For the 50th entry in this retrospective, I'm doing something very special and going in search of one of most heavily-guarded of all of my personal advertising-inflicted traumas. Lurking somewhere within the darkest depths of my psyche is a penguin-shaped cicatrix that on occasion still throbs and causes me to lose sleep to this day. It's high time we put a spotlight on one of the freakiest, unholiest, most thoroughly cursed unions in advertising history - the union between John Smith's Bitter, a waddle of beady-eyed, singing, tap-dancing penguins, and morose comedian Jack Dee, never for a second dropping the mask and giving the impression that he wanted to be there. Such was the man's charm. I should confess upfront that I am mostly unfamiliar with Dee's work outside of this campaign, but it's my understanding that the moroseness and the unenthusiasm were part of his brand. And singing, dancing penguins are ostensibly the antithesis of all that, and of John Smith's. Ostensibly.
The partnership between Dee and John Smith's originated in the early stages of the 1990s, but it took a few installments for penguins to be added to the formula. A ladybird theme was dabbled with at one point (in theory, they should have been the ideal counter to Dee, since they're such bright, colourful and cheering bugs), but it didn't stick. From the start, the basic premise of the ads, pinned to the slogan of "No Nonsense," was about putting themselves in quotation marks, professing an awareness of how hackneyed it was to have fake animals and (one assumes) equally fake celebrities endorsing your products. This was a campaign about the naffness of other campaigns, which in practice amounted to it getting to have its cake and nosily scarf it down too. Dee's sour face provided a humorous departure from the plastic grins of your typical celebrity shill, while the ladybirds he was initially and all-too-reluctantly paired with lampooned the kind of hollow visual gimmickry endemic to television advertising. In one installment, Dee was surrounded by people in ladybird costumes chirping some inane jingle. In another, Dee himself was physically transformed into one of the spotted bugs. All very much against his will in the ads' internal narrative, for Dee was a down-to-earth man who preferred to tell the people about the virtues of John Smith's straight, with no bells and whistles. Then in 1995, somebody decided that the ladybirds were too subtle and what Dee really needed to go up against was a plague of musically-inclined penguins. And with that, a full-blown televisual nightmare was born. That first diabolical penguin spot happened to catch me unawares as a child, and I could practically feel my personality warping in eight different directions just watching it. The world didn't seem like quite the same place after. Nothing seemed quite the same.
What did the penguins have that the ladybirds didn't? I think a lot of it goes back to what I said in my piece on the Bud Ice Penguin. Spheniscids give off that unique cocktail of cuddliness, clownishness and, owing to their vaguely human-shaped appearance, utter uncanniness. Viewed from just the right angle, they can seem strangely off-kilter, a quality that the "No Nonsense" leans into with a particular dry fiendishness. I maintain that my visceral reaction to the John Smith's penguin, as a child, was not the result of a callow mind overreacting to offbeat stimuli - there's something about these birds that I find innately sinister to this day. Compared to them, Feathers McGraw seems like the sweetest-faced of jokers. All by design, I'm sure. The "No Nonsense" had to walk a careful tightrope between revelling in the very lunacy it appeared to decry and establishing some distance from it. On one level, the penguins were intended to be comical; the viewer was supposed to laugh at the hilarious contrast between the singing spheniscids and the po-faced Dee. But they were also intended as a parody of the general inaneness and vapidity of advertising, a point communicated by giving them a certain grotesqueness. The over the top spectacle of the penguin chorus is meant to feel reminiscent of a fever dream; the viewer is bombarded with absurd sounds and imagery at a faster rate than they can reasonably process it. The flashiness of television advertising, the campaign warns us, is something that should engender suspicion. The penguins, however superficially amusing, embody the falseness and the hollowness of product marketing, the sourpuss tones of Dee and the taste of John Smith's representing the welcome interjections of reality undercutting it at every turning. The two forces appear to be at odds, but are actually cozy bedfellows; something that is gone for even more full-throttle with the penguins than it was with the ladybirds is the sense that we are being given leeway to enjoy the silliness while pretending to sneer at it. Above all else, the "No Nonsense" ads are concessions to the guilty pleasures of advertising, and to the base level on which our brains respond to the absurd spectacle of dancing penguins, even when knowing we should be above such things.
The initial penguin spot ended with Dee banishing the offending creatures from the bar. But of course, he couldn't keep them at bay for long. The birds proved such a hit that they returned in subsequent ads to continue their uncanny song and dance routine, with the caveat that Dee invariably got to send them packing with his abuse. (Dee typically limited his abuse to verbal put-downs, but at least one ad, which contained a nod to puppeteer Rod Hull, involved implied physical abuse. The penguins scream in that one.) Somehow, the campaign took an even stranger turn in 1996, in an ad that parodied the bombast of Hollywood blockbusters as much as the vapidity of advertising. The twist here was that the penguins were finally given the upper hand (or flipper) and had free reign for the entirety of the ad. Dee was completely oblivious to their presence, with the narrative that the penguins had been added in the aftermath using green screen technology, and without Dee's consent; he thinks that he has finally succeeded and convinced the advertising executives to ditch the gimmicks, when in actuality they have settled a devious workaround. And the results were utterly terrifying, with the penguins having adopted an apparent vindictiveness after so many turns at being berated by Dee. They have dropped their song and dance routine in favour of aggressive mockery, and scatology. Not only could the penguins now breathe fire, they could apparently also propel themselves into the air by farting fire. Perhaps in retaliation for that earlier Rod Hull gag, one over-sized penguin even stuffs Dee up its rear and then belches him out through its beak. At the end of the ad, Dee's image was even manipulated so that he appeared to be wearing a penguin suit, a playful admission that Dee and the marketing sidekicks he supposedly loathed were really birds of a feather.
The Dee campaign came to an end before the decade was out, with one of the last installments yielding what felt like the perfect punchline to the series. Dee finally got his wish - we found him alone in a room with only a pint of John Smith's and "no gimmicks, no penguins". A slight pause. And then: "Might as well go down the pub." Indeed. In the end, our fascination with kitschy advertising amounts to much the same thing as our fascination with what lurks at the bottom of a pub glass. If it's not about escapism, then what is it for?
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