Door (End of Snivvelyzashuns)

End of world narratives were to be David Anderson's speciality during his time creating experimental animations for Channel 4. Starting with 1986's Dreamless Sleep, his contribution to David Hopkins' Sweet Disaster series, he showed a flair for conveying the disquietude of a hauntingly fragile reality on the brink of unravelling. In the dwindling stages of the decade he teamed up with American author Russell Hoban, and a brace of five minute pieces was formed under the banner of Deadtime Stories For Big Folk. The first of these was Deadsy from 1989, which went on to inspire the "Mark" entry of the "Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives" series of PIFs. The second was Door from 1990, a grisly tale of ill-advised choices that is, for me, as perfect an animated short as they come. The busy, overstuffed and wildly abstract nature of the visuals (created through a combination of stop motion animation and pixelation) keeps us swamped in a nightmarish mix of stimuli, yet it never detracts from the elegant and poetic simplicity of the narrative. The agitated atmosphere gets increasingly sinister as it goes, culminating in the kind of ghoulish punchline that could only work in animation, and which has really stuck with me over the years.

Though overtly apocalyptic, Door does not explicitly link its narrative to the topic of nuclear war, giving it a more mystically parabolic flavour next to its predecessors. Dreamless Sleep had centred on a couple who'd awakened shortly before the detonating of a nuclear weapon, sensing that something in their environment is profoundly amiss but being unable to pinpoint the source until the blinding flash of oblivion was upon them; like When The Wind Blows from the same year, it made a harrowing statement by bringing the all-encompassing matter of nuclear war to the personal level, from the perspective of innocents who were powerless to change their fate. Deadsy took a more comprehensively allegorical approach, relating a humorously macabre monologue about a gender-bending personification of death and nuclear proliferation, and their quest to win over the entire world (their grim spectre also haunts the action in Door, where they put in a cameo appearance). In Door the threat of nuclear annihilation exists on an entirely subtextual level. The central characters, an unnamed man and woman, discover a key marked with a tag, "This Is The Wun". After much deliberation on its meaning, the woman suggests that "This Is The Wun" indicates that this is the key to the one door that should never be opened, lest it unleashes something with the power to warp their reality beyond all recognition. Sadly, their inability to agree on how to manage this most gargantuan of responsibilities reaps devastating consequences. You don't have to reach in far to locate the nuclear allegory, although it can be interpreted quite a bit more broadly than that, evoking as it does the stories of Pandora’s box and the Garden of Eden (for a welcome change, it is here the male figure who makes the fatal move and dooms everyone), suggesting that there may be something innate in the human psyche that compels it toward its own destruction. Compared to Deadsy, where vanity and the lust for domination were the driving forces for cataclysm, the snake in this particular Eden (which isn’t exactly a paradise to begin with, mind) is simple curiosity. The risk is in going so far, in our quest to keep pushing ourselves beyond our limits, that we end up crossing a line from which there can be no going back. Door explores the possibility of how a single and all-too human error might seal not only our own undoing, but cast the whole world into ruin along with us - very pertinent in an age where destroying the world had apparently become as straightforward as pressing a button.

As with Deadsy, Hoban himself takes up narration duties in Door, voicing a couple of characters who remain offscreen until the closing moments, one of whom is relating the cautionary tale of the “wun” key you had better not mess with to the other. Our first hint that these are specifically the voices of a post-apocalyptic landscape comes with their speaking in the slurred, degraded dialect that previously appeared in Hoban’s 1980 novel Riddley Walker (Hoban reasoned that people would hardly be speaking in BBC English following the collapse of civilisation and another dark age), and which I will state upfront that I will not attempt to accurately transcribe here. Connoisseur Video, the people behind the 1992 VHS release David Anderson: Works On Film, were nice enough to include a full transcript of the Deadsy monologue on the inner sleeve, in Hoban’s degraded survivor tongue, but they didn’t bestow that same honor on Door. The dialogue remains close enough to contemporary English that it is still intelligible, so I will be treating it as though it were more or less the same, but for the two key phrases: “This is the wun”, in relation to that very special key, and “the end of snivvelyzashuns we knowit”, the outcome that the characters most fear. We hear the story of the man and the woman (represented by two-dimensional cut out figures), who inhabit a world ("a great big some kind of place") consisting of innumerable doors and have many adventures navigating the surprises they conceal. Even before they discover the key that has the power to dramatically alter their destiny, there is something terrifying and intensely alien about this world, depicted as a sphere covered in a surreal hodgepodge of doors, none of which seem to offer any clear path or exit, only a deepening of chaotic entrapment. It resembles a puzzle box, of the sort that is liable to confound anybody curious or masochistic enough to try engaging with it. At one point a door swings open to reveal a figure positioned within a corridor who is seemingly incapable of doing anything but banging their head interminably against a brick wall, a sign that they've encountered a few dead ends too many. Some of the doors conceal pleasant surprises, which the man and the woman enjoy, while others are direct portals into nightmares ("You opened them, you would just keep falling for a long time"). 

On the making of documentary that appears on the Connoisseur Video release, Anderson shares that he came to the project wanting to explore human relationships and what causes us to self-destruct at an interpersonal level, with Hoban being the one who chose to take that interest in destruction to more cosmic heights. Door actually feels like a perfect amalgamation of their respective fascinations, with the script placing a great deal of emphasis on the interplay between the man and the woman (it's never stated, but we presume that they are a married couple) and their constant bickering, as interminable as anything the maze of doors has to offer. The clue that they are a husband and wife arises from the distinctly humorous nature of their arguing, indicating that they have spent just little too long in one another's company ("Sometimes they would say, why did we ever come here anyhow? Then one of them would say it wasn't my idea, and the other one would say, well it wasn't mine neither, maybe we could go some other place. Only they didn't know any other place."). Their adventures within the world of doors becomes a metaphor for navigating through life within a partnership, with all the highs, lows, surprises and tedium it may bring. As we join them, it isn't exactly trouble in paradise; their relationship doesn't yet feel that it's corrupted, but it has reached a point of stagnation that is wearying, but ultimately survivable. It is the discovery of the wun key that drives an irreparable distance between them, with the woman's cautiousness conflicting with the man's impatience. She suggests that they at least sleep on it before making any decisions, but he is unwilling to do even that and sneaks away with the key, intending to seek out the wun door and uncover the answer by himself. This amounts to an act of infidelity (it isn't a stretch to see the act of inserting a key into a keyhole as a penetrative one), and effectively severs their partnership; his search for the door takes him far away from the woman and they are not reunited. On an allegorical level, their relationship is a reminder that we are all in this wun world together and need to figure out how to make it work; the division over the key indicates the failure of conflicting parties to handle a mutual responsibility that should perhaps never have fallen into the hands of mere mortals to begin with, one that stands between life as we know it and total devastation. Eventually, the man finds a strange rotating door and attempts to get close enough to locate the keyhole - in doing so, the narrator tells us, he ended up getting sucked in by its spinning motion and was dragged into the ground to his demise. A fortunate turn of events, for the woman was right about this being the wun key you had better not mess with, and if the man had gotten any further it would have meant nothing less than "the end of snivvelyzashuns we knowit!"

At this point the narrator's companion speaks up, challenging him on whether he's certain that the man didn't get as far as inserting the key into the keyhole. The narrator responds that he doesn't think that he did. His companion then makes the short's most haunting observation - if the man did commit the reckless deed and bring about the end of snivvelyzashuns, they would not be in a position to even know the difference. The final sequence pulls back to show the sphere of doors, now busted and disintegrating, as the narrator and his companion are revealed to be a couple of disembodied, heavily decayed heads drifting through the debris of the ruined world. The narrator reiterates that he doesn't think the man opened the door. "Wow, what a lucky us," says his companion, and the film fades to black.

 

On the VHS documentary, Anderson clarifies that he saw the epilogue as happening several centuries after the events involving the mysterious key, with the talking skulls representing the subsequent generations who've lived with the consequences ever since. Within context, they can hardly be described as survivors, given their advanced state of decay; rather, they are fragments of the damaged landscape that have been floating in infinity for so long that they've lost sight of what that landscape once was. The bitter irony is that the "snivvelyzashuns" in question already ended long ago, and what they now know is barely civilisation at all. Their continued existence speaks not to the resilience of humankind (if these skulls could even be defined as human), but to the elongation of its decline, their inability to distinguish between the so-called snivvelyzashuns of then and now indicating yet another layer of that protracted decay. The legend of the man and the woman with the wun key might be exactly that - a mere legend, now that the world is far-removed enough from whatever events first set it on its course of irreversible deterioration, but its purpose has been subverted, not to preserve the truth but to reassure listeners that the world was actually saved. It becomes a denial of a reality that should perhaps be all too stark, but which is ultimately too bleak to accept. Door closes, then, by presenting us with a paradox, in the contrast between the man's fatal need to know what lurked behind that wun door and the skulls' desperate need to not know the truth of their hopeless situation. Curiosity might be the factor that propels us to our ruination, but having opened those doors that would have been better off remaining closed, to what extent would we sooner remain ignorant of the consequences? Which proclivity is stronger - our need to know, to understand and keep pushing ourselves into unmapped worlds, or the ability to close our eyes when we're on the cusp of uncovering something truly unpalatable? It is also possible to project a degree of conscious irony onto the second skull's closing statement, as though he wishes that the current state of snivvelyzashuns would be brought to an end.

I honestly don't remember when I first saw Door. I first knowingly came across it in 2012, back when I had started my mission to locate each of the Sweet Disaster series, which led me to check out some of Anderson’s other, less elusive projects, and I found that it had this instant and uncanny sense of familiarity, like the thing had already been haunting me for the better part of my existence. It is possible that I had seen it, or at least an excerpt from it, somewhere before and not quite taken it in (I don’t know if you-know-who would have covered it in his Cartoon Club), but I'd like to think that its freaky ambience just struck a chord with me because it felt so reminiscent of some half-remembered nightmare I'd once had (there is a third option, which is that I’d seen the McEwans lager ad that Anderson later animated using many of the same sets as Door). I do recall becoming utterly obsessed with it then and there in 2012. Not because I was fearing any imminent apocalypse, but because I was, at that point in my life, having a hard time coping with uncertainty in a more generalised sense (in a way that leaves you wide open to intrusive thinking), and I found the ending chilling but also strangely cathartic. I didn’t know if I saw something defiantly reassuring in the concept of being damned and unable to tell the difference, or if that inability represented an entrapment in itself, if you couldn't see beyond it and had no lingering appreciation for what was lost - I just liked that the characters acknowledged that they would have no way of knowing either way. It seemed exonerating, a reminder of how we're all just crumbs of debris floating around in space with only a narrow inkling of the bigger picture (both on a cosmic and on a personal level), and in those circumstances there's not a whole lot we can do other than to learn to trust whatever our own judgement is telling us. What a lucky us indeed.

The Victor (aka I Wondered If That Might Happen...)

The title of Derek Hayes and Phil Austin's 1985 animation The Victor conceals a couple of cunning contradictions. Within context, it is explained in an acronym that is revealed in three separate stages across the narrative, as the action cuts intermittently to a computer screen indicating the successive phases of a sinister experimental procedure - "Violence Induced", "Control Terminated" and finally "Operative Reaction". The last of these phases is followed by a question mark, not present in the title, which plays a vital role in how we are prompted to make sense of the film's macabre developments. The operative reaction is the unknown being tested by the experiment, but the question ultimately raised has to do with who really wins in the end. Is there a victor to be had at all in this scenario? 

Mixed in with the bitter irony is an incongruous dash of loving affection, for the title is also a reference to a British comic from Hayes and Austin's youth, renowned for its "boys' own adventure" type narratives, the art style of which their film was intended to evoke. The Victor is suffused with a warm undercurrent of boyhood nostalgia, which feels paradoxical, given the dystopian forces that prove as prevalent, lingering on the sidelines and pulling the strings from above. 

The protagonist of The Victor is identified, via a montage of computer images shown in the opening sequence, as Jimmy Mullen, a pacifist who resisted conscription into the military and attempted to go AWOL. Now, he finds himself undertaking a mind-bending journey, from the shadows of a seedy bar-room and into a distorted mirror version of the promenade at Brighton, guided by a mysterious rectangular light and bombarded with a flurry of nightmarish stimuli that repeatedly challenge his inclination toward non-violence. When his resistances are shut down, Jimmy discovers that he's capable of unleashing quite a devastating rage upon anybody who threatens him. By the end, it's revealed that Jimmy was the subject of a horrifying military program designed to convert the pacifistic into brutally efficient killing machines, by loading them with doses of violence-inducing drugs. The rectangular light he's been responding to all this while was the window from which his captors were observing as he made his way around the testing field. The adversaries he's been fighting and destroying one by one were none other than his fellow soldiers, including his best friend Vince, who meets a bloody demise when Jimmy momentarily fails to recognise him and hurls a pool ball at his temple.

The Victor was the second film created by Hayes and Austin's company Animation City (the first being the wordless fantasy short Skywhales from 1983). Commissioned by Channel 4 as part of its early commitment to giving the UK animation industry a much-needed shot in the arm, the film took inspiration from a 1970s World In Action documentary about the testing of the drug BZ on US soldiers (in that regard it has thematic parallels with the 1990 Tim Robbins thriller Jacob's Ladder), but also a personal anecdote concerning a friend's recent experiences in combining two lots of prescription drugs, which resulted in hallucinations. The prescribing doctor's response - "I wondered if that might happen...I haven't used those two drugs together before" - became dialogue inserted verbatim into the mouths of one of the characters, revealing as it does authority at its most offhandedly slapdash. At just shy of 15 minutes in length, the project was an ambitious one and faced some budgetary hurdles, but paid off handsomely when the completed film proved popular in the festival circuit and received a theatrical run at the Scala cinema in London, attached to the comic horror feature The Return of The Living Dead. Its Channel 4 debut was highly belated (Clare Kitson, in her 2008 book British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor, speculates that the film was initially withheld on account of its theatrical release, after which it just had trouble securing a suitable timeslot), but finally saw the light of day - or, more accurately, the dimness of night - in 1989, going out at a 23:30 airing when few children were likely to be watching. 

Jimmy's backstory is laid out in the beginning through a series of predominantly still images, offering glimpses into his life pre-conscription and establishing not only his ordinarily peaceful nature (he is seen sporting a shirt with the peace symbol and bearing an anti-war placard) but also that he was a highly sociable being, constantly surrounded by companions. Close scrutiny of these images is required to appreciate that the friends from his past are the same figures who'll be turned against him in his drug-induced nightmares; in the meantime, the synthesising of Jimmy's likeness with computer data foreshadows his impending degradation to the status of a machine. The blurring of fantasy and reality brings an uncanny element of déjà vu to the proceedings, a memory that feels ready-made and ready-distorted, and is as troubling for us to pin down as it is for Jimmy. In the film's strangest running gag, Jimmy is harassed by a figure who seems oddly familiar in more ways than one - he bears a striking resemblance to public schoolboy Billy Bunter, a character created for weekly boys' story paper The Magnet in 1908 (his ability to morph into a mutant bat is a total liberty on Hayes and Austin's part), but if we're attentive we'll see that he's actually a monstrous parody of one of Jimmy's former schoolfriends. In spite of the bleak subject matter, there's a playful, anything-goes quality to the fantasy sequences, in which references to British popular culture are abundant (eagle-eyed viewers will notice that Jimmy walks past the TARDIS on the promenade at Brighton, the Fourth Doctor having paid a then-recent visit to the town in the episode "The Leisure Hive"). These references, along with the funfair amusement-style scenarios navigated by Jimmy (a camp haunted house in which the perils become all-too hairy, a dizzying helter skelter and a dodgems track that transforms into a missile-heavy war zone) are suggestive of innocent diversion gone feverishly wrong. The action sequences, meanwhile, are staged with a boldness that evokes the frenetic escapisms of contemporary arcade games (at multiple points, Jimmy decries the inducement to fight as participating in a stupid game), with the consequences proving painfully real even as the details are illusory. 

The surreal visuals and action set-piece might be the most immediately commanding things about The Victor, although for my money its most impactful moments are to be found in its quieter intervals, which convey a sadder and more subdued sense of how Jimmy's once-earnest world has been corrupted and turned against him. The significance of Brighton to Jimmy is not made totally explicit, but we might notice that the steps on which he stands while surveying the deceptively peaceful promenade are the same ones he was glimpsed upon in one of the opening images, where he was seen palling around with Vince and friends in what was evidently a more carefree juncture in their lives. A balloon bearing the RAF roundel floats silently overhead, a signal of the military surveillance that is already omnipresent, as Jimmy muses on the likelihood that Vince (already brutally dispatched) will be in his usual spot, chatting up the waitresses at the local cafe. This was the ground on which he forged his community. It seems as solid as ever, but is only a few movements away from giving way into a pit of hallucinatory carnage, where his erstwhile allies are recast at best as leering bystanders or, at worst, as direct adversaries. Jimmy is plunged into his nightmare with the expressed warning that he is now on his own; the experiment plays out by not merely heightening his inclination to attack, but by eroding his very concept of connection, prompting him to destroy the people he would, under more auspicious circumstances, have greeted as his own. 

Hayes has shared that he approached the film with an interest in exploring what was the more innate human characteristic, aggression or cooperation. Is Jimmy to be seen as a fundamentally peaceful individual whose nature has been forcibly inverted by external forces, or was his pacifism solidified by his sense of social belonging, something that breaks down the instant he loses that camaraderie and has only his primal urges to fall back on? The obliterated of Jimmy's social identity is cited as a necessary factor in his transformation into an ultra-efficient killer, in the joking observations of one of his captors' lackeys that he couldn't expect to find much affinity with the protestors in CND after unleashing such a violent display. Jimmy's repeated howls of disbelief make it plain that he is having difficulty consolidating these conflicting impulses, much to the perturbation of the army general overseeing the procedure. For as futile as Jimmy's objections might seem while he's fastened to a gurney and barely lucid, they represent a spanner of unpredictability within the works that his captors have been unable to weed out, troubling to the general because it indicates a battle not yet won. But then some victories have the potential to prove unmitigatedly Pyrrhic.

The Victor closes by turning the viewer's own perception of violence back on them, with the startling climactic development where Jimmy breaks free of his restraints and his drug-induced demons become solid and real. It amounts to a thorough rejection of the calmer interlude following the experiment, in which rationality appeared to have taken a hold and we were offered a logical explanation for everything Jimmy had been through. Not only do Jimmy's fantasies spill over inexplicably into the external world, his captors' own reality becomes fluid and unstable, with the gun that fails to protect them from Jimmy transforming into what looks like a clew of little pink worms. The barrier between reality and hallucination has been eviscerated, leaving the world to make its inevitable descent into the realm of full-blown nightmares. Given Jimmy's implied destruction of his captors, it might be tempting to read the final outcome through a redemptive lens, with Jimmy rising up against the oppressive forces that had manipulated him into killing his allies - it does, however, come at the expense of his pacifistic nature, which has by now been completely annihilated, to the extent that he no longer expresses resistance or disbelief over his actions. Jimmy has surrendered to his violent impulses, whether induced or innate, and become the ultimate killing machine, so potent that it cannot be contained, with the black abyss that consumes the screen pointing not to triumphant rebellion, but to the impending oblivion. Jimmy's is a battle lost, and it is through an unseen side effect that he takes out everything else along with him. The victor? This is a game that was always fated to have no winners. Jimmy was right to not want to play. 

Bob's Birthday (aka In Ourselves Are Triumph and Defeat)

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.

Never Say Pink Furry Die (aka Save It Till The Morning After)

Some Aardman productions are so obscure that they didn't even see the light of day in celebrations of the studio's obscurities.

The 2000 home media release Aardman Classics gave a comprehensive overview of the Bristol-based animation house's output pre-Chicken Run, but by no means a complete one. The DVD edition came with a booklet, Insideaard, offering a handy breakdown of the studio's filmography, and if you studied it extensively, you were going to pick up on a few glaring gaps here and there. The lack of Morph or Wallace and Gromit was self-explanatory, since this was intended as a showcase for the studio's assorted one-offs and oddities, with the Creature Comforts pieces as its obvious selling point. Other notable omissions included the preliminary Rex The Runt shorts (assuming you weren't counting Ident), the preliminary Angry Kid shorts, and any of the studio's advertising work outside of Creature Comforts. Also predominantly overlooked was the studio's music video credits, the only featured example being the quirky visual accompaniment created for Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares For Me" in 1987. From a representational standpoint, the absence of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" (easily the most esteemed of Aardman's music video collaborations) seems hard to justify, but maybe there was an issue with licencing. The most mysterious of the snubbed items was a 1989 piece entitled Liftin' The Blues, credited to David Sproxton; to this day, the film continues to elude me, but I have gathered that it was an aviation documentary, which sounds intriguingly out of Aardman's wheelhouse. I fear that its hefty 52 minutes running time might have immediately precluded it from making this compilation, however. A more head-scratching omission would be the 1992 short, Never Say Pink Furry Die, which running at just shy of 11 minutes you'd think they might have squeezed into the mix. I wonder what the story was there? Was the implied sex scene considered a notch too ribald for the family audiences? It's not as though Aardman Classics was an overwhelmingly kid-friendly release anyway, what with the psychological horrors of Stage Fright and the apocalyptic visions of Babylon.

Never Say Pink Furry Die came about during the era when Aardman was regularly allowing its younger talent to create their own projects for Channel 4 - it's how Nick Park, Barry Purves and Richard Starzak were able to get their names into the limelight. This film's creator, Louise Spraggon, doesn't seem to have stuck with Aardman in the aftermath, which is a shame - partly because it is nice to see an Aardman project fronted by a female talent, but also because, while bedevilled with all the roughness of a first effort, it has promise, and I would have been interested to have seen how Spraggon's craft might have developed from here. The claymation visuals look considerably less refined than much of its contemporaries, but I quite like the homespun qualities, particularly the crudely-sketched, predominantly plain environments, which seem warmly nostalgic for the stop motion Paddington series from 1976.

The first thing to be said about the set-up of Never Say Pink Furry Die is how reminiscent the central dynamic is of Wallace and Gromit. Once again we have a master/pet relationship in which the pet is visibly the brains of the operation, although in this scenario both characters are equally non-verbal. The plot follows a young woman who wakes up with the mother of all hangovers, on a Friday the 13th that, most inconveniently, happens to be the day she's scheduled to get married. She's supported through her morning preparations by her far more organised feline companion, who clearly has a greater determination to get her to that alter on time...I don't know about you, but I don't think that exactly bodes well for her future union with her unseen groom. The matter gets thornier still - nestled within the woman's cleavage is a most peculiar item, the titular pink furry die, stoking hazy memories about possible misspent passions that unfolded the night before. We get flashbacks depicting her on what I presume to be her hen night, only there doesn't seem to be anybody out celebrating with her; either her friends have all ditched her at the bar, or she's henning it up by her lonesome. There is, in fact, only one other character in the full short besides the central duo, and they don't show up until the climax. Such is the paradox of Never Say Pink Furry Die; at times it seems so very busy and stuffed with details (the array of food packages, shrivelling Venus fly traps and half-eaten fry-ups on the kitchen unit, the records and magazines strewn across the bedroom floor), whilst being pervaded by so much dead and strangely empty space. Which takes us into its obvious shortcoming - the pacing of the short is listless to a baffling degree. There doesn't seem to be much urgency in how the narrative progresses, which isn't exactly ideal given that our antagonist is a ticking clock. What plot there is could have been told in less than half the run time, but there are long stretches focussed on giving a slice of life glimpse into the daily living routine of this woman and her cat, with the ostensibly pressing matter of the wedding rising to the surface only intermittently, whenever the cat glances at his wristwatch and a ceremonial leitmotif obligingly sounds. Otherwise, it's almost comical just how lightly the wedding seems to weigh on the narrative, never developing into anything other than a vague motivation for the characters to (just about) keep moving. We don't get much indication that this woman's heart is really in it - to the extent that she might just as well be going to a friend's birthday party, not the supposed happiest day of her life. Or is her terminal indifference all part of the joke?

For as long as it takes for the narrative to get to the point, the ending comes oddly abruptly, and this is where the tone of the pieces shifts into something flagrantly more sinister. We never get to the wedding, and by the credits it's honestly hard to say if the characters are even headed there at all. Given the groom's total lack of corporeality, the betrayal that's ultimately felt comes not so much at the closing revelation that it was the vicar with whom our protagonist knocked boots the night before (presumably the same vicar who's going to oversee her wedding ceremony, though it's not made explicitly clear) than at the fade-out, for abandoning us at this point in the story, and in the company of such a skin-crawling individual. When the vicar enters the picture, to assist the main duo with their broken-down vehicle, he is an immediately unsettling figure, with his eyes obscured behind his glasses, although deceptively, his initial function is to dispense quirky sight gags, with his car boot-ready alter, cross that doubles as a spanner, and unintentional substitution of petrol with holy water. Once the woman and cat have joined him in his van, and the furry die has been slotted back into its proper place, along with the last remaining fragments of clarity as to what went on that fateful night, it comes together less like a wacky comedy reveal than a moment of genuine squeamish horror. The general emptiness that's pervaded the film up until now - the seeming lack of anyone in this world besides the protagonist, her cat and this mysterious third party - suddenly feels treacherous, as though the predatory vicar has been closing in on this woman the entire time and she has unwittingly been all alone in his presence. The final arrangement, which finds the duo stranded in the vicar's ever-accelerating van, suggests a situation hurtling ever more critically out of control. The closing image codes them as having entered into a twisted symbolic marriage, bound by their mutually scandalous secret, with the license plate of the towed vehicle trailing behind in the style of "Just married" signage, while Peter Brandt's hazy background score feels evocative of a nightmare unravelling. I don't know if I'd go so far as to conclude that the vicar has literally kidnapped this young bride and her cat, but it does seem evident that their tribulation is just beginning - that, despite the increased speed, they aren't getting anywhere fast, except ever deeper into the whirlwind of chaos.

Humdrum (aka Fear of A Midday Shadow)

If you owned a copy of the 2000 home media release Aardman Classics, you might recall just how flat-out unsettling the compilation got the deeper you delved into its centre. For those who only knew the Bristol-based animation studio for the Morph skits and the creations of Nick Park, I'd imagine this would have been one heck of a bucket of ice water. Things got off to a deceptively genial start, with the original Creature Comforts short and the first of the spin-off ads for electric heaters featuring Frank the tortoise. Then Pib and Pog appeared, in all of their mean-minded, psuedo-educational glory, and things were thrown just a little off of balance. The Creature Comforts gang resurfaced, and for a fleeting moment we felt like we were safe again...right before were slap-dab in the middle of an incredibly fucked-up computer animated bit about a minotaur murdering a duck with the help of a severed hand. Sandwiching Minotaur and Little Nerkin in between the two ads about the dishwasher-loving pandas had the effect of making the pandas seem utterly false; going back to their smiling faces immediately after witnessing the horrors inflicted on that duck was like to having to resume your place at a dinner party after being privy to some enormously disturbing gossip about your host. There was some agreeable content ahead - War Story, Wat's Pig, a music video where a claymation cat with the vocals of Nina Simone performs "My Baby Just Cares For Me" - but "Heat Electric - Penguins 3 and Pablo" would be the last stop before a very disconcerting stretch throughout the middle, where we were basically leaping from one bite-sized nightmare to the next. Stage Fright, Pop, Ident, Loves Me, Loves Me Not - it was a non-stop parade of sleep-robbing freakiness. Obviously nothing else among them was as dark and sobering as the apocalyptic drama Babylon, but twisted psyches with full creative freedom clearly were endemic to the studio. The end of the compilation took us back into calmer territory, with the grimy realism of the Conversation Pieces and Animated Conversations, but even then they had to stick on one final scare to send us home with, in the form of Boris Kossmehl's Not Without My Handbag. In 2006 Aardman released another compilation, Aardman's Darkside, touted as a glimpse into the studio's nastier, more adult-orientated underbelly, but I personally saw very little difference between the films therein and at least half the line-up of Aardman Classics. Family-friendly was definitely not their default setting in the days before Chicken Run.

Lurking amid that sinister middle stretch was the 1998 film Humdrum - a short that, based on the opening credits, I had seriously expected to be a lot darker than it was. Everything about the title sequence - the deeply ominous musical notes, the black backdrop, the abrasive, jagged lettering -  suggests something truly terrifying is in store. Which may well be part of the joke; we enter into Humdrum prepped for a more dramatic affair than actually transpires. Instead, the key characters, two shadowy entities voiced by Scottish comedians Jack Docherty and Moray Hunter, are navigating a nightmare of a whole other nature, one that has less in common with the overt horrors of Stage Fright and Not Without My Handbag than the plight expressed by the verbose zoo animals in Creature Comforts. Stuck indoors and fed up of staring at the same four walls all day, the shadows spend the entirety of the six and a half minute runtime in search of alleviation from the stifling monotony. Their names are never disclosed, but I've taken the liberty of applying my own for the purposes of this review - Pawn, the thoroughly morose one (Docherty), and Rook, the intermittently exuberant one (Hunter), based on the chess pieces their heads resemble. This design choice strikes me as entirely deliberate, since the game of chess comes up explicitly in the dialogue, with Pawn recounting what happened on a previous and (we presume) equally boring occasion, when Rook made him eat all of the white pieces after losing a bet. He indicates that most of the pieces have yet to work their way through his digestive system (though he thought he saw a couple of pawns yesterday), a gleefully scatological gag that takes on added resonance if we view it as a mirror to the characters' own predicament, engulfed by a smothering monotony and desperately looking for an exit that never appears. The idea that the characters themselves are chess pieces also calls attention to their positioning for most of the film, perched at opposite ends of a table, suggesting that they are, whether knowingly or not, opponents and not allies in their ongoing entrapment. In the absence of any other distractions, they have nothing to gaze into except the dark abyss of one another, their every move a bid to keep not only the monotony from gnawing away them, but their companion's eccentricities too. Pawn is, unsurprisingly, the underdog in this equation, with Rook appearing to outmanoeuvre him at virtually every turn, and we sympathise with Pawn all the better for it.

Humdrum was directed by Peter Peake, the particular twisted psyche behind the aforementioned Pib and Pog, with a script doctoring credit for Rex the Runt creator Richard Starzak (then known as Richard Goleszowski). The film takes a unique visual approach - like your archetypal Aardman production, it uses stop motion figures, with the twist that the camera in this case is interested not in the figures themselves but in the shadows they cast. Seemingly detached from any corporeal bodies, Pawn and Rook exist only as murky, one-dimensional entities who nevertheless manage to be entirely fluid and expressive with the limited features they have. They seem at once alive and stranded in a ghostly state of only half-existence, distorted imitations of a full-bodied world that seems eerily unrealised. Meanwhile, the blistered backdrops onto which the shadows are projected take on a low-key life of their own, reflections of the protagonists' barren mental states that intermittently shift to signify the nascent traces of evanescent preoccupations. When the game of chess is mentioned, the wall assumes the checkered pattern of a chess board. When a cow is cited, the blotchy markings of a bovine's hide can be seen. The uncanniness of the visuals is buffered by the distinctly human warmth of the characters' banter, the dialogue between Pawn and Rook being both hilarious and natural. If you were watching it on the Aardman Classics compilation, then that warmth, coupled with the relative simplicity of the piece, came as a great relief following after the busyness and mean-spiritedness of the preceding Stage Fright. Starzak's playful touch seems particularly evident in the film's bluntly self-aware script, incorporating multiple barbs at its own nicheness. The possibility of turning to the television for escapism is dismissed early on, when we're told all that's on is "some weird animation thing". The major development that dominates the latter stages of the film - Rook's proposal that they entertain themselves by creating shadow puppets with their own hands - is met with weary disdain from Pawn: "I can't think of anything more boring that staring at some stupid shadows, for god's sake! Is this what happens when you don't have any friends?!" Elsewhere, Humdrum looks to be making some broader comment on our relationship with popular entertainment and the extent to which it alleviates or reinforces our monotony. The radio proves as futile a means of diversion as the television, bearing out Pawn's gloomy assessment that music "is all the same rubbish these days", with every station the characters tune into broadcasting some variation on "La Cucaracha".

The real purpose of the shadow world is to allow for a series of clever twists regarding the nature of perception. In the first half of the short, a momentary distraction arises in the form of a dog (or, more accurately, the shadow of a dog) barking at the protagonists' doorstep, which Pawn indignantly attempts to send packing. We think we understand what's going on, until Rook shows up and identifies the dog as a double-glazing salesman, who has apparently pestered the shadows on previous occasions. Our natural assumption would be that Rook is simply in cloud cuckoo land, until the door is closed and the dog, suddenly speaking in plain English, confirms his perception. It becomes even funnier when you rewatch the sequence with the knowledge that Pawn is always addressing the caller as a double-glazing salesman and not a dog; it makes me wonder, likewise, if the dog is actually barking from the protagonists' perspective, or if it's all just a comical means of conveying a particularly incessant sales pitch?

The interlude with the dog seems initially to be nothing more than a random sprinkling of absurdity, but later transpires to have laid the ground for the punchline of the short, once the game of shadow puppets has unfolded and become increasingly heated. As noted, the viewer's sympathies are invariably with Pawn, since he is the character with whom our perspectives are more firmly aligned. Odds are that we too would not recognise Rook's ridiculous attempt at contorting his digits into the shape of a cow, before he supplies the giveaway mooing (Pawn quite accurately observes that it looks more like he has his hands caught in a sandwich toaster). By contrast, Pawn's wizardry in creating an astonishingly fluid rabbit shadow is always painfully conspicuous to us, even when Rook insists that it looks more like an otter with two sausages tied to its head. It all climaxes with a deliciously cathartic moment where Pawn finally loses it with the hopelessly obtuse Rook: "I'm stuck indoors playing Guess The Misshapen Beast with someone who clearly wouldn't recognise a rabbit if it came to his house for tea, said "What's up, Doc?" and started burrowing into his head! There are blind people with no fingers who are better at shadow puppets than you! No wonder I'm a tad miffed!" All thoroughly just criticisms...except it's all tipped on its head in the closing moments, when a second caller appears at the door, a mooing shadow that perfectly matches Rook's prior attempt at creating a cow. Something even more shockingly unexpected then occurs - for the first time, we see a smile form across Pawn's face. "Not today, thank you," he says politely, before closing the door, seemingly unfazed by the irony of the situation. While it's certainly gratifying to see things end on a more buoyant note for the beleaguered Pawn, it's here that we also part ways with the character, seeing how our perspective no longer lines up with his. Suddenly, he seems at totally peace with the absurdity of his surroundings, and what's obviously normal to him has us scratching our heads with regard to what we're actually looking at. Is this hideously misshapen beast an accurate representation after all of how bovines look in this world? Is it another door to door salesperson flogging their unwanted wares? A grand cosmic joke at the expense of Pawn? A meta joke at the expense of the animators? All of those things at once? Has Pawn potentially been the daffy one all along, while Rook has a firmer grasp on the realities of the shadow world? After all, we never get any objective insight into how a rabbit even looks in this universe, outside of Pawn's projection - for all we know, his efforts really do look more like an otter with sausages protruding from its head. Or is Pawn simply calmly rejecting the film's final efforts to make a fool of him? All that matters is that Pawn is now in on something that we aren't, and it seems significant that he closes the door while facing the viewer, effectively ejecting them from the premises and leaving them out in the cold. The music heard during the end credits, yet another variation on "La Cucaracha", offers a striking contrast to the music featured during the title sequence and seems almost mocking of the viewer's confusion.

Humdrum was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short, but lost to Aleksandr Petrov's take on The Old Man and The Sea - a film to which there was seriously no shame in losing. I'm just happy that it got some recognition, since like a lot of the studio's projects that weren't helmed by Nick Park, it remains something of a hidden oddity. It's disconcerting as hell, yet basically genial enough that it helped the psychological scarring from elsewhere on the Aardman Classics release to go down more easily, which speaks volumes to Aardman's character at the time.

Papa and Nicole: Interesting (1991)

I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that the greatest television finale of all time was not born of some beloved sitcom or riveting slice of prestige drama, but an eight-part comedy-drama designed to sell you dinky French motors and, as a project on the side, experiment in the numerous different ways you could reconceptualise a familiar Robert Palmer track. I speak of course of the hugely successful "Papa and Nicole" campaign of the 1990s, which not only convinced the UK public that the Renault Clio was a fun and desirable vehicle, but also put "Nicole" in vogue as an elegant moniker for a generation of newborn girls (a phenomenon Renault Clio were able to use to their advantage just last year, with a legacy advert celebrating the coming of age of the generation of young Nicoles whose identifies they helped fashion).

The campaign followed the adventures of Nicole (Estelle Skornik), a free-spirited young Frenchwoman living the swanky Provençal lifestyle with her well-to-do Papa (Max Douchin), neither of whom were doing much to challenge the quintessential stereotype of the French being a particularly amorous crowd. Nicole and her Papa were each perpetually in search of romantic gratification, with the Renault Clio being their mutual go-to method of travelling from one passion-filled interlude to the next. The names Papa and Nicole were themselves an in-joke, a nod to the 1966 heist picture How To Steal A Million, in which Audrey Hepburn plays a character named Nicole who is close to her Papa (Hugh Griffith), and somewhere toward the end the two engage in a verbal exchange that directly anticipates the pivotal dynamic of the Renault campaign. Dialogue within the "Papa and Nicole" ads was extremely minimal, outside of the voice-over narration - the characters uttered only a scant handful of words in total, most of them proper nouns (presumably to cover for the fact that they would have been speaking French). The majority never extended beyond the campaign's signature duologue, in which the father and daughter would address one another by name ("Papa!" "Nicole!"), in a new context and with slightly altered intonation every time, and always conveying as much and as little as ever needed to be expressed between the two. The mix of continental chic, non-verbal storytelling and sun-soaked salacity charmed many, with "Papa and Nicole" being voted the 12th most popular TV campaign of the bygone century in Channel 4's 2000 poll - although it drew its share of detractors, among them the late Fay Weldon, who went on record saying, "I hated those people, for some reason. They seemed so self-obsessed - and French, I suppose....it just seemed inappropriate that anyone would make a romantic getaway in a Renault Clio. Too small!" 

Appropriate or not, Nicole's saga was destined to culminate in the romantic getaway to end all romantic getaways, with the diminutive Clio providing the inevitable means to a life anew. When the campaign debuted, on 1st April 1991, one of its most popular contemporaries was Nescafe's "Love Over Gold", which managed to spin a full-blown soap opera from the scenario of Anthony Head and Sharon Maughan flubbing chance after chance to profess their love for one another, settling instead for making vague advances through their mutual palate for instant coffee (the campaign was parodied in this Harp ad starring Randy the Yorkshire terrier). While not as rigidly narrative-driven as "Love Over Gold",  Papa and Nicole had a story of its own going - one that, to begin with, played more like a bite-sized situational comedy than a soap opera, with various hi-jinks ensuing from Nicole and Papa's respective efforts to get themselves laid while the other wasn't looking. In the later stages of the campaign, a plot thread that became increasingly apparent had to do with Nicole's desire to fly the nest. Her sixth adventure offered a startling new development to that end, but the the truly explosive material was saved for the eighth and final installment, which coincided with the launch of the second generation Renault Clio, and was heralded by an extensive media blitz promising that things would be bowing out on an absolute bombshell - Nicole was getting married! But to whom? The identity of the groom was a subject of much speculation, with a press release noting that "spokesmen for Hugh Grant, James Major and Gary Barlow have refused to comment" (spoiler: it was none of those people). To be among the first to know, you'd need to tune in around the middle of Coronation Street on 29th May and see who was waiting for Nicole at the end of the aisle. An estimated 23 million viewers did exactly that. It seemed logical to assume that they couldn't possibly live up to such overwrought hype, but they delivered and then some. Call me sentimental, but I even get a little emotional at the final iteration of that iconic exchange between Nicole and Papa, just knowing that it will be the last.

For now, let's start at the campaign's humble beginnings, with the original Papa and Nicole spot, "Interesting", in which Nicole sneaks out from under the nose of her dozing Papa for an afternoon's romantic liaison, unaware that Papa has similar plans up his sleeve. Mark Robinson's 100 Greatest TV Ads, the official tie-in book for the aforementioned Channel 4 poll, specifies that the ad debuted on April Fool's Day 1991, as if there was a kind of hidden subversiveness to the arrangement, and Papa and Nicole's particular brand of foreign, Clio-powered glamour was always intended as a taunt at the expense of the viewer. The basic ingredients are deftly cemented - picturesque Provençal scenery set to an instrumental interpretation of Robert Palmer's "Johnny and Mary". Renault had been using this track as their signature leitmotif for some years prior to enlisting Papa and Nicole, but the more lulling, continental arrangements felt intrinsically tied to the serenely indulgent lifestyle of the Provençal pair. It was like something out of an idle afternoon's daydream, in between the ingestion of a sultry paperback fantasy. It was likewise a distinctively British conceptualisation of what their overseas neighbours must be up to right now, the foreignness of the characters being precisely what made them so alluring. In spite of what Robinson identifies as England's "historical anti-Frenchness",  the campaign fed into the UK's underlying fascination with France as a kind of parallel world, seeming as it does at once so close to home and so far-removed.

 

 

France, then, is construed here as Britain's reverie, and from the start, the ads linked the Renault Clio to a desire for escapism, even if, in this instance, it's a fairly low-stakes excursion from the unspoken expectation on both parties to stay perfectly still when they'd rather be off exercising their libidos. All that is spoken is the campaign's signature exchange, at the end of the ad, when Nicole and Papa resume their respective opening positions and greet one another with a tone that suggests both self-satisfaction and a vague wariness of how much the other potentially knows. Earlier, we'd seen Papa drive past Nicole's rendezvous without so much as turning his head, but I'm not convinced this conveys cluelessness as it does disinterest; nestled beneath the faux innocence of their ostensibly skimpy conversation is the understanding that neither will pry into the other's dealings so long as their own covert indulgences go uncontested.

I'll give a special shout-out to Papa and Nicole's chauffeur, Bernard (his name was never brought up in the ads themselves, but was included in the campaign's press materials) who would reappear in subsequent installments, and is here such a good sport to them both (he's possibly relieved to them out away from the château for a couple of hours). And if you're wondering there was ever a Maman involved, I could say something, but it might be considered a spoiler.

The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water (aka There Are Backwater Places All Hidden From View)

Jeff Grant's 1973 film Lonely Water is as perfectly crafted a horror experience as you're likely to find in just 90 seconds. It has everything - atmospheric chills, an unforgettable villain, a couple of gut-wrenching character demises, even a sequel hook. That it was created for the purpose of educating children about the dangers of straying too close to the water's edge should not surprise us, given that there is a certain level of thematic intersection between the horror and the public information film - both deal in nasty surprises and morbid fascinations, with the intended outcome of maybe costing their audience a sleepless night or two. All the same, Grant's film leans more conspicuously on horror iconography than most others of its ilk, by envisioning the aquatic threat as a new kind of boogeyman, one who wears a hooded robe and hangs around bodies of water, anticipating the various ways in which reckless or unwary children will obligingly drag themselves to their liquid graves. "No one expects to find me here", muses the self-professed Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, as he lingers behind a group of children attempting to to retrieve a football from a muddy bog, and one of their party, identified as a "show-off", one of three victim archetypes with which the Spirit is accustomed to working, treads too far down the slope and loses his footing. "It seems too ordinary." An ominous splash, as we are reminded of the fine line that all-too frequently hangs between the ordinary and the catastrophic. That the Spirit boasts such an instantly recognisable voice - Donald Pleasence, on ghoulishly good form - does little to dispel his unearthly aura. Lonely Water was also unmistakably the product of the UK of the 1970s, a time when public information films were not only a prolific component of the children's television landscape, but were of the philosophy that a little psychological scarring at teatime was a sure-fire way to get results (Lonely Water, for all of its unabashed creepiness, might be considered positively soothing next to the drama of poor Jimmy and his frisbee). Things had definitely changed by my day. The water safety video I remember being shown in school (circa 1991) was comparatively lighter - it was narrated by a talking dog, and the only casualty was an inflatable bed that got abandoned by its teenaged owners and lost to the current.

Lonely Water was part of a spate of PIFs from the early 1970s aimed at reducing the number of deaths by drowning among the young. Charley the cat got in on the campaign, with the animated short Charley Says: Falling In The Water, also released in 1973, to which Robbie Edmonstone, writing for the BFI release The COI Collection Volume Four: Stop! Look! Listen!, describes Lonely Water as an "infinitely more disturbing alternative". That may be so, although I would counter that Falling In The Water is still the most harrowing of all the Charley shorts, because it is the one in which danger is most immediately felt - the sequence where Charley is shown struggling underwater, before Dad's resourcefulness as an angler saves the day, plays like a miniature nightmare in its own right. In typical Charley fashion, the expressed moral is specifically about not straying far from the watchful eye of adult authority - the mistake Charley concludes that he made was not in failing to look before he leapt, but in not adhering to Dad's command that he remain by his side. Teach Them To Swim with Rolf Harris adopted an altogether gentler approach; directed at the aforementioned adult authority, it urged them to book swimming lessons for their children in order to broaden their survival artillery. Of the three, it has aged the least elegantly, although not just for the reasons you're inevitably thinking. I would not disagree that swimming is a valuable skill for anyone to acquire (not least because it is fun and good exercise), but the assumptions at the heart of Harris's monologue seem profoundly wrong-headed - that you should teach your children to be confident and competent swimmers in a heated swimming pool with trained lifeguards on duty, so that if they fall into a river with freezing temperatures and raging currents, you can be sure they'll be able to handle it. Lonely Water, however heavy-handed its tactics, seems to have the better idea, in encouraging children not to take chances with the water to begin with. There was also Teenagers Learn To Swim from 1972, which accords with the Harris film in insisting that an education in swimming could save your life, although the preoccupations of the accompanying narrative have more to do with genetic survival - Dave the non-swimmer is dumped by his unnamed girlfriend for Mike (who swims like a fish) because aquaphobia just isn't an attractive quality in a mate. If so, it would have surely been bad news for the reproductive prospects of the generation reared on Lonely Water - at least, according to Edmonstone, who muses that the film's approach was enough to ensure that its target viewership "will never so much as get into a bath for the rest of their lives."

The key to the Spirit's unsettling energy, besides Pleasence's baleful vocals, is his seemingly passive approach to ensnaring his prey - he never has to lift a finger to lure any of these children to their doom, preferring instead to loiter in the backdrop, a horrifying presence to whom his young quarries remain as perpetually oblivious as they do the risk of submergence. The Spirit's modus operandi appears to be based purely on anticipation, and in knowing all too well how each of these scenarios will play out - the show-off will venture too far into the mud, the unwary will fail to take account of whether the branch on which he's leaning can take his weight, the fool will ignore the literal warning signs. There is a sense of chilling inevitability about their respective fates, as if the children were compelled by something deep within their callow natures; their playful curiosity, along with their failure to comprehend their surroundings and their own limitations, prompts them to waltz directly into the deathtraps before them, while all the Spirit has to do is to wait and claim his prize. There are times when the ease of the catching seems to get too much even for our narrator - when the unwary takes his predicted plunge, the Spirit immediately turns away, as if even he can't stomach to watch the outcome, leaving the horror of the incident to be articulated by the local ducks, who react noisily to the disturbance. Meanwhile, the landscape scarred by various discarded, rusting vehicles and appliances tells its own horror story, revealing how the children's longevity is threatened not only by their fundamental human weaknesses against the elements, but also the wastefulness of their adult caregivers, whose own careless habits risk transforming their playground into a hazard-filled wasteland. The power on which the Spirit thrives appears to be a melting pot of various forces working all at once - the deadliness of the water, the obliviousness of the children, the indifference of nature, and the unspoken complicity of adults.

Despite his astuteness in assessing human folly, we see at the end of the film that things don't always run according to the Spirit's plans. His conquest of the fool is thwarted by the arrival of the one thing the Spirit dreads - not adult authority, which does a grand job of staying out of the picture for the full 90 seconds, but rather "Sensible children...I have no power over them." A couple of children wise to the dangers appear and manage to save the fool from drowning, after which they obligingly take the place of the absent authority, by berating him for his poor judgement: "Mate, that was a stupid place to swim." It's through the sensible children that we get our only instance of direct interaction between the Spirit and the children over whom he presides - one of them, looking for something in which to wrap the shivering fool, finds the Spirit's delated robe upon the ground (having trampled over it earlier), but some deep-rooted sense of revulsion causes her to reject the item and to toss it into the waters, where it sinks beneath the surface. The final message of the film is one of empowerment to its young viewers - they have the power to vanquish the Spirit, provided they refrain from putting themselves at risk. Yet like any great horror villain, the Spirit refuses to be overcome that easily. He gets the last say on the matter, submerging out of sight to the foreboding cackle of "I'll be back!"

The sequelisation threatened in the Spirit's closing words never materialised - Lonely Water was the only PIF featuring the Spirit ever produced, but the staying power of the film proved so immense that this needn't matter. True to his word, the Spirit WAS back, in multiple ways - the film continued to make the rounds on children's television into the 1980s, meaning that you risked bumping into him in every next commercial break you watched for the better part of a decade. Vanishing from the airwaves didn't quell the Spirit either; his memory continues to haunt those raised on his teachings, with the childhood nightmares he inspired proving so enduring that in 2003 that Lonely Water landed a place in Channel 4's list of the 100 Greatest Scary Moments (if you can put stock in such things). The film's subsequent notoriety, and its reputation as one of the finest public information films ever made, has ensured that successive generations (among them, yours truly), who might have otherwise lived in blissful ignorance, have had the chance to get acquainted with the Spirit's charms. On a significantly grimmer note, there's also the extent to which the threat that the Spirit symbolises has remained as persistent and as deadly as ever. Katy McGahan, covering the film for the BFI, notes that: "Although statistics have shown a downward turn since the 1970s, drowning remains the third most common cause of accidental death among the under 16s." The essence of the Spirit's warnings are still relevant, even if his phobia-inducing tactics are from another world entirely.

Father Christmas (aka What If Claus Was One Of Us? Just A Slob Like One of Us?)

In some respects it's all too easy for me to take the 1982 animated masterpiece The Snowman for granted, because as far as I'm concerned, it's always been there. I was born into a world in which the short was still fairly young, but already there was a firmly-entrenched cultural worship of it, and growing up it was an inescapable part of my Christmases, as intrinsic to the season as holly, ivy and the Wizzard cash register. But this is not the case for the short that could be described as its first real successor. Despite the positive reaction to The Snowman in 1982, and how much of a lucrative merchandising property it remained in ensuing years, it took the better part of a decade for anybody to attempt any kind of subsequent festive animation based on the works of Raymond Briggs (I think we can all agree that When The Wind Blows from 1986 was aiming for a very different demographic). I'm old enough to personally remember when it was announced that The Snowman was finally getting a follow-up, a spin-off focusing on a character who made a small but all-important cameo in the 1982 film. The Snowman was a completely dialogue-free experience (save for that bemusing prologue in certain broadcasts where David Bowie appears and introduces it as something that happened to him), but here our protagonist was to be given a voice, courtesy of comedian Mel Smith. Father Christmas was directed by Dave Unwin and debuted on Channel 4 on 24th December 1991; I was watching, and I've never forgotten the gleeful anticipation I felt seeing it fresh and new, forever cementing the film as a nostalgic favourite of mine.

By Briggs' standards this is a rather jolly old special. No death and no heartbreak of any variety, just a comedic 25-minute window into the private life of Santa and what he does on the 364 nights of the year when his uncanny talents for flight and infiltration aren't in hot demand. Turns out, Father Christmas (Briggs' version of the legendary gift-bearer is a Brit, and it's established at one point that this is the moniker he prefers) gets as worn down by the daily grind as the next person, and requires a vacation every now and then. As an added bonus, he doesn't have to worry about the cost of travelling - all he needs to do is convert his trademark sleigh into a caravan and fly to whatever destination takes his fancy. Still, FC is a fickle tourist and it doesn't take many inconveniences to convince him he'd be better off elsewhere. The first half of the special follows FC as he travels from locale to locale, hopping around from a campsite in France, to a coastal town in Scotland and finally a glitzy hotel in the USA - Las Vegas, Nevada, more specifically (yes, Santa has a thing for showgirls and gambling, although he isn't particularly good at the latter) - before returning home at the end of the summer to find a stack of letters from children already piling up in his doorway. From then on, he doesn't have time to even think about anything else other than preparing for the busy night ahead of him.

The special was an amalgamation of two separate Briggs books, Father Christmas (1973) and Father Christmas Goes On Holiday (1975). The story has also been expanded ever-so-slightly so as to function as a loose sequel to The Snowman - at one point, FC takes a short break from his annual rounds to drop in on his enchanted snowmen friends at their Christmas bash, where the young David Bowie (yes, I know that "officially" his name is James, but I'm not calling him that) and a familiar frozen cohort are also in attendance. Upon seeing them, FC quips, "Glad you could make it again...the party, I mean, not your Snowman!" Given how much childhood trauma and emotional devastation was unleashed by the Snowman's untimely demise at the end of the aforementioned film, that really seems a bit flippant to me, but the very implication that he was reincarnated on subsequent Christmases and reunited with Bowie certainly helped take the sting off. This isn't the only point in the special where the story intersects with another of Raymond Briggs' properties - there's another, much subtler nod elsewhere in FC's adventures, with potentially darker ramifications, but we'll hold off on that for now.

Briggs' story offers a fairly unique take on the Santa mythos, in that his Saint Nicholas is depicted as a more humanised figure than we're accustomed to seeing in our seasonal media. For one thing, he's not much of a Saint - indeed, he has one or two filthy habits that might even rub some modern sensibilities the wrong way (see below). This Santa is human like the rest of us, meaning that he shits and pisses like the rest of us (and, in his case, his intestines are seriously ill-equipped for an over-indulgence of gourmet French cuisine - I'm not 100% certain, but I think this may be the only animated family special in which Santa suffers from a bout of explosive diarrhoea). He's also a bit of a grump and is constantly muttering under his breath about everything and anything that gets under his skin ("Blooming" being his favourite adjective). The pivotal humor, though, is in the extremely wry manner in which Briggs' Father Christmas is shown functioning within the mundane realities of every day life. This Santa doesn't live in the far-off regions of the North Pole; instead, Briggs proposes that there is something every bit as magical in the notion that, for the other 364 days of the year, Santa could be just your typical bloke next door (albeit easily recognisable to his legions of young beneficiaries through his portly figure and fluffy white beard). He lives in a nondescript English neighbourhood with nary an elf in sight, and if Mrs Claus was ever involved then she either died or packed up long ago (there is a portrait of a woman on his wall, widely speculated to be the departed Mrs Claus, which I guess tells its own sad unspoken story, but this is never confirmed). Magical flying reindeer are an indispensable part of the Santa lore even in Briggs' (relatively) down-to-earth vision, so FC does have a couple of those hanging out in a shed in his backyard. Otherwise, his sole companions are the nameless black cat and Jack Russell terrier who wait devotedly on the sidelines for FC to return from his numerous adventures; FC treats them with a genuine affection, demonstrating that, for all his gruffness, he's a softie deep down inside. Although perhaps that much is already evident in what he's willing to do for the world's entire young populace by flying out every night before Christmas and leaving them all presents, a profession that's here regarded as as matter-of-fact as anything else about his daily existence. It's not at all clear what higher power, if any, tasks FC with completing such a gargantuan endeavor year after year - for all we know, he's compelled to do this simply because he's that much of a philanthropist and delights in bringing the children of Earth a bit of seasonal magic and joy, even if it comes at a conspicuous cost to himself. It only happens once a year, but it is, nevertheless, an obligation that dominates his life throughout the remaining 364 days. And as much as FC might persistently grumble about that fact, in the end we sense that he wouldn't have it any other way. 

Although Father Christmas is by and far the most gentle of the Raymond Briggs animations, there is an understated sadness in the subtle implications that FC's devotion to his singular profession prevents him from leading the kind of ordinary life with which he intermittently flirts. I suspect that this is why there's no room for Mrs Claus in Briggs' version of the mythos - this Santa is a decidedly lonely individual who isn't able to get close to and form relationships with other people, in part because his job places such heavy demands on his time, but also because he has a secret identity to keep under wraps. This is a major factor in why he's unable to settle for long in any of his chosen vacationing spots; remaining an anonymous tourist isn't an easy task when you've got one of the most recognisable mugs on the planet. The dilemma is particularly salient during his time in Scotland, where he visits a pub and does a pretty good job of integrating with the locals, only to be reminded almost immediately of how badly he risks letting his guard down when he's identified by a passing bairn. This isn't exactly The Last Temptation of Santa, but the closing sequence, which shows the exhausted and solitary FC retiring to his prosaic bedroom while the world around him wakes up excitedly to a brand new Christmas morn, is a surprisingly poignant means of rounding off such a light-hearted narrative. He does monumental work and is loved and admired the world over, but strictly from a distance; the man himself exists purely on the sidelines, a total unknown. And that's fine - one gets the impression that he's perfectly happy with just his dog and his cat and his bottle of brandy from Uncle Bob. All the same, the number of parties and celebrations happening in the world that FC brushes up against but can never be a part of gives you an idea of how much he's sacrificed in order to make this work. Even his stopover at the snowmen's shindig is cut short by an urgent last minute delivery to Buckingham Palace.

Briggs' take on the legend is charming and refreshing, but it does leave a few lingering questions about how this FC operates that probably won't bother the special's target audience, yet inevitably plague my less credulous adult brain. For one thing, it's never established how he makes a living in this universe. True, you could query how any version of Santa manages to be financially viable, but this one has a penchant for some seriously splashy indulgences, and I'm wanting to know how he finances his expensive French lunches and luxury hotel stays in Vegas. Moreover, with the elves and the big fancy workshop taken out of the equation it's not explained where the sleigh-load of toys he delivers every year even comes from; he simply has them ready on the night in question, and that's that. If the implication is that he buys them himself then that's an even bigger drain on his seemingly endless pocket. And who puts up his reindeer during his tenure in Vegas? Is nobody bothered by the fact that he's bypassed customs to bring two unquarantined animals onto French and American soil (again, Santa does that every year anyway, but here he's meant to be passing himself off as a regular tourist)? Some of these absurdities are weaved quite knowingly into the story - for example, the fact that numerous letters addressed only to "Santa Claus, The North Pole" are able to inexplicably find their way to this seemingly ordinary urban household. Clearly, there are greater forces at work here that we're not let in on, even if it is just some arrangement he has in place with the world's postal services - it's noteworthy that adults in this universe seem hilariously nonchalant about FC's existence; he shares an amiable exchange with a passing milkman after finishing his delivery, and at one point accidentally walks in on an adult party and is casually directed to the correct room (although the attendees do share a snicker over his cliched get-up).

Like The Snowman, the special went on to become a long-running fixture of Channel 4's seasonal line-up (it's certainly better-remembered than subsequent Briggs specials, like The Bear and Ivor The Invisible, which in spite of their merits seem to have fallen between the cracks; they still keep trying to push that sodding Snowdog, but we'll see how much he longer lasts). I do, however, know at least one person who showed the special to their children in recent years and felt that it had aged poorly, with its depiction of an "everyday" Santa who's into smoking, boozing, gambling and lusting after women (I assume that nobody has a problem with the diarrhoea, though?*). The "lusting after women" charge was a mite exaggerated in my view - there's a brief moment where FC is seen dancing with a chorus line of girls at a Vegas stage show and giggling inanely, and he later dreams about lying on a lilo and being surrounded by female admirers, but that's as far as it goes - but I'll concede that if this special was made today then FC's penchant for cigar-puffing would certainly be excised. The alcohol? Possibly - although, unlike in the US where children traditionally leave out milk and cookies for Santa, in the UK it is customary to leave him a glass of sherry, so there is an argument to be made that a boozing FC is all part of the mythos there anyway. The idea is that he's supposed to be a flawed Santa (though not a bad one), and giving him a handful of muted vices is one way to show that, but I suppose I can respect why some parents with young children might feel uncomfortable with seeing such behaviours modelled by a bastion of childhood innocence. Then again, between this and the Father Christmas we meet in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, who dispenses weapons to children and comes out with explicitly sexist spiel, I know which incarnation I prefer. Personally, I only have one real issue with how Briggs' Father Christmas is characterised, and it's much the same problem I had as a child back in 1991 - there's a scene where he goes to a dry cleaners to collect his iconic Cola Cola-endorsed reds and is unduly brusque to the woman who serves him. She's doing nothing more egregious than attempting to make pleasant conversation, and is visibly shocked by his reaction. This moment has never sat well with me - I get that the whole idea is that FC doesn't have much of a social life and therefore isn't always great in situations that require him to deal with people, but this is the only point in the special where he comes off as an unpleasant old geezer as opposed to a lovably gruff one. Seriously, FC, this a tough season for those working in customer service too; maybe show a little solidarity?

Although Father Christmas is in many respects a very different kind of seasonal special to The Snowman, it takes an obvious cue from its predecessor in one regard, in climaxing with a musical sequence as our protagonist takes to the skies and embarks on an epic overseas journey; here, we get a montage showing FC transporting presents to numerous households around the world, all while expressing his thoughts on the process in song. The song itself, "Another Blooming Christmas", is upbeat in tone and blatantly not looking for comparison with the haunting and sombre "Walking In The Air", but it is infectiously catchy. And the animation, in which FC and his reindeer are seen swooping across various snow-covered buildings and landscapes, while not as starkly immersive as that of its counterpart, genuinely does make me gasp in places.

Oh yes, and that slightly darker nod to another Raymond Briggs property I mentioned - when FC goes into the pub in Scotland, who else would be wetting their whistles in the backdrop but Jim and Hilda from Gentleman Jim and When The Freaking Wind Blows? Now, I'm perfectly fine and dandy with this special taking place within the same narrative universe as The Snowman, but for the sake of FC and his pets, and for young David Bowie and his snowman friend, let's hope that this is an alternate timeline where they didn't drop the bomb. The last thing we need to think of is Santa perishing in the nuclear winter.

* I say that, but actually, the upload of the special that can be found on YouTube right now has been carefully edited to remove the part where we actually see him on the john.