Content warning: Suicide
The Christmas of 1994 was a Christmas quite unlike any other, all on account of what was happening at Victor Meldrew's house that year.
One Foot In The Grave was then riding high among the cream of the contemporary Britcom crop. The previous year's special, "One Foot In The Algarve", had been a major ratings success, and you can bet that the BBC were eager to maintain that momentum with another festive special in 1994. Series creator and writer David Renwick didn't have time to devise a stand-alone special from scratch, but suggested that one of the scripts he'd been working on for the upcoming Series 5 could potentially be expanded to 40 minutes. The episode in question was "The Man Who Blew Away". Legions of Meldrew devotees tuned in to BBC One at 21:00 on 25th December, eager for another extended round of wacky hilarity with the irascible sixtysomething, and by 21:40 were sitting there in stunned silence, struggling to wrap their heads around what they had seen and keep a day's worth of Yuletide dining down. The episode garnered immediate notoriety, guaranteed to come up in conversations to the tune of "Can you believe THAT went out on Christmas Day?" for years to come.
If you are unfamiliar with this episode, then I fear that the content warning at the top of this page might have given the game away. The plot involves Victor and Margaret accommodating a house guest with suicidal tendencies, and having to talk him out of his latest attempt, which
involves him climbing around naked upon their roof. Then in the epilogue they receive news that he made a subsequent attempt soon after leaving their company and on this occasion he succeeded. The episode promptly ends. Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!
In fairness, One Foot In The Grave had dabbled in some gloomy subjects in previous Christmas specials. "Who's Listening?" from 1990 contained a subplot dealing with the Yuletide struggles of a bereaved young family (albeit one that ended happily, by way of a deus ex machina). Pippa's pregnancy arc in "The Man in The Long Black Coat" from 1991 ended on a note of immense pathos, with her being injured in a bus crash and suffering a miscarriage. The thing is, neither of those specials had aired on Christmas Day itself. There was traditionally a safe enough buffer between the peak of the festive celebrations and Renwick's morbid indulgences. Even the ambitious, feature-length (and relatively breezy) "Algarve" had to make do with a Boxing Day slot. "The Man Who Blew Away" was the first One Foot In The Grave special to have the honor of going out on 25th December, and it yielded what has to be one of the show's most unapologetically downbeat endings ever (bested only by the final episode, "Things Aren't Simple Any More", which at least had mercy enough to sign off to the triumphant sounds of The Travelling Wilburys). It all makes a little more sense when you consider that it wasn't originally written to be a Christmas installment, but at the same time, there was something incredibly on brand about the series using that prime Yuletide slot to leave the nation not merely depressed, but seriously perturbed into the bargain. The ending to "The Man Who Blew Away" isn't only tragic, it's also deeply unsettling. A large part of that has to do with the song that accompanies the closing credits, "The Laughing Policeman" by Charles Penrose, a classic music hall song from 1922 (itself an adaptation of "The Laughing Song", recorded by African American singer George W. Johnson in 1890). The song had shown up at an earlier junction in the story, where it was nothing more than an insomnia-inflicting irritation to Victor and Margaret, but it acquires much darker overtones when it's repeated in the outro. Renwick remarks on the DVD commentary that he's always thought there to be something terribly "macabre" about the song - not because of the hysterical, borderline-crazed laughter that makes up the chorus, but because of the clicking noises going on in the background, which he reckons are evocative of something you'd find in the horror comedy series The League of Gentlemen.
The irony is that I vividly remember watching the episode's festive premiere as a child and not finding the experience anywhere near as dark or disturbing as I should have done, on account of "The Laughing Policeman". I should explain that my school's Christmas show for that year had been themed around music hall, and "The Laughing Policeman" was one of the songs we'd performed. A really fun song to perform it was too. So when it cropped up in this episode, I was positively buzzing. It was something that I knew, and the excitement of that performance was still very fresh on my mind, so naturally I gravitated straight to it. When we heard the news at the end that Victor and Margaret's friend had died, I did think it was a weirdly sad way to cap off the episode. But then "The Laughing Policeman" started up again in the credits and it cheered me right up. It was only when I revisited the episode in the early 00s that it hit me what the real intention had been. You weren't supposed to laugh at the Laughing Policeman. The Laughing Policeman laughs at you. "The Man Who Blew Away" feels, more savagely than any other edition of One Foot In The Grave, like a story where the last laugh is squarely on the viewer. Which makes it all the more ballsy that it went out on Christmas Day.
The circumstances of the episode's airing is a detail that will forever colour it, giving it a greater infamy than it would have acquired had it aired according to Renwick's original plans. But looking at "The Man Who Blew Away" thirty-one years after the fact, it holds up as more than just a twisted joke that rattled some 15 million people on the Christmas of 1994. The thing that always made it worthy of that coveted Xmas slot is that it stands out as one of the very strongest installments of One Foot In The Grave. A lot of that is down to the doomed character, Mr Foskett, and how wonderfully portrayed he is by Brian Murphy. He is one of the most hauntingly complicated figures ever to grace the series, at once ridiculous and tragic. Creating a character who is both soul-crushingly tedious and uproariously hilarious can be a challenge enough in itself, but Murphy pulls it off effortlessly, all while imbuing Foskett with a multi-layered pathos that has us running the whole gamut of emotions. On the one hand, we empathise fully with the Meldrews in finding the man unbearable and in wanting to give him as wide a berth as possible. On the surface his behaviour is beyond infuriating. He shows up on their doorstep and expects to be immediately accommodated, then talks at mind-numbing length about every nondescript detail in his own life, never letting anybody else get a word in edgeways. At the same time, we become increasingly aware that Foskett's rabid neediness stems from forlorn desperation; that this is a deeply damaged man teetering on the edge, and his various imposing tendencies amount to cries for help that the Meldrews are ill-equipped to provide. We become uneasy about where this story might be headed, and rightly so. We're still able to get in plenty of laughs at Foskett's expense, but this is all turned back on us in the final scene, when we are implicated, along with the Meldrews, as part of the wider unsympathetic milieu that consigned this poor fellow to oblivion.
Mr Foskett is the narrative centrepiece of "The Man Who Blew Away", but the funny thing is that he doesn't appear until 22 minutes in. That's over midway through the episode. What's more, his arrival comes completely out of the blue, making it every bit as jarring for the viewer as for the Meldrews. There hadn't been so much as a throwaway mention of the character in any of the preceding scenes, so when Victor receives a telephone call and hears Foskett on the other end, we have no context for who he even is, other than that the mere sound of his voice is enough to make Victor jolt upwards in terror. His being there represents an intrusion from a terrible chapter in the Meldrews' past they had considered long buried; it's revealed to be such an absurdly minor chapter at that, but one that's left deep psychological scars on them both. Foskett was a fellow guest at a boarding house the Meldrews had stayed at during a trip to Weston-super-Mare seventeen years ago, and the bulk of their interactions came from him having to walk through their bedroom every night to access the bathroom. Obviously he talked their ears off then, and demanded their contact details so that they could keep in touch when their holidays were over. The Meldrews gave him a false address and hoped that would be the end of it. Foskett has tracked them down anyway. He might not manage this until the latter end of the story, but what's clever about that first half is that you can look back and identity how it's been building toward his appearance through its artful use of foreshadowing. The opening sequence has Margaret returning home to find that Victor has neglected to bring in the washing, and their clothes have blown all over the snow-covered garden. Among them are a pair of socks frozen into the shape of a boomerang. "I'd throw these socks away," Margaret grumbles, "Except they'd probably keep coming back."
On the commentary, Renwick states that one of the modifications made to his original script was the inclusion of snow in the outdoor scenes, to give the impression of a festive setting. Even so, "The Man Who Blew Away" does not actually appear to take place at Christmastime (which was not at all unfitting, since "Who's Listening?" was the only OFITG Christmas special that did - the specials were more an opportunity to tell stories on a grander scale than your regular episode). The only direct artifacts of the festive season are the box of Christmas crackers and reels of wrapping paper that feature in an early sequence, recent purchases from the Happy Shopper (a defunct convenience store brand that has since been supplanted by Premier), suggesting that the events of the special fall somewhere close to Christmas, although there is ambiguity regarding the precise proximity. Does it take place in the early winter, before the decorations have gone up, or in the aftermath, with Margaret having purchased marked-down crackers and paper in the January sales, so as to have cheap supplies ready for the following Christmas? I lean toward the latter, largely on account of the box of Milk Tray chocolates Victor is seen working through at the start (and in such a classy fashion, by skewering them with cocktail stick and dunking them in his tea), as it seems like the kind of seasonal gift that you might still have left over in the early days of January. Such details feel like arbitrary concessions thrown in to make an otherwise disconnected story a little more superficially Christmassy, although a great gag is mined from the presence of the crackers, when Victor opens one to find that someone has slipped an insulting joke inside - "What's the difference between Victor Meldrew and a chef who keeps dropping his pancakes? Answer: They're both useless tossers!" (Adding insult to injury is that the pranksters have failed to construct the joke correctly; as Victor points out, it should be "Why is Victor Meldrew like a chef who keeps dropping his pancakes?").
Renwick's other major modification was to pad out the initial sequence in the Meldrews' living room, and if "The Man Who Blew Away" has any real shortcoming, it's that the story takes a long time to get going. Even so, the protracted opening doesn't feel like time wasted, with the slowburn enabling the more outlandish material to land with greater impact - notably, when Victor casually approaches a drawer and pulls out an arm, a weird and macabre gag that falls within a sequence of lower-key moments and is not immediately explained. As it turns out, Victor has lately been the target of a string of bizarre pranks, with false limbs being left around his bin and garage to give the appearance of bodies stuffed within. Not only does the resolution of this narrative strand dovetail with Foskett's arrival, the repeated emphasis on disconnected body parts neatly foreshadows the grotesque visual on which the episode will end.
In spite of the misadventures with the clothes, the limbs and the crackers, the Meldrews are in an overall buoyant mood, because their car has been stolen. This is a very good thing, because if you watched "The Beast In The Cage", you might recall how much Victor struggled with their dsyfunctional Honda. As we join the Meldrews, the car has been gone for three months and they are planning which new vehicle to buy with the anticipated insurance settlement. That is, until their good cheer is interrupted by a telephone call, bringing the bad news that their Honda has been found, in one piece...and in Finland. This prompts a truly uproarious reaction from Victor: "FINLAND??? That car couldn't get to FINCHLEY!!!" The events of the Honda narrative, which occupies the first half of the episode, have no direction connection to anything that later goes on with Foskett, but we can see how the seeds are being sown for his eventual appearance. Coupled with Margaret's observation about the frozen socks, a running theme is being established regarding unrelenting nuisances finding their way back to Meldrews as they think they are rid of them. Meanwhile, there is a subplot unfolding next door with Patrick and Pippa, as the former prepares for an engagement with a couple of prospective business contractors. It's a relatively small part of the story, but it climaxes with the episode's most hysterical visual gag, which occurs once Foskett has made it out onto the Meldrews' roof, and which I wouldn't dare spoil here.
Between the unwelcome intrusions of the Honda and Foskett, there is a further bugbear to contend with in the form of Mr and Mrs Aylesbury, an unseen couple who live across the street from the Meldrews, and who apparently have a penchant for throwing raucous parties into the early hours. It's here that "The Laughing Policeman" first comes into play - right after a deceptive silence in which the Meldrews think the party has died down and the ordeal is finally over. The really nerve-grinding part is during the chorus, when the party guests all join in with the deranged laughing (before, as per Victor's account, spilling out onto the front lawn to do Chuck Berry duck walks). For as hilarious as this entire sequence is, I will say that it is the part of the episode that requires the greatest suspension of disbelief (yes, even more so than the stolen Honda showing up in Finland), on account of Victor's observation about no one else on the street is remotely bothered besides themselves. That much is a bit hard to swallow. I could see the Swaineys maybe shrugging this off, but there's no way that Patrick and Pippa wouldn't be just as wound up and inconvenienced as Victor and Margaret, particularly with it coinciding with Patrick's important business preparation. You just to have buy into the premise that this is another instance of universe conspiring purely to make life harder for Victor (and by extension Margaret), and that the Trenches are somehow impervious (since they are typically only affected wherever it will make Victor look worse). In this case, the universe's malice manifests as delirious laughter, permeating the Meldrews' walls and mocking their futility in the face of such unabating chaos. The one consolation for their sleepless night is that it's followed by Sunday morning, and under normal circumstances they would have no obligation to get up early. Under normal circumstances. This is of course where Mr Foskett chooses to rear his head, the seismic disaster in relation to which all other grievances - the inescapable Honda, The Laughing Policeman - have been mere rumblings on the horizon. This is also where the episode really shifts into full gear, with every last moment hitting with utter precision. Time could so easily have diluted the impact of that one joke where Foskett is revealed to be calling on a mobile from outside the Meldrews' front door, coming as it did from an age where mobiles were less prolific and this would have been more unexpected, and yet the timing and the delivery are so perfect that it still feels every bit as fresh as it did back then.
Foskett claims that he'd happened to be in the area visiting his sister-in-law and, having looked up the Meldrews' real address in a telephone book, had decided to call in on them. During the extended, one-sided game of catch-up he has them play, he reveals that his first marriage broke down soon after that holiday in Weston-super-Mare, resulting in the loss of his job and in thirteen separate suicide attempts, but that he's since picked his life up, remarried and has two wonderful sons. Foskett's gushing about his newfound familial bliss brings its own extraneous misfortune for Victor and Margaret. When Victor opens the door, he finds Foskett accompanied by two pre-teen boys and, assuming them to be the sons in question, the Meldrews let them in and offer them breakfast, only for them to take advantage of their hospitality and eat well beyond their fill of jam tarts and roast potatoes. And then it turns out that they aren't even Foskett's sons, but local children who were responsible for the pranks with the fake limbs (and also the Christmas cracker) and were sent by their father to apologise. As the dust settles from that misunderstanding, Victor finds Foskett in the hallway, looking very pale and shaken. He'd gone to make a telephone call to his wife Loretta, who'd declined to come to the Meldrews' on account of having a migraine, only to discover that she and the boys have taken the opportunity to make a bolt for it and abandon him for good. All of his talk about having found happiness with a new family was a sham; they couldn't stand him any more than anyone else he ever encountered.
Following a further mishap, where Foskett retreats to the kitchen for a class of water but ends up collapsing onto a pile of scattered rubbish, the Meldrews allow him to clean up with a bath, but are all the while thinking of how to awkwardly get rid of him, with Margaret suggesting they ring for a taxi. It dawns on her that it maybe wasn't a good idea to let Foskett lock himself inside the bathroom and out of their sight, given his extensive history of suicidal behaviour. Victor thinks she's overreacting, until he goes outside and sees Foskett out on the roof wearing only a towel, threatening to throw himself off. He ultimately has second thoughts, but not without slipping, losing the towel and having to dangle naked from the roof gutter. This is the narrative's major set-piece, with the tension and comic absurdity exquisitely nailed by Susan Belbin's direction, so that even the admittedly rather naff-looking night sky effects don't take us out of the moment.
In the epilogue, set a short while after the ordeal, we learn that Victor and Margaret are making a habit of leaving their Honda unsecured, in the hopes of it being stolen again, although Victor is questioning the purpose, noting that any keys left in the ignition have been invariably returned by would-be Good Samaritans. Foskett, on the other hand, will not be back, at least not in the flesh; the Meldrews receive a package containing an update on their old friend, and it's revealed that he made his fifteenth and final suicide attempt after leaving with the police and sadly succumbed to his injuries in hospital. Before his death, Foskett shared that there was one thing that brought him comfort in his darkest hour - his friendship with the Meldrews, the kindness they had shown him on that day, and how pleased they had evidently been to see him after all these years.
Foskett remains something of a puzzle, and we are left wondering if he was perhaps considerably less oblivious than he let on. He comes off as a man in deep denial, commenting on how strange it was that the address the Meldrews had given him turned out to be bogus but convincing himself that he'd written it down wrong. This raises the question as to what really precipitated his arrival at their door - did his family's total abandonment of him come as such a surprise to him, or was it the result of a much more prolonged marital breakdown? It dawns on us that Foskett might have deliberately sought out the Meldrews because he knew that something like this would be coming and felt the need to be with friends when the dreaded news broke. The knowledge that his first marriage had ended soon after the holiday in Weston-super-Mare underscores the likelihood that he was having marital problems back then too, and that his interactions with the Meldrews had amounted to much the same thing. On both occasions, he'd been reaching out to Victor and Margaret, and
while they'd sat and endured his company through gritted teeth, all
they'd privately desired was to have him out of their lives. That a
couple he'd known for a brief spell seventeen years ago should be the
only people he could think to turn to tells its own desolate story. The most haunting thing about Foskett? We never even learn his full name. He talks at great length about his vast collection of antique dentures and his allergy to sticky tape, yet that one all-important detail never slips through. The Meldrews were all he had left in the end, and they weren't even on first name terms with the man. He is of course the figure alluded to in the episode title - the opening sequence, in which the onscreen title was juxtaposed with a discarded newspaper page with coverage of local weddings, had foreshadowed Foskett's marital woes as the factor that would drive him over the edge, while also subtly implanting the image of him as a soul drifting feebly upon the breeze, briefly fluttering into people's lives only to be swept out again into the ether. He is a man with a knack for alienating every single person he comes into contact with, with no lasting ties or connections to keep him grounded in any particular social setting. Much like that stray newspaper page, he is discarded rubbish, professing to carry joyous news but totally unwanted and destined to shortly become nothing. It is a haunting allusion, calling to mind how little the Meldrews, or indeed we the audience really knew him, in spite of the tremendous deal he had to say about himself. To The Meldrews, he was an annoyance that came into their lives for a day, while to us he was a momentary diversion to be laughed at, but the gravitas of Margaret's final reading impresses the sobering notion that this was a life, now lost because nobody cared enough to hold onto it. He can also be likened to the scattered washing found by Margaret in the beginning, with the lack of eyes upon him (both literal and metaphorical) leading to his terminal ruin.
Foskett's belief that he'd found camaraderie with Victor and Margaret is by far the episode's cruellest irony, but of course Renwick isn't going to bow out without inflicting one further instance of cosmic misfortune upon the Meldrews. They open up the package to find that, as Foskett's last remaining allies, he has entrusted them with his legacy in the form of his collection of antique dentures, in which Victor had politely feigned interest in an earlier scene. The final visual of those assorted cabinets of lovingly displayed pearlies creates an uneasy connection between smiling and death, for these are not merely the worldly remains of Foskett himself, but the synthetic snickers of countless owners long departed, all grinning mindlessly from beyond the grave. An underlying theme of "The Man Who Blew Away" is the idea of laughter as a reflexive coping mechanism geared toward masking grim realities and staving off the omnipresent darkness of life. The knowledge that we're all going to die and the likelihood that life is absurd are as inescapable as the Meldrews' Honda; we have to find a way of keeping the pain at bay somehow. The episode ends with Victor expressing newfound sympathy for Mr and Mrs Aylesbury, for he now understands their need to stay up laughing with Charles Penrose into the early hours, and suggests that if he and Margaret cannot follow their example, they too risk sinking into suicidal despair. The final moments, naturally, produce no laughter from either party, only an awkward silence followed by a characteristically morbid punchline, in which Victor asks Margaret where she's keeping the sleeping pills. We linger on one last shot of Foskett's collection before dissolving into the closing credits, where the familiar tortoise footage is accompanied by a reprise of "The Laughing Policeman" in lieu of the usual Eric Idle-sung theme song. Previously a manifestation of the universe's mockery of Victor and Margaret, it now becomes something altogether more sinister - our own laughter and craving for escapism has been implicated in this process of addled diversion, making these hysterical wails of irrepressible anguish an eerie caricture of our own damnation. The presence of those tortoises only adds to the final uncanniness; their significance was explained by Renwick on the commentary for "The Beast In The Cage", where he notes that they are specifically giant tortoises, which are one of the most long-lived of animal species and thus symbols of longevity. Juxtaposed with Penrose's howls, they suggest suffering of a particularly interminable variety, of having lived so long and seen so much lunacy.
Which was certainly an uncomfortable point at which to leave us in the late hours of Christmas, although it should be noted that it did little to sour the public's appetite for further seasonal installments with Victor and Margaret. A festive edition of One Foot In The Grave Christmas would remain an annual event for the duration of the mid-90s, with three further specials, "The Wisdom of The Witch", "Starbound" and "Endgame" airing in the succeeding years (of which only "Starbound" missed out on a Christmas Day slot). Renwick would never again attempt anything with quite the same bitterly downbeat flavour as "The Man Who Blew Away", however, at least not within the festive specials. The upsets of Series 6 were still to come (including an echoing of the themes of "The Man Who Blew Away" in the episode "Tales of Terror"), but those were a good few years away yet.
Finally, since I'm such a VHS nerd, I've spent an unhealthy amount of time scrutinising the Meldrews' living room cabinet to see if I can identify which tapes they have in their collection. I'm not 100% sure, but I think that's The Addams Family there on the bottom right. Neat, the Meldrews have good taste then.
