TAC's Christmas campaigning didn't yield quite the degree of instant classics as elsewhere in the year (which, to be clear, is not just my personal aversion to "The 12 Days of Christmas" speaking - this 1999 study by the Monash University Accident Research Centre found that their Crimbo selection generally left a softer impression on subjects), but I am willing to bat for "Lennon's Christmas" as an underchampioned example of their seasonal output. Haunting the Victorian airwaves throughout the Christmas of 1996, the 60 second ad was in many respects a return to roots for TAC, pivoting on a similar scenario to their 1989 premier film "Girlfriend". We find ourselves back in a hospital emergency ward, cutting between various parties in the aftermath of what looks to be multiple drink driving related-accidents, as paramedics endeavour to save mangled victims, and relatives and perpetrators alike linger in the waiting zone, anxious for an outcome. As with "Girlfriend", we get a string of queasy close-ups showing whimpering patients undergoing harrowing medical procedures, professionals looking on glumly and shattered spirits taking their vitriol out on one another. There are shades of "Beach Road", with a remorseful driver learning that their lapse in judgement has brought tragic consequences for the innocent they smashed into while their presumed partner angrily berates them ("I said I'd get a frigging taxi!"). Also reminiscent of those earlier ads is how it bucks TAC's more recent trend of showing us the accidents, preferring to centre on the eye-view of the hospital staff and how they're tasked with having to mop up (perhaps literally) the unspeakable horrors that entail in the aftermath. It is, however, quite a bit more viscerally nasty than either "Girlfriend" or "Beach Road". There are more graphic PIFs out there, but "Lennon's Christmas" incorporates a higher proportion of squalid injury detail than your typical TAC piece - among its skin-crawling showcase are a kid getting wheeled down a corridor with bleeding around his crotch, a man staggering about spluttering up internal fluid, and an ominously large puddle of blood getting wiped from a surgery floor. The emphasis is still squarely on the emotional fall-out, but there is a notable effort to make us feel physically sickened into the bargain, and a little more ill at ease with our highly pulpable forms.
The detail that most obviously differentiates it from the candidness of those earlier TAC installments, injecting the old school formula with a shot of the sardonicism evident in the same year's "Bush Telegraph", is that commentary on the dismal action is provided not by an onscreen professional but by a disembodied child's voice performing a mournful a cappella version of the 1971 holiday classic "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" by the Plastic Ono Band and the Harlem Community Choir. (So far as I can tell, the John Lennon connection is the only significance behind the ad's title; it's not that any of the characters are also named Lennon or anything.) Originally written as a protest against the war in Vietnam, with its pivotal lyrics lifted directly from a billboard campaign John and Yoko had circulated a couple of years prior, the song has here been repurposed to protest the senseless carnage happening just metres from your doorstep in the name of Yuletide jollies, again evoking the responsibilities of the public in procuring peace. The lyrics that explicitly reference the war have been carefully omitted, with the focus being shifted to the opening verse in a way that brings out its accusatory undertones ("And what have you done?") and adds a bitterly ironic twist to its more optimistic sentiments ("I hope you have fun" is juxtaposed with the shot of a man vomiting). Children's voice-overs, while an effective shorthand for vulnerability and broken innocence, can also be a recipe for maudlin - I have rated "Classroom" as the Drinking and Drinking Wrecks Lives PIF that most leans into mawkishness. What saves it here is the same thing that ultimately saved "Classroom", where we had that one child who spoke about the driver who'd been down the boozer with a distinct jadedness suggesting that he was no stranger to adult screw-ups. By the same token, the girl in "Lennon's Christmas" delivers her damning recital with no so much teary-eyed horror, but weary disappointment at the interminable stupidity of the adult set. Her glimpse into the bleaker underbelly of the festive hedonism does not seem to outrage and appal her so much as bring her to a place of deflated acceptance, her final "So this is Christmas" being delivered in a tone not altogether dissimilar to that of a child who's just learned definitively that there is no Santa but who had a strong inkling all along.
The ad's emotional punch rests heavily on the performance of the child, for if "Lennon's Christmas" has a shortcoming, it's that the fragmented narratives do not themselves deliver quite the same impact as the more focussed action in "Girlfriend" and "Beach Road", which detailed the outcome of a single accident with blunt and terrible consequences. Here, the narrative is less coherent, with it being difficult to keep track of which people are connected to which incident. We see enough fleeting glimpses to know that various tragedies are unfolding - the ad opens with a pregnant woman sitting alone in the waiting area, who is later seen crying, "He can't be dead!", when confronted by hospital staff, while that driver who insists that he wasn't intoxicated is informed that the passenger from the other vehicle has died - but the strategy is clearly to immerse us more in the chaos of the ongoing Christmas calamities, rather than to drown us in the intensity of any single one. Just as the full horror of one character's predicament is unfolding, we find ourselves whisked away to another tribulation in a different part of the ward; we don't stay with any of them for long enough to make much of an investment. Where the ad proves most effective is not in the outpouring of unbridled emotion endemic to so many TAC campaigns, but in its moments of chilling silence, as it captures not simply the grief of those involved but also the overwhelming loneliness, and where the narrative details are left to fester below the surface. There is a quiet, persisting despair in the shots of people sleeping in otherwise deserted waiting rooms, sitting beside unconscious loved ones, and in the grim formalities with which a body is finally carted away, covered up and indiscernible as an individual, as all lingering traces of their being are obliterated from the venue following an unsuccessful attempt to save their life. Perhaps the bleakest implication of all is that this is just business as usual at Christmastime, even if it doesn't get any less challenging for the medics who have to deal with it. The lyrics of Lennon's song warn us that with "Another year over, a new one's just begun." We could have put a stop to the bloodshed, but it's a cycle we've doomed ourselves to repeat.