In 1989 the Transport Accident Commission joined forces with advertising agency Grey Melbourne, and created the 60-second television ad "Girlfriend" with the explicit mission to "upset, outrage and appal". This no holds barred assault on Victoria's cultural nerves was to prove a resounding success. "Girlfriend", a short piece about the perils of driving while intoxicated, might be one of the most important road safety ads ever made. Not only did it kick off a long and ruthlessly traumatic line of televised TAC campaigns, it also birthed the fantastic slogan "If you drink then drive, you're a bloody idiot" - here spoken in the ad's dialogue by a character identified onscreen as Karen Warnecke of The Royal Melbourne Hospital - which sent shock waves through Australia and beyond (we've observed from LTSA's "Gonna Get Caught" series how the phrase also caught on in New Zealand).
For all that, "Girlfriend" seems fairly subdued by subsequent TAC standards. As the campaigns went on, a particular point of notoriety garnered was in their predilection for raw spectacle - they weren't ones to shy away from showing you the accidents themselves in all of their lurid, jaw-dropping horror. Cars crashed, cars crunched, bodies within were brutally mangled. A TAC formula emerged, which could be broken down into essentially three acts - the deceptively innocuous build-up, the literal impact in the middle, and then the aftermath, with its inevitable overflowing of tears, hysteria and the gnashing of teeth. For now, TAC had no interest in those first two acts, leaping head-first into the protracted epilogue and showcasing the happenings in an emergency ward in the late hours, the results of a crash that has already occurred. "Girlfriend" isn't overly graphic when it comes to injury detail, the worst of it being a glimpse of a leg wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage near the start of the ad, but it is high on emotional anguish. With its repeated cross-cutting and intimate close-ups, it replicates a documentary format, the point seemingly being to give us a fly on the wall view of the stomach-churning messiness of the onslaught of emotion that arises at a time of calamity, here allowed to be a spectacle unto themselves.
Compared to the UK's contemporary "Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives" campaign, the entry it most resembles is "Fireman's Story", with a few shades of "Arrest". Like the former, it centres on a monologue from a professional who is already well-familiar with the tragic consequences of drink driving - the aforementioned Karen Warnecke, who relates to the camera how anyone in her position has to learn to cope with the emotional devastation along with the physical. She maintains her composure better than Ken Stott's firefighter, but is blatantly just as perturbed by the things she's witnessed, hence her damning, campaign-defining final verdict. Meanwhile, her words are juxtaposed with one such example, as a critically injured young woman, Lucy, is wheeled into the emergency room while her unnamed boyfriend, the driver, staggers around uselessly in the foreground, a feeble, whimpering wreckage of a man. Much like "Arrest", we have the perpetrator attempting to navigate his way around an institution where everyone he meets regards him with barely-muted disdain - that is, until he runs into the mother of the woman he's harmed, who is far less inclined to hold back her anger. Karen herself has more of a low-key presence throughout these sequences, but for one fleeting close-up once Lucy's parents are brought up to speed on the possible consequences; her face slips into a harrowed frown, cluing us in that no matter how many times she's seen this scenario play out on previous nights, it still gets to her. The most optimistic thing you could say about the situation is that the injured party is, from the sounds of it, expected to live (at least, it's never suggested that she could die), although the full extent of the damage is not known - the ad fades out with a question mark still hanging over whether Lucy will get to keep both her legs or if her head hasn't suffered some serious trauma.
"Girlfriend" established TAC's approach as one that strove doggedly for realism, and to push the viewer uncomfortably close to the kinds of horrific incidents we'd prefer to convince ourselves could only happen to other people. While their devotion to overstatement could intermittently get a bit heavy-handed for yours truly, in this case there is a certain sense of knowingness to the ad's voyeurism, a feeling that we, like the driver, are intruders amid the family's displays of grief and suffering, witnessing more that we should perhaps be permitted - consider that moment where Lucy lies immobilised whilst subject to the indignity of having her clothing forcibly removed from her chest. A persistent narrative thread throughout the ad is in the boyfriend's efforts to get to Lucy, only to be continually barred, either by the medics or by Lucy's indignant parents - a reinforcement of his status as a persona non grata, and of the barrier we suspect this incident is likely to present in terms of their relationship going forward. Throughout the ad, we're encouraged to empathise with just about every other participant - Lucy, her parents, Karen - yet we end up cast out in the cold with the boyfriend, last seen weeping in the hospital corridor about how sorry he is, his patheticness a grotesque reflection of our own helplessness in the face of such misery. The point is clear - if we're not willing to be a part of the solution, we belong out in the sin bin with the problem.
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