, that climactic showdown between Lovejoy and the baboons in "In Marge We Trust" always struck me as kind of dumb. Less dumb than the baboon showdown in Ad Astra, mind you.) There are also jokes about New Orleans culture that wouldn't have felt at all out of place in a regular episode entailing a trip to the Big Easy - notably, an appearance from chef Paul Prudhomme, espousing (somewhat inexplicably) the catchphrase of fellow purveyor of Cajun cookery Justin Wilson ("I Gar-Ron-Tee!"), to the irritation of Skinner. In other regards, "Chief Wiggum, P.I." marks itself out as a very specific pastiche of 1980s crime dramas, most obviously Magnum, P.I. and Miami Vice. It's noteworthy that, while such shows might have been looking distinctly old hat in 1997, when "Spin-Off" was made, more recent years have seen the rise of the cultural movement known as synthwave, a niche genre of electronic music/art dedicated to evoking a characteristically 1980s flavour, and for which Miami Vice, with its sun-drenched palm trees, bright colours and weakness for showy vehicles and swanky attire, has proven a cornerstone aesthetic. The series has gained fresh relevance, in helping to construct a mythical vision of the 1980s, one that's instantly recognisable but might never have existed, except in media image. The opening sequence to "Wiggum" has most of the cliches down - the obligatory shot of Wiggum whizzing along in a shiny convertible with the wind in his hair, the opening theme tune conspicuously striving to recreate the sound Jan Hammer's discography, the clip montage offering individual introductions to the principal cast, each culminating in a comical freeze frame (though I'd associate that particular quirk more with The A Team than either Vice or Magnum). What's evident from the narrative itself is that the chimerical cool that Wiggum has gone in search of, and which once came so effortlessly to the likes of Magnum, Tubbs and Crockett, just seems to keep eluding our hero.

The premise of this faux pilot has Wiggum relocating to New Orleans to pursue a new career as a private investigator; in a hilariously graceless chunk of exposition, we learn that he was compelled to leave his former stomping ground of Springfield after suffering disgrace for his "massive corruption" as chief of police. That in itself is not such an implausible outcome for old Clancy. His exodus does not go unaccompanied - Wiggum's marriage to Sarah has also broken down, for reasons that the script does not care to specify, and he has custody of Ralph. The curveball of the arrangement is in the casting of Skinner as Wiggum's sidekick, "Skinny Boy". Wiggum and Skinner seem an unlikely pairing off the bat (in the series proper they had little connection, outside of Skinner being principal of the school Wiggum's son attends), but the real kicker is in the reference to Skinner's former life as a hustler on the streets of New Orleans, from which his foray into a career in education was apparently just a meagre distraction. Here, this plays as a deliberately clunky means of transplanting him into the action, the joke being that a character as categorically prim and starchy as Skinner should be a woefully unconvincing fit for such a backstory. But...the thing is that it's not altogether far removed from what we were shortly expected to swallow as canon in "The Principal and The Pauper" (there, he was an ex-street punk, as opposed to an ex-hustler, but it's in a near enough ballpark). That the two episodes landed so close together is eyebrow-raising enough in itself. For now, I don't want to get into the specifics of "The Principal and The Pauper" and the contentious matter of whether it does or doesn't succeed, but it is interesting to note that the two episodes take what is effectively the same joke and give it a radically different treatment. In "Wiggum", it's never presented as anything other than knowingly ludicrous writing, and while there's an element of that in "Principal", it also attempts to use it as the basis of a serious character drama involving Skinner's bifurcated sense of identity. 

Complicating the gag in "Wiggum" is that the episode seems to vacillate on just how viable Skinner is in the role of streetwise sidekick, presenting the character as both ridiculously out of his element in theory and yet absurdly proficient when it comes to the crunch. In one scene, Wiggum asks for the word on the street and Skinner admits that he hasn't lived in New Orleans for forty-two years and much of his contemporary understanding of the city comes from an article he read in "Parade" magazine. In "Grade School Confidential", an episode in very recent memory, Skinner's age was given as forty-four, so...are we to believe that he honed his tough street guy credentials when he was just two? Then again, Skinner isn't exactly bluffing about those credentials either - given that he manages to subdue an alligator with his bare hands, albeit one with corks around its teeth (of course, he was also a soldier in Vietnam, but that aspect of his backstory isn't raised here). I'll credit Seymour with being the magic ingredient that makes the whole parody tick; his hidden talent for gator-wrestling notwithstanding, his fundamental Skinner-ishness remains perfectly intact for the duration. The joke about him having only vague awareness of that Mardi Gras function the city intermittently throws would feel wonderfully in character even if he were a native New Orleanian - he's such a thoroughgoing square as to be totally indifferent to such things, even when they're happening right on his doorstep.

From the outset, Troy promises us a "gritty crime drama, starring Springfield's beloved Police Chief Wiggum," - a statement that, to anyone familiar with Wiggum and his staggering incompetence, rings as flagrantly oxymoronic (and what happens in "Spin-Off" certainly feels less gritty than Wiggum's disturbing encounter with Snake and Herman in "22 Short Films About Springfield"). Adjectives featured throughout the segment itself, in poorly-disguised snippets of self-promotion, include "exciting" and "sexy" - words first used by Lisa when she and the family conveniently show up during the Mardi Gras parade to give Wiggum's new ambitions their tacky-ass seal of approval. Despite being explicitly signposted by Troy before the segment begins, the Simpsons' entry into this world is jarring, not least because it brings what meagre plot "Wiggum" has going to an abrupt halt. Bart insists that the family are in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras celebrations, but the real purpose of their visit is made plain when Lisa interjects (in what turns out to be her only line of the episode) that she "can't wait to hear about the exciting, sexy adventures you're sure to have against this colourful backdrop." This statement would have felt odd coming from any of the family's mouths, but seems especially jarring for Lisa, a point made all the more salient later on, when we learn of her principled refusal to take part in the gruesomely tacky "Smile-Time Variety Hour". In his essay, Sloane notes that "the line is awkward and forced, particularly coming from the rather self-aware Lisa," (p.155), although he doesn't highlight the most skin-crawling element of Lisa's pitch, which is the questionable appropriateness of an eight-year-old child, albeit one characterised as having the mentality of an adult, selling something as "sexy". Wiggum later echoes these very words at the end of the episode, when he anticipates a long-running enmity with crime boss Big Daddy that will take "more sexy and exciting" forms with each passing week. What's important is that the characters spend more time taking about how alluring and adrenalin-packed their adventures will be than is actually evidenced onscreen throughout the adventure, which is a predominantly empty affair, despite occasional morsels of dramatic development. In that regard, it could be seen to vacillate as much as Skinner; there is an inkling of genuine peril when Ralph is abducted, and the story climaxes in a legitimate (albeit ridiculous) action sequence, yet the final confrontation with Big Daddy (who, despite possessing the suave Southern vocals of Gailard Sartain, appears to be every bit as incompetent in his allotted role as Wiggum) is a total anti-climax. Daddy exchanges a lot of nonsensical bluster with our heroes, before suddenly bailing, surrendering Ralph and making his (prolonged) escape, which Wiggum allows for the expressed purpose of securing a recurring nemesis for his upcoming (although not) series. The whole thing is implemented with the obvious intention of instilling a marketing hook in audiences, and the lack of closure, rather than opening up narrative possibilities, suggests an overall aimlessness to the enterprise - an indication that the real interests lie in longevity, and in keeping the Simpsons train running, than in accomplishing anything of genuine merit.

The most revealing aspects of "Wiggum" lie not in any pulse-racing action sequences, but in the parts of the segment that take place in the sparseness of Wiggum's new office, as he attempts to set up his detective business with meagre resources. Just as Moe's allegiance with the possessed love tester in "The Love-Matic Grampa" was entrenched in a pitiful desolation barely disguised by the machinations of the laugh track, so too does the heart of "Wiggum" secretly lurk in the overwhelming emptiness that pervades the segment. The doomed nature of the spin-off is depicted in the drab vacancy of the building interior, and in the (beautifully executed) sequence where Wiggum and Skinner open the windows to find the Mardi Gras celebrations happening right outside; there's always a party going on somewhere near Wiggum, but he just can't seem to find his way in. Like "Love-Matic", it ends up being a story of lonely individuals, of a couple of outcasts struggling to find their niche in a landscape that is both emotionally and creatively barren, and likely to discard their bid for the spotlight with total indifference. The joy of the segment lies in the chemistry between Wiggum and Skinner, which is genuinely delectable; both characters are equally at sea in their tough new environs, with the result that their mutual hopelessness manages to sell the absurdities of the spin-off as outright endearing. An anti-actioner with a King-of-Square Vladimir and perpetually clueless Estragon itching for a reckoning with a Godot to whom they can't get remotely close; don't tell me you wouldn't all watch the shit out of that.

"Wiggum" ends with a callback to the comical freeze frames that populated the opening montage, with Skinner making some lame wisecrack and the cast reacting uproariously. Freeze frame endings were another technique heavily favoured by Miami Vice, although "Wiggum" subverts the aura of uncompromising cool that accompanied its model series, using it to segue into the territory of cheesy sitcoms (also partial to a final freeze), with glib humor substituting for closure and an upbeat leitmotif that's every bit as phoney as any of the Pavlovian devices deployed in "The Love-Matic Grampa". It's always struck me as immensely significant that, in the specific frame they freeze on, Ralph doesn't look as though he's laughing so much as screaming. It's in his wide-eyed, tortured outburst that the segment lets us in most prominently on the cry of desperation that's manifest all throughout the episode, proving to be just as evident in the phoney-baloney laugh track of "Love-Matic" and the fixed plastic smiles of the family in "Smile-Time". A fraught compulsion to stave off a beckoning oblivion is the motivating factor behind every single ill-advised gimmick within the showcase, but there is, as Abe will shortly illuminate in "Love-Matic" with his "suffered so long" admission, a certain horror in the realisation that there is no end, that you have to keep on going, jumping through an interminable line-up of hoops for as long as you continue to draw a sufficient-sized crowd. What's articulated by Abe and hinted at in Ralph's expression is that each of these spin-offs constitutes a different vision of purgatory for the ailing series, a means for the media machine to carry on exploiting the property long after its dignity has expired (the freeze frame itself can likewise be seen as a signifier of such stagnation, with the characters trapped in a single moment ad infinitum). Of all of the Death Trilogy, "Spin-Off" comes off as by far the most pessimistic in terms of what lies in store for The Simpsons' future, the churlish frustrations of "Poochie" and the dark cynicism of "Enemy" having been supplanted with a queasy contemplation of the stalemate aligning on the horizon. As the swan song of this particular chapter in the series' history, it certainly goes down swinging with all the creative defiance it can muster.

Papa and Nicole: Interesting (1991)

I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that the greatest television finale of all time was not born of some beloved sitcom or riveting slice of prestige drama, but an eight-part comedy-drama designed to sell you dinky French motors and, as a project on the side, experiment in the numerous different ways you could reconceptualise a familiar Robert Palmer track. I speak of course of the hugely successful "Papa and Nicole" campaign of the 1990s, which not only convinced the UK public that the Renault Clio was a fun and desirable vehicle, but also put "Nicole" in vogue as an elegant moniker for a generation of newborn girls (a phenomenon Renault Clio were able to use to their advantage just last year, with a legacy advert celebrating the coming of age of the generation of young Nicoles whose identifies they helped fashion).

The campaign followed the adventures of Nicole (Estelle Skornik), a free-spirited young Frenchwoman living the swanky Provençal lifestyle with her well-to-do Papa (Max Douchin), neither of whom were doing much to challenge the quintessential stereotype of the French being a particularly amorous crowd. Nicole and her Papa were each perpetually in search of romantic gratification, with the Renault Clio being their mutual go-to method of travelling from one passion-filled interlude to the next. The names Papa and Nicole were themselves an in-joke, a nod to the 1966 heist picture How To Steal A Million, in which Audrey Hepburn plays a character named Nicole who is close to her Papa (Hugh Griffith), and somewhere toward the end the two engage in a verbal exchange that directly anticipates the pivotal dynamic of the Renault campaign. Dialogue within the "Papa and Nicole" ads was extremely minimal, outside of the voice-over narration - the characters uttered only a scant handful of words in total, most of them proper nouns (presumably to cover for the fact that they would have been speaking French). The majority never extended beyond the campaign's signature duologue, in which the father and daughter would address one another by name ("Papa!" "Nicole!"), in a new context and with slightly altered intonation every time, and always conveying as much and as little as ever needed to be expressed between the two. The mix of continental chic, non-verbal storytelling and sun-soaked salacity charmed many, with "Papa and Nicole" being voted the 12th most popular TV campaign of the bygone century in Channel 4's 2000 poll - although it drew its share of detractors, among them the late Fay Weldon, who went on record saying, "I hated those people, for some reason. They seemed so self-obsessed - and French, I suppose....it just seemed inappropriate that anyone would make a romantic getaway in a Renault Clio. Too small!" 

Appropriate or not, Nicole's saga was destined to culminate in the romantic getaway to end all romantic getaways, with the diminutive Clio providing the inevitable means to a life anew. When the campaign debuted, on 1st April 1991, one of its most popular contemporaries was Nescafe's "Love Over Gold", which managed to spin a full-blown soap opera from the scenario of Anthony Head and Sharon Maughan flubbing chance after chance to profess their love for one another, settling instead for making vague advances through their mutual palate for instant coffee (the campaign was parodied in this Harp ad starring Randy the Yorkshire terrier). While not as rigidly narrative-driven as "Love Over Gold",  Papa and Nicole had a story of its own going - one that, to begin with, played more like a bite-sized situational comedy than a soap opera, with various hi-jinks ensuing from Nicole and Papa's respective efforts to get themselves laid while the other wasn't looking. In the later stages of the campaign, a plot thread that became increasingly apparent had to do with Nicole's desire to fly the nest. Her sixth adventure offered a startling new development to that end, but the the truly explosive material was saved for the eighth and final installment, which coincided with the launch of the second generation Renault Clio, and was heralded by an extensive media blitz promising that things would be bowing out on an absolute bombshell - Nicole was getting married! But to whom? The identity of the groom was a subject of much speculation, with a press release noting that "spokesmen for Hugh Grant, James Major and Gary Barlow have refused to comment" (spoiler: it was none of those people). To be among the first to know, you'd need to tune in around the middle of Coronation Street on 29th May and see who was waiting for Nicole at the end of the aisle. An estimated 23 million viewers did exactly that. It seemed logical to assume that they couldn't possibly live up to such overwrought hype, but they delivered and then some. Call me sentimental, but I even get a little emotional at the final iteration of that iconic exchange between Nicole and Papa, just knowing that it will be the last.

For now, let's start at the campaign's humble beginnings, with the original Papa and Nicole spot, "Interesting", in which Nicole sneaks out from under the nose of her dozing Papa for an afternoon's romantic liaison, unaware that Papa has similar plans up his sleeve. Mark Robinson's 100 Greatest TV Ads, the official tie-in book for the aforementioned Channel 4 poll, specifies that the ad debuted on April Fool's Day 1991, as if there was a kind of hidden subversiveness to the arrangement, and Papa and Nicole's particular brand of foreign, Clio-powered glamour was always intended as a taunt at the expense of the viewer. The basic ingredients are deftly cemented - picturesque Provençal scenery set to an instrumental interpretation of Robert Palmer's "Johnny and Mary". Renault had been using this track as their signature leitmotif for some years prior to enlisting Papa and Nicole, but the more lulling, continental arrangements felt intrinsically tied to the serenely indulgent lifestyle of the Provençal pair. It was like something out of an idle afternoon's daydream, in between the ingestion of a sultry paperback fantasy. It was likewise a distinctively British conceptualisation of what their overseas neighbours must be up to right now, the foreignness of the characters being precisely what made them so alluring. In spite of what Robinson identifies as England's "historical anti-Frenchness",  the campaign fed into the UK's underlying fascination with France as a kind of parallel world, seeming as it does at once so close to home and so far-removed.

 

 

France, then, is construed here as Britain's reverie, and from the start, the ads linked the Renault Clio to a desire for escapism, even if, in this instance, it's a fairly low-stakes excursion from the unspoken expectation on both parties to stay perfectly still when they'd rather be off exercising their libidos. All that is spoken is the campaign's signature exchange, at the end of the ad, when Nicole and Papa resume their respective opening positions and greet one another with a tone that suggests both self-satisfaction and a vague wariness of how much the other potentially knows. Earlier, we'd seen Papa drive past Nicole's rendezvous without so much as turning his head, but I'm not convinced this conveys cluelessness as it does disinterest; nestled beneath the faux innocence of their ostensibly skimpy conversation is the understanding that neither will pry into the other's dealings so long as their own covert indulgences go uncontested.

I'll give a special shout-out to Papa and Nicole's chauffeur, Bernard (his name was never brought up in the ads themselves, but was included in the campaign's press materials) who would reappear in subsequent installments, and is here such a good sport to them both (he's possibly relieved to them out away from the château for a couple of hours). And if you're wondering there was ever a Maman involved, I could say something, but it might be considered a spoiler.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #46: Iguana Pool Party (Benson & Hedges)

Let's be real here - when you're dealing with a product as heinous as cigarettes, there is an argument to be had that any animal involved in the shilling process can be automatically construed as "horrifying". The intention is, after all, to get you curious about a substance that's both highly addictive and recognised universally as hazardous to you and to the people around you. With cigarette advertising I've always found there to be this weird dichotomy; I see the government health warning splashed across the screen in big bold lettering and my reflexes are immediately going to want to interpret it as an anti-smoking PSA - which is of course entirely at odds with what the imagery itself is attempting to convey. Not that the two forces were necessarily so incompatible - the challenge was to make the deadly look sexy, and I'm sure that advertising agencies were exuberant at the prospect.

In the UK, televised adverts for cigarettes had been banned long before I was born (cigars and loose tobacco were exempt until 1991, which is why the Hamlet campaign endured in popular memory as long as it did) but they were still allowed to advertise them on billboards right up until my late teens and, odiously enough, it was entirely the norm to see adverts for cigarettes (and alcohol) on the billboard positioned right outside my school. The ubiquitousness of cigarette advertising (outside of the chattering cyclops) struck me as bizarrely contradictory at the time - from a young age, a multitude of authorities were keen to impress on us the message that smoking was bad and we were better off not dabbling in it, and yet there was clearly this other, more invisible authority at work, whose voice was, in its way, every bit as loud, and as every bit as eager for us to know that the product existed. The only thing more disconcerting to me than the idea of hawking something that required such a terrifying health warning was my not having the foggiest what any of the featured imagery had to do with cigarettes anyhow. One of the major limitations imposed on such advertising was that you weren't actually allowed to show anybody doing the recommended-but-not-recommended action, so agencies had to resort to strange, abstract gimmicks to get their pitches across. The granddaddy of strange, abstract gimmicks being this 1979 cinema advert for Benson & Hedges, which forged some enigmatic connection between smoking and poolside iguana gatherings. Devised by Collett Dickenson Pearce and directed by Hugh Hudson, who would soon be better known as the director of Chariots of Fire, it spared no expenses and turned numerous heads in its day. I first came across it as part of a YouTube compilation and immediately wondered what on earth could it be hawking - regardless, it had a whole lot of weird imagery involving lizards chilling around an unfilled swimming pool, so it had my attention. When the final reveal came, well, it shouldn't have surprised me. Leave it to tobacco advertising to be this aggressively overwrought with its abstractness.

To give "Swimming Pool" full credit, it is properly a cinematic creation, comprised of shots that feel wild, alive and invigorating (set to the sounds of "Wind" by Godley & Creme). In terms of its boldness and originality, it is very hard to fault the thing, even if it is in aid of such an insidious product. The 90-second ad shows a helicopter flying over the Arizona desert carrying some precious cargo, which appears to pique the interests of the various reptiles soaking up the sunshine down below (mostly iguanas in swimming pool territory, but a snake gets in on the observation too). This is all intercut with footage of a camera peering out from behind some Venetian blinds, before the helicopter drops its cargo into a pool and an iguana swims toward it, apparently turning into a scuba diver who proceeds to open the box with a sardine key. The film then closes with an ad-within-an-ad, revealing the preceding action to have been playing out "inside" a billboard positioned alongside Battersea Power Station, and finally that government health warning, to remind us that we're playing with fire, which Collet Dickenson Pearce no doubt saw as bolstering the film's seductively dangerous aura.

The meaning behind the visual punchline with Battersea Power Station is itself not so enigmatic - it represents the grey humdrum from which the exoticism of Benson & Hedges is purported to provide elevation. In that regard the ad might be perceived as much as a love letter to the power of advertising as to the joys of Benson & Hedges, if the billboard image itself is meant to be so alive with suggestive pleasures. The ad displays a fascination with the act of looking, albeit through a predominantly non-human gaze, from the obvious voyeuristic allusions of the seemingly unmanned camera to the pool outlets, which eerily evoke the eyes of an awakening monster. The use of reptiles (as opposed to anything more fluffy-looking) implies an adult-orientated exoticism tinged with menace. The snake, a classic symbol of danger, here seems wary of the approaching crate of cigarettes, indicating that it sees itself as lower down in the predatory hierarchy (clearly, it has the good sense to know what kinds of carcinogens are being hauled above it). Meanwhile, the pool-dwelling iguanas, besides providing a cool visual, evoke a sense of a badland subsisting upon the fringes of your personal play area, a meeting of the wild and the recreational. When a human finally appears on screen, in the form of the scuba diver, his wetsuit-coated body seems redolent of that of the swimming iguana, suggesting that a transformation has occurred. At this point it becomes tempting, however facetiously, to read the sequence as analogous to the opening chapter of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the discovery of the crate elevating these lizard brains to the level of cultured beings given to constructing vast civilisations (hence our journey to Battersea Power Station at the end). Except the silhouettes of the two passers-by in the final frame have a similarly obscured appearance that does not transcend the uncanniness of the lizards' domain, implying that we haven't completely left it. Besides, the film clearly has an affinity for this otherworldly wilderness, consumption of the Benson & Hedges brand being posited as an ideal balance between animal impulse and chic sophistication.

But like I say, weird dichotomy. There's no way I can personally interpret the full-on outlandishness of this ad, as slickly directed as it may be, as anything other than a reflection of how badly smoking screws you up. In that regard it's practically a comedy sketch. Cool lizards, though.