Let's talk about the single greatest oddity of British Telecom's 1992 "Get Through To Someone" campaign. The edition that conceals it isn't half as unnerving as the one about the woman who frets that her daughter is freezing to death inside a student hall, but it is several times more confounding. On this occasion, we focus on a plucky would-be Lothario who's determined not to get through to someone - or rather, to get through to her by maintaining total radio silence. Our protagonist considers himself a pretty slick fella, and thinks it most beneath him to give his girlfriend a bell to let her know that he loves her, preferring to keep her interested by keeping her hanging. He's so slick, in fact, that he justifies his dubious tactic by misremembering a quote from the 1940 Marx brothers film Go West. "What's that line from the old film? Fanning the flames of desire with the bellows of indifference..." Go West is not explicitly cited, but the quotation in question is markedly similar to one uttered by Groucho Marx therein. Problem is, it's not an exact match; the actual line spoken by Groucho is: "The secret is never let her know you care. Never pursue her. Let her pursue you. Fan the flames of desire with the bellows of indifference!"You might think this is a case of me being unreasonably pedantic, but where it gets perplexing is that we hear the snippet of dialogue playing in the protagonist's head, spoken in some suave, old timey actor's voice, and presented as though it were an extract of culled directly from the film itself. On top of everything else, that suave, old timey actor is audibly not Groucho Marx. Which begs a number of questions. Can we say for certain that Go West is the old film our protagonist has in mind? If not Groucho Marx, then whose voice is it? Is it a legitimate extract from some other classic picture in which a character makes a near-identical observation, using the exact same metaphors? Or is it just a faux dialogue extract, created to sound like it was taken from an old movie? Was the idea to have the protagonist seem additionally foolish, since his memories don't quite align with what's heard in the film itself, or was the intention here simply to allude to Go West without actually having to secure the rights to use any of it? That last one has the ring of plausibility, although why go to the trouble to create a faux extract when you could have had the protagonist (mis)remember it in his regular voice, creating much the same implications?
It should be noted that most ads in the "Get Through To Someone" campaign involved some element of paranoid or delusional fantasy, with characters fretting over the barrage of unknowns presented by their individual situations, before their fears were finally put to rest with a call and a sound of that soothing harmonica leitmotif. "Bellows" is something of an anomaly, in that the protagonist professes to be entirely at ease with a state of no communication. In lieu of a paranoid dream sequence, he gets an internal monologue, and his misquoting of Groucho Marx, in the wrong vocals, is the closest he gets to retreating into fantasy, with the misremembered details distinguishing his musings as a display of personal indulgence (those mysterious misplaced vocals representing his own attempt, as part of that internal monologue, to role play not as Marx, but as a more generically suave actor from Hollywood's golden age) and not objective memory. There seems to be a broader theme involving classic Hollywood; when Debbie calls, and his facade is totally punctured by the sudden surge of panic that has him lurching for the telephone, Sally the dog appears and creates an awkward, albeit jovially dispelled misunderstanding ("Sally, get off! No, no no, she's a dog. No, a sort of terrier type thing!"). Is it a coincidence that she is, specifically, a Cairn terrier, the breed most familiar to general audiences as that of Toto, the travelling companion of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz? These allusions to old Hollywood are emblematic of the protagonist's desire to immerse himself in a world of airy fantasy, exposed as foolish play pretence the instant reality comes calling and drags him straight back down into Kansas. There, he lives in disarray, surrounded by the contents of an upset fruit bowl, hounded by an over-enthusiastic terrier and suddenly very eager for the reaffirmation of Debbie's affections ("Debbie, listen to me," he implores at the end).
The especially fun part with these GTTS ads is noticing which aspect of the mise en scene works its way into the final arrangement, sharing the BT logo's status as the connective tissue between the featured parties, what function it serves within the characters' narrative and how it might be construed as symbolic of their relationship. In this case, it's the eye-catching knick knack that's foregrounded during the opening frames of the ad, an indoor water fountain comprised of a female figure, and droplets trickling all around the sides of her casing. Her foregrounding is juxtaposed with the protagonist's utterance of "Women...", indicating that she's to be seen as the embodiment of his professed views on the fairer sex. As with "Empty Nest Angst", I suspect that water is once again being used as a metaphor for sex, or at least for sexual desire, with this perfectly contained figurine encapsulated by her own ever-flowing desire serving as a telling reflection of how our protagonist envisions Debbie, treated mean and kept keen. But seems just as appropriate those non-stop trickles to be indicative of his own inner craving to connect with Debbie, barely concealed by his purported inclination to play it cool by emitting those bellows of indifference. In actuality, he's a chaotic geyser of ill-suppressed yearning. In the closing collage, the figure's image is situated so as to appear to be gazing from his direction and onto Debbie, a sly visual allegory for how transfixed by her he really is.
On September 30th 1993, "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" (episode 9F21) aired, getting The Simpsons' fifth season off to a roaring start. They couldn't have picked a classier, more iconic debut if they'd tried, and yet it wasn't always intended to lead the pack. The bigwigs at Fox had originally wanted "Homer Goes To College" to be the big season premiere, believing that the premise of Homer Simpson enacting a string of Animal House-style hi-jinks would prove irresistible to viewers, but in the end "Quartet" just had too much of an edge. By which I mean a guest appearance from a Beatle, with Homer's musical odyssey allowing him to cross paths with George Harrison a couple of times. Animal House parodies ain't got nothing on that! But then, as Harrison himself observes during his second appearance, "It's been done." It would be done again too. "Quartet" marked only the second occasion on which a Beatle had graced The Simpsons with their vocals, following Ringo Starr's appearance in "Brush With Greatness" of Season 2. Paul McCartney would later show up in "Lisa The Vegetarian" of Season 7, thus completing the surviving set (if John Lennon had lived to see the series, do you reckon they could have convinced him too?). What better way to cement the show's own status as a phenomenon for the ages than by having your legacy converge with that of another timeless phenomenon? Harrison's cameo is by and far the briefest and most frivolous of all the Beatles' guest appearances - whereas Starr and McCartney each enjoyed a prolonged interaction with one of the family and a meaningful impact on the resolution of their respective story, Harrison's role consists of popping up twice for a quick gag and immediately moving on. It's also more self-effacing than the other Beatles' appearances; Harrison receives none of the in-universe reverence afforded his bandmates, a great part of the joke being that no one even notices he's there (which is the very problem he faced as a Beatle, is is not?). It's a fitting summation of what's going on in the episode as a whole. The legend of The Beatles, those four Liverpool lads who became global sensations and changed the face of popular music forever, looms large over the events of "Quartet" but goes mostly unspoken. Outside of Harrison's appearances, the band is brought up explicitly only once, when Lisa asks if Homer's singing career was sunk because he screwed up like The Beatles and said his titular quartet was bigger than Jesus. (Objection! Only Lennon said that, not The Beatles as a collective, and while it triggered quite the backlash in the US at the time, it hardly brought about an end to the band. They hadn't even done Sgt Pepper's at that point.)
"Homer's Barbershop Quartet" opens with the family at a swap meet (or car boot sale, as we'd call it in the UK), where Bart and Lisa are perusing Comic Book Guy's stall and, after learning a little about the Rodent Invasion of the early 1960s, are surprised to dig out a record with Homer's face on the cover. Homer explains to them that, back in 1985, he was part of a barbershop quartet (alongside Skinner, Apu and Chief Wiggum) that used to perform regularly at Moe's. The group had a slow start, but eventually became a local sensation, at which point they were approached by a theatrical agent named Nigel who wanted to represent them, on the condition that they lose Wiggum, whom he considered "too Village People". On discovering Barney's hidden talent for singing, the group brought him in as a replacement and went on to record a hit record, "Baby on Board", under the name The Be Sharps. Alas, the taste of celebrity was sweet, but ultimately fleeting, and by the end of the summer the quartet had become an obscure footnote in music history. This is the story of their dramatic rise and fall.
We can technically count "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" as the fourth in the ongoing branch of "flashback episodes" that originated with "The Way We Was" of Season 2; doing so handily gives the branch a five-year streak that wasn't broken until Oakley and Weinstein took over as showrunners (one assumes that after "And Maggie Makes Three" they ran out of obvious subject matter). But "Quartet" would inevitably be the odd one out, in part because it's the only flashback episode, of that initial streak, that isn't focussed on the family. The other Simpsons are always somewhere at the back of Homer's mind throughout his rise to fame - there's a rather meagre subplot dealing with the mutual dissatisfaction that accompanies his being separated from his young family, but this has no discernible impact on how the episode ultimately resolves. But more glaring still is that is that the events of this particular flashback aren't events that conceivably fit with what we already know about the family. The other flashback episodes play out like the putting together of pieces in a puzzle, combining to give us the bigger story of the Simpsons' formation and how the family in its present state came to be. The questions they tackled were all very logical ones. How did Homer and Marge meet? How did they marry? What were the circumstances behind each of the children's births? How did Homer come to work at the nuclear power plant? When did the family move into Evergreen Terrace? "Quartet", by contrast, tells a story that is, by its own admission, a profoundly illogical thing to be retroactively working into the family's backstory this far into the series. Toward the end of the episode, Bart and Lisa (performing their intermittent duty as viewer substitutes) fire off a barrage of questions that directly attack the preposterousness of the tale their father has just related, the most insurmountable of which is, "How come we never heard about this until today?" Indeed. It would be one thing if a youthful Homer had been part of a music outfit that never went anywhere and left him a bit embarrassed as a thirtysomething. But for him to have been in a band that enjoyed chart success, toured Sweden, performed for the Statue of Liberty's centennial, won a Grammy, inspired a slew of tacky merchandise and still reunites for the occasional Dame Edna special...well, it surely wouldn't have taken this long to come up from an in-universe perspective? It's the kind of thing that should threaten to significantly rewire our perception of Homer as a character. Besides which, Santa's Little Helper is clearly glimpsed one of the flashbacks to 1985. The dog probably wasn't born until later in 80s, and he certainly didn't
live with the Simpsons at this point, so CONTINUITY TORPEDOED! (Mind
you, the dog in question is a different shade of brown to
Santa's Little Helper, so is it possible the Simpsons owned another
greyhound we'd also just never heard about? It would certainly be no more of a stretch than the mere existence of The Be Sharps.)
But then, The Be Sharps were not introduced with the intention that they have any serious ramifications for the series' world-building, as evidenced by how seldom they've been referenced in the seasons since. They were introduced purely so that The Simpsons could craft its own personalised love letter to The Beatles, and once we've accepted the distinctly self-contained nature of the story, its charms on that score are manifold. Writer Jeff Martin clearly had a great deal of passion for the Fab Four; that passion is palpable all throughout the script and certainly compensates for whatever conceptual quibbles we might have with the arrangement. If you know your Beatles history, then it's hard not to smile at some of the small ways in which the reality of the series is bent to accommodate the tribute - for example, Moe's Tavern was apparently known as "Moe's Cavern" in the summer of '85 - and the ways in which the quartet members act as embodiments of that history feels almost entirely natural and true to their characterisations. Wiggum is unambiguously the Pete Best of the equation, although none of the Be Sharps themselves serve as analogues for any one specific Beatle. Rather, they just recall bits and pieces of them wherever it fits. Barney starts out as Ringo, the newcomer, but ends up as John, with the Japanese conceptual artist girlfriend (about as on the nose as the allusions get, but at least it's consistent with what we'd later see in "A Star Is Burns", with Barney having an appreciation for the avant garde). Homer starts out as John, the de facto leader and the one who's already taken but encouraged to keep his marriage out of public knowledge, but by the end feels more like Paul (I love Macca, but I can totally hear that song about Mr T coming out of him). Apu being persuaded to adopt the pseudonym De Beaumarchais (on the grounds that Nahasapeemapetilon wouldn't fit on a marque, although De Beaumarchais isn't significantly shorter) likely alludes to "Ringo Starr" being the stage name of Richard Starkey. Skinner is tagged by the press as "the funny one", which was Ringo's designation back in the day (just as John was the smart one, Paul the cute one and George the quiet one). Various poses and fashion choices made by the band throughout directly echo the iconography of The Beatles - notably, a photo from the Let It Be recording sessions, which perfectly captured the divisions between the band members in its final days, here lovingly recreated right as the Be Sharps are nearing their breaking point. Most delectable of all, however, is the origin behind the band name "Be Sharps", chosen because it meets Skinner's requirement for "a name that's witty at first, but seems less funny each time you hear it". That's an accurate assessment of the pun in "Beatles", which is cute when you first notice it, but after a while you just forget is there.
What makes "Quartet" an interesting episode beyond the Beatles allusions is that it also represents a bit of bold experimentation in terms of broadening Homer's social connections. With the exception of Barney, with whom he was well-accustomed to palling around, the line-up of characters in The Be Sharps was a reasonably novel one. If a more contemporary Simpsons episode were to feature the premise of Homer forming a barbershop quartet, the remaining members would almost certainly be Moe, Lenny and Carl. All
three of those characters work their way into "Quartet", but at this point in the series
there seemed to be a general reluctance to use them much outside of
their designated habitats of bar and power plant. Instead, the episode digs a little deeper into the supporting cast, pooling Springfieldians from various all of life in an attempt to settle on some new mates for Homer, some of which stuck while others didn't. "Quartet"
seems to mark the turning point where Apu was depicted as one of Homer's close friends, and not simply the guy he'd interact with when he was out shopping for groceries, a move cemented later on in the season with "Homer and Apu". It seems far stranger to contemplate the possibility that the writers were toying with the idea of making Skinner a fixture of Homer's friendship circle, but there does appear to have been a genuine shift toward bringing those characters together during Season 5 - consider that he was included in Homer's vigilante group in "Homer The Vigilante", and they shared a hotel room while serving as jurors in "The Boy Who Knew Too Much". Skinner doesn't seem like the kind of guy who'd be in his element with Homer socially, but perhaps that was what made their combination so appealing. Skinner is the uptight straight guy who provides invaluable contrasts. When asked by a reporter if his aforementioned reputation as "the funny one" is justified, his deadpan, "Yes, yes it is," demonstrates why that's seriously no lie (it's also a bit strange how the reporter addresses him as "Principal Skinner", suggesting that his strict schoolmasterly persona has permeated his identity within the band too). The writers were onto something with the pairing, but I guess they just didn't know how to keep it going. As for Wiggum, while I don't feel there was such a conscious effort to make him one of Homer's friends in Season 5, it's worth noting that they would enjoy a more prolonged team-up in "Marge on The Lam".
Part of the underlying joke behind the Be Sharps is of course that barbershop is (as Bart points out) an old-fashioned music style associated predominantly with the turn of the century, and would have seemed really out of place within the popular music climate of the 1980s, despite Homer's insistence to the contrary ("Rock and roll had become stagnant. "Achy Breaky Heart" was seven years away. Something had to fill the void. And that something was Barbershop.") Still, our friend Bobby McFerrin had his own one-off chart success in 1988, so it wasn't as though there was no room for a cappella in the era of synthpop and New Romantics. And here's the secret ingredient that gives the episode that extra layer of conviction, for all its unlikelihoods - as a musical act, The Be Sharps are played more-or-less straight. Singing vocals were provided by then-current members of the Dapper Dans, the barbershop quartet that performs daily as part of Disneyland's Main Street Parade, and interlaced with those of Castellaneta, Azaria and Shearer, so they certainly have the mettle. "Baby on Board", the song Homer is inspired to pen after seeing Marge's latest purchase, a yellow warning sign designed to deter drivers from "intentionally ramming our car", has the benefit of sounding like an authentic a cappella standard and lampooning a contemporary obsession (much like Dexy's Midnight Runners, those "Baby on Board" signs stuck around for longer in the UK, but in the US I understand that their moment came and went in the mid-80s). Although maybe Homer was too quick to abandon that one about Geraldo and Al Capone's vault (somewhat anachronistically, given that the whole Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults fiasco wouldn't happen until April 1986).
"Quartet" is a delightful ride, although it has to be said that there's not a great deal to the story. You can tell, from the beginning, that the writers had difficulty stretching it to the full 22 minutes, because of what's going on with the couch gag; they mash three of them together, giving us something to the tune of a couch gag clip show. ("Cape Feare", its neighbouring episode, had the same problem, but used the more conventional solution of running the extra-long circus-themed variation). Conversely, it also feels like there are pieces missing from it; being one of the last episodes to emerge from Al Jean and Mike Reiss's turn as showrunners, it's got their trademark meandering structure, with not all of the narrative threads neatly combining. Did you notice, for example, that after a while the character of Nigel just disappears from the story altogether? He sets The Be Sharps up on the road to stardom and then apparently takes no interest while the group is disintegrating. It has crossed my mind that his absence might have been a deliberate choice, as an allusion to the death of Brian Epstein, but if we're meant to draw that conclusion it surely would have been helpful to have at least acknowledged him. There's also the matter of the Simpsons struggling while divided; a classic theme, but it doesn't really build to anything narrative-wise. The scene where Marge attempts to compensate for Homer's absence by constructing a dummy father for the young Bart and Lisa is a little unsettling and adds nothing (except for that timeline-muddling Santa's Little Helper appearance), but we do get a nice moment with Homer in his Hollywood hotel room, having a telephone conversation with baby Lisa about his Grammy success (Lisa, who at this stage can't be older than one, is already exhibiting precocious behaviours), before contemplating how much he's missing his family and how unfulfilling he's finding stardom. He's so disillusioned by that realisation that he attempts to give away the Grammy to a bellhop as a tip, only for the bellhop to reject it as not worth having. That joke at the Grammy's expense is as far as this particular thread goes - Homer's longing for his family doesn't come up at all in the third act, as much sense as it would have made to imply that his abilities as a songwriter waned because his heart wasn't in it - but I do like the moody, almost Hopper-esque tones that accompany his hotel-bound solitude. Meanwhile, there's an obvious parallel to be drawn between the raw deal Marge gets in the past and how direly underappreciated she still is in the present. In 1985, she's left alone with the kids and is purposely erased from Homer's public profile so that his teenybopper fans can retain their delusions of having a shot with him. In 1993, pay attention to what Marge is doing in the background of the framing narrative, and you'll see she's having yet another punishing time of it, forced to walk 12 miles when the family's car breaks down in the desert, and later receiving no help in changing the tire. Combine that with the sight gag in which Homer's parenting of toddler Bart consists of leaving him under a laundry basket in the basement, and the implicit message is that while Homer recognises that his real place is among the Simpsons clan, he can't help but take them for granted whenever he's with them.
Still, in the end the family becomes something of a red herring, to the point that they're given no payoff. The sequence where the quartet members, post-disbandment, are seen settling back into their regular lives is all padding, despite that hilarious bar order from our Yoko Ono parody, but does it strike you as strange that Homer's return to normality is all about him going back to the power plant (where he's implied to have killed Queenie the nuclear chicken...goddammit, Homer) and not reconnecting with the family for which he's been pining? The other Simpsons might be the gravitational pull that keeps Homer from feeling too at home in the world of celebrity, but they are not where the episode's real emotional grounding lies. Rather, the heart of the story lies with the friendships forged with his fellow Be Sharps during their moment of glory, and the feeling of nostalgic regret that ultimately emerges from Homer's recounting, as he looks back on those youthful ambitions that were never fully realised, and the good times that simply couldn't last. Whatever the underlying factor, The Be Sharps came to an end because their creative well ran dry, in spite of Barney's valiant attempts to take the barbershop genre to strange new places. The fateful moment that doomed them to obscurity came when Us Weekly declared them "Not" instead of "Hot". Here, it's possible to detect just a smidgen of the anxiety the series would explore in greater depth with "Bart Gets Famous", and which permeated much of Oakley and Weinstein's era - the idea that the Simpsons' own bubble might pop at any moment. Homer underscores the fickle nature of celebrity when he specifies that The Be Sharps' reign lasted for only five and a half weeks (which, mind you, seems a long time by today's standards). When Homer states that "what goes up must come down", only for Bart and Lisa to retort that Dean Martin, Tom Jones and Frank Sinatra were still going strong, it's hard to say if they're meant to represent the doggedly expectant fans or the defiant staff insisting that they'll keep going regardless. I don't believe such anxieties to be the real point of the episode, however. "Quartet" seems to me to be about something far less cynical than the idea that anything that reaches the top is destined for a sharp and brutal decline. As noted, it is an achingly sincere ode to the Beatles and the numerous lives their music touched. And it's just as sincere about the "what if" question that becomes particularly poignent as it nears its conclusion, when Homer feels compelled to get in touch with his fellow Be Sharps. What if it didn't have to end when it did? What if we could have made this last longer? What else could we have accomplished together? If we tried again, would anybody still care?
The thing I quibbled over earlier on this review, about how this isn't a backstory that logically fits with the the series, actually ends up working to its advantage. Hearing the story of The Be Sharps is akin to brushing up against an alternate reality, in which Homer gets to contemplate another road he might have pursued in life. It's a road he knows was never really for him, but he remains haunted by the suggestion that there was always something there of value, even if he couldn't get close to it for long. He's able to revisit that road, if only for a moment, by reigniting his connection with the friends with whom he once shared that common ambition. The episode ends with Homer meeting with the other Be Sharps on the rooftop of Moe's, where they give an impromptu performance of "Baby on Board" to the streets below, an obvious homage to The Beatles' rooftop concert of 30th January 1969, aka the band's final public performance. Crowds gather to watch, enraptured by what they're seeing. It's also hinted that Wiggum, who had to contend with being a media punching bag during The Be Sharps' success, might get his belated revenge, as he orders Lou to "Get the tear gas" (a nod to how the police intervened in The Beatles' own rooftop concert). Homer signs off by quoting Lennon: "I'd like to thank you on behalf of
the group, and I hope we passed the audition." Barney laughs
uproariously, then admits he doesn't get it - speaking, I suppose, for every audience member who was either too young or simply too unhip to know just what this episode was getting at.
The ending of "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" is a touching one on multiple levels. There is something immensely magical about the prospect of getting to go back and re-experience some bygone excitement from a time in our lives when things seemed so alive with possibilities. About giving something that seemed long-lost one final, unexpected breath of life. There's the faintest hint of knowing absurdity blended in with the wistful melancholy that accompanies The Be Sharps' reunion - within the show's internal universe, their turn in the spotlight didn't happen so long ago, and it's not as though Homer doesn't interact with two of the other members on a regular basis anyway. But then they're standing in for something far greater outside of the show's reality, that being our continuing cultural connection with The Beatles, a phenomenon that seems at once so tied up in a distant age and yet still so prevalent and perceptible in the present. In 1993, the possibility of The Beatles reuniting in this manner was long off the cards, for obvious reasons; we weren't then even 20 years removed from the band's official break-up, and already they represented something lost and irrecoverable. But their legacy refused to fade, both among the people who'd witnessed their rise to the top as it happened, and among the generations that had come along since, the Simpsons tribute being yet another step in that ongoing proliferation. "Quartet" is a heartfelt attempt, however quixotic, to recreate just a smidgeon of that Beatles magic by having Homer and co follow in their footsteps. The Simpsons might be the masters of deconstructing popular culture from all across the board, but I'm not sure how many other examples send out so sincere a statement of "We heard you. You mattered to us. Here's our little part in keeping your flame alive."
We'll end this review with a quote from Kurt Vonnegut: "I say in speech that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'." True, and I'd like to think that Matt Groening and his crew achieved a bit of that too.
(PS: Looking at the episode's Wikipedia article, I can't help but notice that the current summary seems to grossly exaggerate the role that Barney's Japanese conceptual artist girlfriend plays in The Be Sharps' dissolution. Funny that.)
As we've established, New Zealand's intersections were dangerous places to hang in the 2000s, and this campaign - quite possibly the most inspired of all NZ intersection campaigns - offered a really creative means of illustrating that point. "Wheel of Misfortune" was created in 2008 by agency Clemenger BBDO Wellington for Land Transport New Zealand (who'd inherited LTSA's mantle in 2004), and arguably represents the absolute peak of LTNZ's output. I'd go a step further and say that it represents peak road campaigning, period. When it comes to public information films (or whatever the equivalent international term would be), "Wheel of Misfortune" is one of the all-time greats. Top 10 material, definitely. Maybe even a contender for the Top 5. All of the right ingredients are there - an ingeniously novel set-up, spine-chilling atmosphere, beautifully crafted tension, flickers of grim humor and the kind of indelibly grisly climax that makes any PIF buff weak at the knees. What's more, it has a villain who could give the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water a run for its money. Here, the face of crossroads carnage is actor David Austin, playing a wordless, other-wordly carny who occupies the focal intersection and beckons drivers with the ultimate challenge - the opportunity to Risk It All, Risk It Here. Getting across without giving way is envisioned as a twisted carnival game, straight out of your darkest, most nutmeg-addled nightmares.
The premise of "Wheel of Misfortune" has it that whenever a driver navigating the intersection fails to give way, the other-worldly carny spins the titular big six wheel, determining their fate from five possible outcomes - Near Miss, Minor Crash, Major Crash, Death and an ultra-slim chance of Miracle. The original campaign installment followed a "rule of three" structure, teasing us with the evil possibilities while reserving the most brutal developments for last. The ad was broken up into three different segments, opening with a driver who, laughing with her passenger and presumably not paying adequate attention to the road, pulls out in front of a red van and gets a Near Miss on the wheel. A collision is averted, although the driver of the red van angrily sounds their horn, indicating their mistake. The second segment shows a driver making more sensible choices and crossing the intersection without prompting the carnie to spin the wheel (just as well, as I think he had a kid in the back). The final segment opens with a driver (who I've always thought looks a bit like Peter Gabriel) giving way and making it across the intersection safely, but has a second driver in a grey sedan attempt to cut across right after, throwing themselves directly into the path of a black sedan, and into the wheel's climactic wrath. And here's where the fun part begins - there are multiple versions of the ad, revealing the various possible repercussions for the hapless drivers based on what comes up on the wheel. It is, notably, always the same two vehicles involved in all instances (with a third unhappy vehicle getting dragged into the action in one variation), indicating that we are exploring the alternate consequences of the grey sedan driver's single rash decision, and not different outcomes for other drivers who prompt a wheel-spinning on different days. This is the Sliding Doors of road campaigns. Or Run Lola Run, since there are three possibilities shown.
The first of these variations, the "Death" ending, might be considered our default version, as it contains the most obvious narrative from a cautionary standpoint. We already got our tantalising glimpse of potential catastrophe with the opening segment; surely now it's time for them to hold nothing back and to reveal what absolute disasters we could potentially bring on ourselves. Here, the black sedan duly slams into the grey sedan (and its occupant) with full force, causing the vehicle to crunch and leaving an ominous trail of shattered glass in its wake. The action is intercut with the spinning wheel, and the eyes of the carny as he keenly awaits the results. For a moment, the final outcome seems uncertain, with the pointer resting on the final spoke between Major Crash and Death, but it gets that last little burst of momentum to flip over into the latter, sealing the grey sedan driver's terrible fate. Naturally, this is the very worst thing we see happen to the grey sedan, but it's not the only thing.
Another variation, the "Near Miss" ending, was a real unicorn. I'd seen someone describe it on an internet forum soon after the campaign started airing in New Zealand, stating that there was one version in which the grey vehicle narrowly cleared the black vehicle, only to get a police car on their tail. But I could never find this one on YouTube, and my hunt proved so fruitless that I started to doubt that it even existed. After all, they'd already demonstrated the "Near Miss" outcome with the first segment (albeit without the police getting involved), so wouldn't it be redundant to show it again at the end? Would it not reinforce the very misconception the campaign seemed designed to downplay, that it wasn't a big deal if you failed to give way, since your odds of being involved in a collision were low compared to your chances of getting across safely? I wondered if perhaps the author had misremembered the "Near Miss" variation, by conflating details from the opening segment with a legitimate ending. But no, I can confirm that it does exist, having eventually been signposted to an upload on Vimeo. Seeing the grey vehicle miss the black by the skin of its teeth, having scoured the net for it for so long, and knowing the other versions inside out, was frankly surreal. I can also confirm that it makes more sense in context as a variation, as the Near Miss in this case is a hell of a lot nearer than that in the opening segment, as signified by the pointer once again getting caught between two possible outcomes, Near Miss and Death. In this version, the pointer doesn't quite have the momentum to flip over, staying in Near Miss and averting the collision. It's nevertheless hair-raising to complete just how razor thin a line had divided the more desirable outcome from complete disaster. The "Near Miss" ending makes a point that was implicit in the opening segment (the first time the wheel is spun, you might notice that Death fell immediately after Near Miss, and that's certainly sobering) but not given quite so brutal an emphasis (since the first driver still lands safely in Near Miss). When you fail to give way on an intersection, not only are you playing a foolish game of chance, but the factors that separate one extreme from the other (whether you get out unscathed or get completely pulverised) could be totally miniscule. On top of that, the police indeed show up, indicating that the grey sedan driver will face consequences in the form of a fine. He's not getting to wherever he was headed any sooner.
The third and final variation is "Miracle", and this one basically feels like it's there for a bit of comic levity. This time around, the grey sedan's gambit causes the black sedan and a third vehicle approaching from the opposite direction to swerve in a desperate attempt to avoid collision, and somehow or other, it works. All three vehicles come to a safe standstill without making contact. Gentle choir music plays in order to hammer home the point that this is nothing short of miraculous. Clearly "Miracle" is intended to the jackpot outcome. It only occurs
once on the wheel and takes up less space than the others, so the odds
of landing on it are significantly smaller than the others. In practice, though, I'm not sure what makes
"Miracle" any more of a jackpot than "Near Miss". Nobody gets hurt in either result, no damage is dealt to the vehicles, and both presumably entail heapings of stress for the people involved. Muting the cute music and looking at what
actually happens in the "Miracle" ending, if I had been in one of those
vehicles, I think I'd have found the experience considerably more traumatic than if I'd been in one of the vehicles in the opening segment. It may just be that "Miracle" falls between "Death" and "Major
Crash", the two worst outcomes, so it represents your slim chance to get
out of an extremely fucked situation. But there are evidently no winners in this game, just needless risks and varying extremes of punishment. (Some of which spilled over into the behind-the-scenes arena, with a stunt driver requiring hospital treatment during the filming of one of the endings, presumably the Death one.)
The outcomes of Minor Crash and Major Crash were not represented in the television ads, but did receive their own print ads.
At the time, I recall seeing a handful of online voices who claimed that the concept was flawed, since it implied that whether or not you get into an accident is all a matter of chance and had nothing to do with the driver's diligence. I can only assume that those viewers weren't paying close attention, because the ad makes it clear that the carny does not spin the wheel for drivers who don't make bad decisions. That is the whole purpose of the middle segment, where nothing happens, and that's a good thing. That the carny readies the wheel suggests that the second driver was at least tempted to cut across, but managed to resist, and is rewarded by getting to sit out the game. And he doesn't even ready the wheel for Peter Gabriel. We can think of his philosophy as being somewhat akin to that of the Mystery Man in Lost Highway, and how it was not his custom to go where he was not invited. By the same token, the carny does not subject anybody to the game who did not take him up on his offer in the first place, however unwittingly. He lets people make their own decisions, and if they choose wrong lets fate make the decisions from there. What makes Austin's performance especially chilling is the air of total impassiveness with which he imbues the character. Compared to the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, there's nothing to suggest that he derives any kind of sadistic relish from being a force of reckoning for these foolish and unwary drivers, but he goes about it with a steely, unflinching sense of duty that's every bit as ghoulish.
In a campaign brimming with disturbing touches, it might be difficult to isolate the most disturbing, but here's a bit of gratuitous horror that always stands out to me - at the end of the ad, no matter what the variation, we'll get a final shot of the carny and his wheel in motion, signifying the interminable nature of the game, accompanied by a discernible, disembodied whispering. What the whispering is saying isn't fully intelligible, but you can definitely pick out a "Yeah, that wasn't worth it..." at the start. What's more, we hear that same disembodied whispering at the beginning of the third segment, as the ill-fated grey sedan pulls into view and the carny waits for Peter Gabriel to pass. Spooky, no question. But whose disembodied whispering is it? Arguably, it's the carny's internal monologue, which would align with it being juxtaposed with him, but that would imply a degree of emotional investment in the lives of these passing motorists that I don't think he makes. Presumably it's not the ghost of the grey sedan driver because a) we hear it in all versions of the ad, not just the one where he gets Death and b) we hear it prior to him making his stupid decision. It might be that it has no deeper narrative significance, and was incorporated as an extra bit of atmosphere to accentuate the viewers' goosebumps. I've got another theory, though, and it alludes to yet another layer of implicit horror that you might pick up on if you study the details closely. At the start of the ad, the pointer is already positioned on Death. Once the carny has had his first opportunity to spin the wheel and it's landed on Near Miss, we can see that it remains in that position at the start of both succeeding segments, until he has the chance to spin it again. If we read between the lines, then the implication is that the last unlucky sod to play the game before the events depicted in the ad had landed on Death. So I'd suggest it might be their ghost we're hearing, urging the other motorists not to make the same mistake. Maybe even multiple ghosts, all resigned to the same locale to collectively rue the one reckless blunder that cost them everything. I think the implication is definitely that the intersection is haunted, in one sense or another, a monument to the accumulated mistakes made by various individuals in the heat of the moment, the grim consequences of which are now echoing across eternity.
Despite the brilliance of the campaign, coupled with the morbid elegance of Austin's performance, the carny would not go on to have a long-running presence on New Zealand television (I don't know if the disestablishment of LTNZ in mid-2008 had anything to do with that). He appeared in just one further ad, in which he was shown to be stalking the same individual across various different intersections on different days, the omnipresent spectre of what could potentially go wrong, waiting for this patently conscientious driver to make the single slip-up for which he could be punished dearly. This ad did not have multiple endings, although there were different edits, the longer of which resulted in another driver who did not follow the protagonist's shining example, necessitating a spin of the wheel, although the ad cut away without showing us how they fared. That was the final curtain for the Kiwi intersection carny, yet he's never quite gone away. His face, his wheel, his eerie fairground leitmotif...it all still haunts me. There are days when I think I can just make out his silhouette from the corner of my eye, lingering on the roadside and anticipating every possible opening for calamity. Public information legends never retire, they merely enjoy an extended encore in the psyches of their viewers.
Even at a relatively brief 12 minutes, Bob's Birthday, the 1993 animation from British-Canadian husband and wife team Alison Snowden and David Fine, is a slow burn. The short, a co-production from Channel 4 and the National Film Board of Canada, centres on Bob Fish (Andy Hamilton), a neurotic dentist turning 40, and the efforts of his forbearing wife Margaret (Snowden) to throw him a surprise party, under the pretence that they'll be dining out at an Indian restaurant come the evening. Bob, though, isn't feeling the occasion and is in the midst of a mid-life crisis. The narrative highlight is when, having arrived at the house with no inkling of Margaret's actual intentions, he proceeds to strut into the living room with his genitalia on full display, and to fire off a string of damning remarks about the friends and associates who, unbeknownst to him, are hiding behind the furniture. But that doesn't occur until seven minutes in. Before then, we get an extensive build-up in which Margaret's innocent party preparations are contrasted, uneasily, with Bob's drab day at the dental surgery, and his wandering eye for his young and oblivious secretary, Penny. Bob is not a particularly sympathetic character. Much of his malaise about the onset of middle age seems to revolve around his cold dissatisfaction with his life with Margaret, all while we're seeing the evidence of Margaret's sweetness and devotion to Bob in plain sight. There is, though, something achingly human about his prosaic predicament. Snowden and Fine's short was to resonate with audiences, winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 1995, and later inspiring a spin-off series, Bob and Margaret, which rain from 1998 to 2001.
Bob's Birthday is a poignant, particularly sour-toned trouble in paradise tale with a sprinkling of strange and grotesque touches - right from the very first scene, in which a severed foot visible upon the kitchen floor is quickly revealed to be a squeaky dog toy. Bob, who has dedicated his career to the preservation of oral hygiene, lives in a world that is markedly unhygienic, with all kinds of uncomfortable realities simmering below its proverbial gum-line. The aphid infestation that is slowly devouring the plants in the dental surgery is a visual indicator of the emotional ugliness of which Bob, until his climactic blow-up, prefers not to talk, as is the ornamental doll gifted to him by a patient, revealed to be a kitschy toilet roll holder, and the criminal activity happening both on the street outside Bob and Margaret's abode (Margaret doesn't seem to notice the thief who casually breaks a car window and makes off with its radio) and within their living room (one of their guests pockets the spare change she fishes out from behind the sofa cushion). The surgery's aphid problem also juxtaposes comically with the script's various allusions to gardens as symbols of vitality. Bob listens to a radio announcer (voiced by Harry Enfield, and sounding distinctly like a more sedate Dave Nice), who introduces a discussion on middle age with a clunky metaphor about seasons in the gardening calendar. The greenery with which Bob has surrounded himself (the reflections of his own metaphorical garden), is ailing, potted and confined to a coldly clinical environment in which they have little hope of thriving. In his longing for Penny, Bob recites Thomas Campion's Renaissance love song, "There is a Garden In Her Face", while Penny is shown tending to one of the infested plants; the plant's continued degradation in her care (by the final shot in the dental surgery, we see that it only has one leaf remaining) a sure sign that his yearning is unlikely to heal his inner turmoil. His work offers him no solace. One patient merely feeds his existential fears, by citing an American
study claiming that dentists have a particularly high rate of suicide.
Another, despite her tasteless choice of birthday present, seems more
benevolent in her musings. Her suggestion that 40 should be seen as a
new beginning, with one having had ample opportunity to learn from the
foolishness of their youth, is swiftly undermined by Bob's immediate instinct, on
arriving home, to engage in a whole new bout of foolishness, behind what
he naively believes to be closed doors.
Bob's Birthday offers a humorous look at the existential despairs associated with ageing (Snowden and Fine were themselves closer to 30 when they made the film, and apparently already feeling the pinch of their impending middle age), but its sharpest insights are in the moments which create a broader portrait of loneliness, accentuating the mutual solitude of both Bob and Margaret, and the obvious disconnect that has crept into their marriage. The futility of Margaret's party preparations is echoed in the adjacent tussle
between the couple's two dogs (whom, it later appears to occur to Bob, were taken in as substitutes for having children) for a
football, which leaves both parties locked in a stalemate for the duration of the short. Bob's professed desire to have children with Margaret seems at odds with his interest in an extra-marital affair, reading less like an attempt to reaffirm their union than a further, desperate expression of his fear of ending up alone. Bob is so overwhelmed by the prospect of oblivion in his future that he's unable to recognise the care he is evidently receiving from Margaret in the present, and his own failure to return it. His disparagement of his wife, and his unwitting sabotage of the party she'd planned, amount to a cruel rejection of that care, pushing Margaret into a more subdued existential crisis, in which she contemplates her own ageing, vulnerable form and the lack of love in her life (can she count on Bob to take care of her?). Her predisposition to always nurture the pathetic Bob nevertheless seems to transcend the emotional bruising she endures; she eventually returns downstairs and tenderly hands him a pair of trousers, which Bob obligingly receives.
Bob's journey can be seen as following the familiar trajectory of the five stages of grief. The earlier scenes in the dental surgery are all about denial. His silent desiring of Penny, who's never hinted to reciprocate his interests, amounts to a hollow attempt at escapism from his middle-aged discontent, while his sterile interactions with his patients offer him little recourse for an emotional outlet. When Bob gets home, his anger suddenly becomes manifest in the gruesome outburst in which, in an act of overcompensation for his own roving fancies, he coldly advises Margaret to find herself a new partner. He denounces all of their friends as boring, before sinking into a mournful rumination about how the only people they ever cared for, Ted and Elaine, have since deserted them for Australia (his evident attraction to Elaine indicates that Penny wasn't the first occasion in which he's contemplated infidelity to Margaret). He reaches his bargaining stage when he searches for an answer to his problem. Should he and Margaret have children? Would he be more attractive if he exercised more or went on a diet? Finally, he embraces Margaret and appears to have achieved acceptance. Suddenly he seems very upbeat and optimistic about the restaurant dinner he believes is awaiting them, insisting that he's been looking forward to it all day, despite his earlier reservations that curry was too spicy for his palate.
This takes us into the short's ambivalent ending, in which Bob goes out to start the car, and Margaret takes the birthday cake she'd prepared earlier and follows him, abandoning the thwarted party and leaving her friends in the darkness. Meanwhile, Bob proclaims his newfound acceptance of middle age by reciting the final lines of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Poets" ("Not in the clamor of the crowded street, Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, But in ourselves are triumph and defeat"), and is seen to unlock the car door for Margaret, freeing the way for her to join him in wherever life will take him next. We might question why Margaret chooses to ignore the party guests at the end. Is she too embarrassed to face them? Is this some futile attempt to sweep those pervasive uncomfortable realities back under the rug, by pretending they were never there? Or does it represent her own rejection of the social connections that, as per Bob's accusations, Margaret despises as much as he does? (The rather emphatic slamming of the door might imply the latter). Either way, it is obviously a bit fanciful to suppose that they won't have to face the music sooner or later. They're going to have to come back home eventually (for one thing, their dogs are there) and, whether or not the guests will be waiting or will have found their own way out, this is the world they'll still have to live in. Perhaps we feel a mite bad for the guests, with whom we don't really spend enough time to assess if they are as bad as Bob claims. For the most part their transgressions seem to be quite low-key. We've got the penny-pincher who pockets coins from behind the sofa, and another who spills a drink on the carpet despite Margaret's request that they leave it unstained. Bob repeats some rumor he's heard about one guest, Barbara, who is a "wild card" behind the back of her husband Brian. Otherwise, their biggest sin, according to Bob, is simply being dull. He could be right - as we first enter the party, some of the guests are having a rather vapid conversation about basil and mozzarella. All the same, we're not given enough information to see their friends as the real problem. Bob is plainly his own worst enemy (something his citation of Wadsworth Longfellow appears to acknowledge), but by embracing Margaret (physically and emotionally) he seems to find his way toward redemption. Margaret, meanwhile, throws her lot in with Bob, concession that, in the end, all they fundamentally have is one another.
There is, though, another problem. Bob remarks how prudent it was that they booked their restaurant table in advance, as being a Friday night, they can expect it to be busy. But of course Margaret hasn't. She never intended to go to the restaurant, which was just a decoy to disguise her actual intentions. They're going to have to take their chances. Maybe they'll get lucky and get a table anyway, maybe they'll have to drive around all night looking for a place that can take them (in which case Margaret is going to have to admit to Bob that she lied about making the booking). What lies behind them is a lot of awkwardness and angst that's bound to rear its head again somewhere down the line. What lies ahead of them, tonight and on every night to follow, is uncertain. By the end, Bob and Margaret have each resigned themselves to that particular fate.
