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.