TACtics: Nightshift (Fatigue Kills)

"Nightshift", a 1994 road safety advertisement about the dangers of driving tired, gets my vote for the best production from Australian televisual trauma veterans TAC. This one has all of TAC's strengths and none of their weaknesses - and something genuinely unexpected into the bargain.

In general I have mixed feelings about the campaigning methodology of TAC, aka the Transport Accident Commission, a government-owned organisation that provides personal and financial support to those affected by road accidents in the state of Victoria. It would be hard to deny that they've had their share of psychologically-denting classics. Their first television campaign was launched in 1989 with "Girlfriend", and advertising history was born - this was the film that coined the immortal tagline "If you drink, then drive, you're a bloody idiot" (a phrase that doubles as a frank admonishment and an irresistibly fiendish pun), which proved so successful that it was adopted by similar campaigns in Canada and New Zealand. A pseudo-documentary set in a hospital emergency room, where a nurse commented on the lamentable happenings while the family of a critically injured passenger gave the driver a rollicking in the backdrop, "Girlfriend" cemented TAC's favoured approach as one of thoroughgoing realism. The weirder, artsier tactics from the later installments of the UK's concurrent Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives campaign were certainly not for them. What TAC do exceptionally well in that regard is to capture a credible sense of the calm before the storm; a signature TAC technique is to carefully establish each scenario and the doomed souls within via a sequence depicting the build-up to the accident. Nondescript people are shown going about their day in a seemingly nondescript manner, before a bad decision on someone's part causes things to flip over (sometimes literally) into the stuff of nightmares. The characters' interactions feel natural, the ways in which the seeds of their impending destruction are sown are deliberately low-key, cleverly positioning them as ostensibly small things with the potential to reap catastrophic consequences. TAC's forte is in illustrating just how painfully fragile is the dividing line between the everyday and the horrific.

Where I tend to have a harder time with TAC is in their favoured strategy once that dividing line has been breached, which is to say that they're very big on displays of raw, uninhibited emotion. The muted, austere nature of those earlier Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives PIFs was also not for them. With TAC campaigns you get ample instances of people in grave distress, sobbing about how sorry they are for their lapses of judgement, screaming for badly mangled loved ones, etc. It's not that this is an inherently ineffective approach (I'd rate "Tracy", an ad that's nothing but a driver in absolute hysterics, as one of their stronger entries), but it is absolutely the case that TAC prefer to overstate the emotive content of their ads, and overstated emotion is not something I'm inclined to respond to in a safety campaign. I'm of the opinion that the best campaigns are the ones that manage to exercise a little restraint, and to convey their messages in a sharply succinct manner that doesn't rely on beating you over the head with how distressing their cautionary scenarios are (ideally, that much should be self-evident). I think D&DWL was onto something in attempting to keep its emotional horrors as below the surface as possible - there, it's often the small things that sliver into your psyche and fester (the way Kathy breaks the fourth wall while her parents argue, the demonic background laughter at the end of "Pudding", the grimly sardonic "Cup of tea, sir?" at the end of "Arrest"). In pitching things at the opposite extreme, I find that TAC intermittently dampens the impact of their ads, having them come off as merely overwhelming, and at worst pushing them into the arena of gruesome sentimentality (see "12 Days of Christmas", a campaign I find so personally indigestible that I'm very unlikely to touch on it here).

"Nightshift" works as well as it does for its lack of any big emotional fall-out. It's a rare occasion on which TAC took the D&DWL-favoured route of less is more. Sure, we could have had an epilogue in which the mother of one of the crash victims, referenced in the preceding dialogue, is shown going to pieces on receiving news of the central accident, but why would we need to see that? Our imagination can fill in that blank just fine. The ad says all that it needs, through a subtle gesture from an innocent bystander after the crash has occurred - a gesture that's perhaps even more devastating, in its way, than the crash itself. As I say, it's the small things that should really stick with you in a safety campaign.

Before we come to that, "Nightshift" establishes itself, in classic TAC fashion, with a naturalistic sequence in which we get to know our characters and the thought processes that lead them astray before having to abruptly say our goodbyes. Our protagonists are a young couple - Shaun, who's been working a late shift in his job at a pizzeria, and his unnamed girlfriend, who comes to collect him in a combi van. The two of them are planning to take a trip over the weekend, and the girlfriend makes the sensible suggestion that they go home and get some sleep beforehand, but Shaun is intent on making the drive overnight while the roads are deserted. We can sense that he probably isn't up to it, having already admitted to having had a demanding shift at work. The most ominous early statement, though, comes from Shaun's boss, who makes the parting remark, "See you Monday". A seemingly innocuous pleasantry that seals his fate from the outset, cluing us in that Shaun, in all odds, won't be back at all. As with slasher movies, there's got to be a particular set of rules for surviving a safety awareness campaign; saying anything along the lines of "See you shortly" guarantees the recipient victim status.

Sure enough, as the night wears on Shaun finds it increasingly difficult to stay awake. He tries turning the radio on, but his girlfriend, who's attempting to sleep in the passenger seat, objects to the noise. He then asks her to talk to him, but she refuses, advising him to pull over if he's tired. Shaun, for whatever reason, is determined to keep going. Come dawn's early light, and he's reduced to a barely-conscious daze, blatantly fighting just to keep his face upright. At one point, it looks as though Shaun might have averted disaster; he accidentally drifts onto the right-hand side of the road, but a truck approaching up ahead flashes its headlights at him, spurring him awake for long enough to redirect the vehicle out of its path. Unfortunately, Shaun's sleep-deprived body can't hold out for any longer, and as the truck passes them, he looses control and veers directly into it. As crashes go this one is pretty, as Shaun himself would phrase it, full-on - the front-end of the combi completely crunches. The ad stops short of showing you any bodies or injury detail (it's one of TAC's lighter ads in that regard), but it's hard to imagine how either occupant could have survived that impact. The real moment of devastation occurs when the driver of the truck jumps out, his adrenalin clearly up, only to survey the damage and take in how hopeless the situation is, whereupon his shoulders droop forlornly. That shoulder-drooping, so subdued a gesture, says everything we need to know about the accident's emotional aftermath; the ad fades out on a moment of chilling silence, with the continued, eerily incongruous background ambience of the newly broken morn.

It's the smaller and sometimes incidental details in "Nightshift" that make it such an effective work. Take that brief shot of a Gumby doll positioned on the combi dashboard. It doesn't contribute anything significant to the story, but it's a quirky touch that adds a little extra character, both to the van's interior and to the film's broader atmosphere, giving us some insight into the lives of these ill-fated individuals.

Here's where we get to the ad's unexpected strength. This is not something I'm accustomed to saying about road safety advertisements, particularly ones featuring crashes as brutal as this, but "Nightshift" is actually a really beautiful-looking piece of film-making. Sure, once the combi goes into the truck it gets as grim and ugly as you would expect from a production of this ilk, but the preceding sequence in which Shaun and his girlfriend cruise along the Australian highway and past a lake bathed in the orange glow of the rising sun is so dazzling that the first time I saw it, it made me gasp. For a split second, I nearly forgot that I was watching a safety promotion that was gearing up to end in carnage. There's something so wonderfully deceptive about the calm and the beauty of that moment, almost as if we too are being lulled into a gentle stupor before the crash snaps us back abruptly into the reality of the situation. It also emphasises the implicit cruelty of the final outcome, with the freshness and promise of a new day getting underway with two young lives being tragically snuffed out.

"Nightshift" proved so indelible that it was partially remade in 2015 for an ad entitled "Then and Now", designed to illustrate how advancements in safety and technology could result in a happier outcome. The climax of the original ad was featured alongside its 21st century update via a split screen; while things play out as disastrously as ever for Shaun '94 and his girlfriend, their modern counterparts fare better thanks to the presence of safety barriers in the middle of the road, which prevent their vehicle from making contact with the truck. The car's dashboard then activates a warning, telling the driver to take a break after detecting that he's been at the wheel for too long. The update ends with the modern, more fortunate version of Shaun pulling over and asking his girlfriend if she'll take over driving for the rest of the journey, which she agrees to do.

That's all very swell, you know, but what the newer version sadly lacks is cinematography as gorgeous as its predecessor. In the 2015 version, the world looks comparatively dull and hazy - which seems ironic, given that our characters here live to relish whatever it may bring.

Oh, and a small disclaimer. You'll notice that here and in my review of "Gonna Get Caught" I've purposely avoided describing these ads as public information films, or PIFs, and that's because I'm not sure what the correct technical term would be for such films from Australia and New Zealand. (That might seem pedantic, but I'm mindful of how the terms "public information film" and "public service announcement", while regarded as one another's UK/US equivalents, are not as interchangeable as popularly assumed, and prefer to apply caution in using them.)  This 1999 study from the Monash University Accident Research Centre refers to TAC's output as simply "road safety advertisements", which seems a safely generic enough term to use for the time being. The study itself makes for an interesting read - even if "Golf", which would likely be my vote for the second best TAC installment, was sadly excluded from their research.