The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #59: Britain's Bipping Hyena Problem

 

It's no secret that hyenas get a bad rap. Much has been made about what appalling PR Disney's The Lion King was for their kind. Beside the magnificent lions they made for gruesome little characters - scrawny, sleazy, slavering and perpetually cackling - but it goes deeper than them not being what you'd describe as conventional lookers. There is something the film finds innately cursed about the hyena, casting them as the very antithesis of the values signified by the Circle of Life (this is in spite of the repeated emphasis throughout on the connectedness of all beings, which should very logically include the hyenas), so much so that their mere presence in the Pridelands must not be tolerated, lest it lead to the order breaking down (there's even a dubious attempt at coding them as Nazis, by having them goose step through Scar's big musical sequence). Simba learns early on that one of his key responsibilities as monarch will be to keep the hyenas in their miserable little ghetto and outside of his kingdom; Scar's downfall, meanwhile, comes in allowing them to enter in and have free rein. I don't for a second believe that Disney did this because they thought that real hyenas were bad and wanted to convey that message - rather, they just needed an animal that fit certain archetypes and symbols in terms of the story they wanted to tell. But we all know that Disney has a lot to answer for in terms of colouring the public's perception of particular animal types (they made Dalmatians a beloved breed, while Siamese cats have conversely never quite shaken the stink that Lady and The Tramp left on them). Their hyena negativity wasn't exactly an isolated instance in popular culture either. In Yann Martel's 2001 novel Life of Pi, there is a section where the narrator says something along the lines of, "I am not one to harbour prejudices against entire species of animal, BUT..." and proceeds to rant on for about two pages or so about what an exceptionally grotesque creature the hyena is, to the extent that even an animal enthusiast couldn't extend them much love (it's been a long time since I read Martel's book, but at that point I remember rolling my eyes so far back that I may have glimpsed the insides of my skull). Once again, the hyena is contrasted unfavourably with a type of big cat. The tiger, Richard Parker, is every bit as much a dangerous predator, but his deadliness is offset by how beautiful he is to look at, whereas the hyena (or else Frenchman) represents survival at its most monstrously brutal - there is no nobleness or majesty in his case, just killing and the crunching of bones (he is effectively a metaphor for death without hope of spiritual deliverance).

I have precious little time for Martel's flowery posturing, but I can say this much in Disney's defence - contrary to popular assumption about its impact on the hyena's reputation, The Lion King made me vehemently pro-hyena. To me, Shenzi, Banzai and Ed were by far the most sympathetic characters in the picture. They were born into a world where the status quo did not favour them, and where survival was patently a lot harder for them than it was for the lions. Even as a child, I picked up on the contradictions in Mufasa's teachings about the Circles of Life, between what it meant in theory and what it meant in practice, and that struck me as terribly unfair (with hindsight, it was probably even more unfair to the antelope, who were expected to venerate the very creatures that were violently murdering them, but the movie downplayed that by not giving them personalities). As for the entire plot point of the hyenas running riot throughout the Pridelands and destroying it all (implied but not actually shown), I wondered if perhaps they wouldn't have gotten so carried away if the lions had been willing to share with them from the beginning. I felt that there had to be some kind of middle ground, a means for both species to find a balance and to coexist, but alas, the movie was uninterested in exploring such a notion. A year after The Lion King came the movie Babe, which had a message that appealed to me a lot more. There, I detected the faintest echo of Mufasa in the character of Rex, who was insistent on each creature remaining in its proper place, accepting what it was and being thankful for it. Which is all very well when the status quo does favour you. Coincidentally, Babe contains a throwaway line in which it's suggested that allowing a pig to challenge the sheepdogs at their game will lead to other radicalities like "a laughing hyena doing showjumping", and in my head I constructed that as a winking bit of affinity - Babe, a representative of one maligned species, was breaking down barriers so that other outcasts and misfits could have their own turn in the sun.

For myself, the hyena was cemented as the ultimate underdog (although not actually a dog), and I did have Disney to thank for that. It displaced the predominant image I'd previously had of the hyena, which is that they had this tendency to hang around car parks and do damage to vehicles while their owners were out watching Basic Instinct at the Odeon. For that particular bizarre notion I can thank the Central Office of Information, who'd put out a series of public information films in the early 1990s that showed hyenas breaking into cars, and for a while that was my primary exposure to the animal. The PIFs were part of a crime prevention campaign designed to alert motorists to the importance of properly securing their vehicles, with the hyenas themselves being stand-ins for thieves on the prowl for raidable targets, but as a small child I was way too literal-minded to take it that way. Honest to god, I thought this was a campaign about actual hyenas and the damage they would do to your car if you didn't hyena-proof it. At some point or other, I must have figured out that a hyena was not a creature you should expect to encounter roaming around Britain, in multi-storey car parks or otherwise, but for all I knew these were general warnings being issued to people who were going on holiday to places where they had hyenas. For their part, COI certainly seemed to be treating the symbol a bit too literally - for a while they were so intent on making the hyena the face of British car crime that you'd get these signs showing crossed out hyenas displayed in car parks and in car dealerships. After The Lion King came along and made me reconsider the species, seeing those signs made me feel so sad, since I was beginning to get the impression that the hyena had perhaps been falsely accused. I'd been inspired to do my own research on the animal, and I had yet to come across any reference to their alleged car cracking practices. What if this idea that they were car vandals was all just a gigantic misconception, along with the similarly erroneous ideas that they are dogs and hermaphrodites? 

This wasn't the first occasion on which COI had made a PIF representing criminal types as animals. We looked previously at "Magpies: Home" from 1984, in which a group of the titular corvids were shown raiding a bedroom, making an stomach-churning mess of the place and flying out with all of the lacy undergarments they could carry. That PIF had also traded on negative associations with the featured birds (the idea that they steal shiny things, the many superstitions surrounding them, etc), but it didn't feel anywhere near as defamatory. "Magpies" was happy to let the metaphor speak for itself, and didn't feel the need to explain to us how much actual magpies suck in order to drag the thieves down with them. It helped that it was a homage to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, so there was a degree of knowing fantasy in its scenario. The photography of the magpies was also splendid - there was a level on which it worked as a covert celebration of the birds - whereas in "Hyenas" the beasts are restricted mainly to the shadows, with close-up shots depicting them with creepy glowing eyes. Moreover, in "Hyenas" we get a monologue openly stressing the characteristics that (in COI's eyes) make car criminals comparable to hyenas. And honestly, it's pretty messed up. Hyenas are bad because they show no compassion toward their prey? Well neither do lions or tigers. But of course they're majestic big cats, so when they show no compassion it's sexy. Use of the word "victims" in place of "prey" is likewise a highly emotive choice, which suits the particular narrative the PIF is seeking to tell about car crime, but makes the hyena's actions appear more malevolent than they should.

A word that doesn't come up in COI's campaign, but is key to understanding the hyena's negative reputation, and why they would have been singled out as a metaphor for criminality when there were so many other big scary predators to choose from, is "cowardly". COI were inspired to cast hyenas as the villains because of market research indicating that hyenas were unpopular with the public, who associated them with cowardice, and they were looking to paint car criminals in the same light. I must say that I find that to be a strange notion. Cowardice, as a concept, is heavily rooted in ideas of human morality; applying it to the animal kingdom, where creatures are merely doing whatever it is they need to survive, seems futile. What is it, exactly, about the hyena that should make it a coward? All of the negative characteristics listed in the PIF itself are things that you would reasonably expect to associate with any predator. I would hazard a guess that it's because hyenas are seen as predominantly scavengers and, as a rule, animals associated with scavenging tend not to have the best of reputations (the terms "vulture" and "jackal" have negative connotations of their own). People see them as sleazy opportunists, seeking out the fallen and mortally wounded and feasting off of their misery, while stealing from other, more "worthy" predators like lions and leopards, which are capable of doing their own dirty work. That is indeed the narrative COI is wanting to convey of the car criminal, depicted as a skulking beast roaming the shadows of car parks, searching for vehicles that haven't been adequately secured and won't give them much hassle. There is perhaps an implicit suggestion that such criminals are to be seen as more dishonorable than other brands of thief, since they don't have the guts to pull off a more ambitious raid, and want only the easiest of pickings.

Does the PIF mischaracterise the hyena by depicting it as a scavenger? Yes and no. The animals featured in COI's campaign are actually striped hyenas, which are not the most famous kind. They are smaller and have a slightly more wolf-like appearance than the spotted hyena, which is what most people think of when they picture a hyena, and the species represented in The Lion King. The campaign does, however, conflate the two - the animal seen in the logo at the end (and on car park signage) appears to have been modelled on a spotted hyena, and what's more, the audio heard throughout the PIF was taken from recordings of spotted hyenas. Striped hyenas are less vocal than their spotted cousins, and they don't make the infamous laughing noise that COI uses as the basis of their punchline: "Leave it unlocked, and they're laughing." Which is the other reason why hyenas were likely chosen as our metaphorical criminals - it's not hard to construe that noise as mockery, and as the car thieves revelling in their own sneakiness and how easy unwary motorists make it for them. The notion that hyenas are predominantly scavengers would be false in the case of spotted hyenas, which are efficient pack hunters and often have their kills stolen from them by the supposedly virtuous lions, but true in the case of the striped hyena (which is a far less social being). But what COI definitely does mischaracterise is the very process of scavenging, with its insinuation that it's a revolting or dishonorable means for a creature to sustain itself, when in reality scavengers play a vital role in removing rotting carcasses from environments and preventing the spread of disease. We might think them macabre, but they're really our benefactors.

The whole point, of course, was to make car thieves sound nefarious as hell, and like a threat you absolutely should be taking all of the necessary steps to safeguard yourself against. Much like Disney, I don't believe that COI made this campaign because they had it on their agenda to increase the public's hatred toward real hyenas (Yann Martel's intentions I'm less sure about), but they were certainly looking to exploit certain prejudices already harboured against them, and to seemingly affirm these.

It goes without saying that I disapprove of the tone of the campaign, and of the tactic of explicitly villainising the hyena to suit COI's narrative ends, but that doesn't mean I'm all negative about it. On a strictly atmospheric level, I find these PIFs to be pretty unknockable. I dig the dingy, sleazy aura of the car park; multi-storey car parks are spooky venues to have to navigate at the best of times, and "Hyenas" really nails that, depicting them as murky concrete wildernesses where all manner of hidden menaces could conceivably be lurking in the shadows. It's a setting that feels alarming, dangerous and alive. In fact, it always put me heavily mind of the panther sequence from the extended video to Michael Jackson's "Black or White" - with their similar juxtaposition of ill-lit streets, car vandalism and prowling predators, I had wondered if Jackson's video might even have been an influence on COI's campaign, although I suspect that the timing doesn't line up. As for how it uses its questionable anthropomorphisms outside of its slanderous voice-over, I'd rate it as more endearingly comical than the equivalent "Magpies" PIF. You don't get the same sense of the uncanny from these shady hyenas as you do those conniving birds - rather, it treads a wobbly line between the sinister and the just plain silly. When, in the main PIF, one hyena is shown in silhouette, with its teeth (and ambitions) bared at the unsecured vehicle, it is genuinely intimidating. When seen from a different angle, with the hyena poking its face through the open car window, apparently gawking at all the goodies to be pilfered, the tone shifts to something a little more cartoonish. And you do have to love how unashamedly goofy it gets in its final moments, when we have the ridiculous sight of the hyena strolling away with a car radio in its jaws. What does a hyena want with a car radio anyway? At least a magpie could use stolen lingerie for nesting material.

Their star turn as sordid car vandals might have been jolly good acting on their part, although sadly we do have it on record that the specific hyenas used in this campaign were not good parents. Two of the hyenas were a mated pair, and they had a cub that they rejected. We know this because the rejected cub, who was instead hand-reared, was featured in a segment on the CITV show Animal Crazy, presented by Neil Buchanan and Jenny Powell, in 1994. Which is, incidentally, where I first learned that hyenas are not dogs. Even within the context of them rejecting their offspring, there was something "humanising" (for lack of a better term) about the supposed car criminals being described as a mother and father and not simply the villains in a public information film. Buchanan mentioned something about how, due to the unpredictable nature of the hyenas, the set of the PIF had to be constructed inside a cage in order to protect the film crew - which does make me hungry for further behind the scenes information about how the hyenas were trained and the PIFs were filmed. There have got to be some fascinating tidbits to be shared.

In the meantime, we're still waiting for that showjumping hyena to come along and prove he's as elegant as any pony. 

Desserts (Best Served Cold?)

The opening gag of Jeff Stark's 1999 comic horror Desserts is so deliciously subtle that it doesn't even register the first time we see it. The credits promise us "a stark film", a term that obviously denotes its writer-director, but slyly underscores the nature of the experience to follow, when Stark's name turns out to be no misnomer. What is immediately striking about Desserts is its bluntness. At a concise four minutes in length (a good chunk of which is occupied by credits), it presents a scenario that's part unbridled nightmare, part macabre joke, and above all a story of sweet, sweet revenge. Its execution is so unabashedly punchy, in fact, that it's not hard to imagine it being repackaged as a public information film, albeit one of the sicker-minded ones. A man (played by Scottish actor Ewan McGregor and identified in the credits as "Stroller") goes for a ramble on the beach and happens upon an unattended chocolate eclair, possibly left behind by some absent-minded picnicker. Looking around and seeing no one else in sight, he decides that the alluring pastry is up for grabs and stuffs it into his mouth. This, needless to say, turns out to be a huge mistake, and the outcome is swift but brutal. Concealed within that humble eclair is an enlarged fish hook, which pierces straight through Stroller's gob and gets him yanked (by some unseen force operating other end of the line) into the depths of the ocean to his presumed doom. A ghoulish twist that convincingly evokes the heavy-handed visual language of a PIF looking to shock viewers away from any number of situations in which they may be tempted to put something into their bodies that could bring them trouble down the road. The presence of the young McGregor might immediately put us in mind of Trainspotting and heroin addiction (the actor's participation was secured by producer Jill Robertson, who had worked as part of the crew on Trainspotting), but Stroller's demise works just as aptly as a metaphor for the pitfalls of developing too much of an appetite for sugary junk food. Or even a straight-up warning about not eating random food items you find lying around in the middle of nowhere, if you don't know where they've been or who might have tampered with them.

At the same time, there is an obvious an animal rights subtext to the short, one that naturally appeals to my vegan sensibilities while warmly recalling the ending of the "Gone Fishin'" episode of Tales from The Cryptkeeper, the younger-skewing animated spin-off of the HBO series Tales From The Crypt. Adapted from a Vault of Horror comic published in 1951, it concerns a grossly irresponsible fisherman who ultimately falls foul of a race of intelligent piscines that like to hunt for humans, in their case by using money as hooked bait. It was a story that had a very profound effect on me, in that even today, if I see any banknotes lying about on the ground, of any value, I'll walk straight past them. I'd like to say it's because I'm honest and want whoever dropped them to have the chance to get them back, but nope, it's because a cartoon show I watched when I was 10 hard-wired my brain to automatically suspect discarded banknotes of being traps (it made graspingness seem unappealing, and that's no bad thing, surely?). The point is that the twist in Desserts is in no way original (it also shows up in the "A Little Fishy" segment of the 1986 anthology film Escapes, and I'm sure there are other instances still), but that doesn't matter. It is a particularly slick, particularly efficient variation on an old theme about nature turning the tables on humanity by pinpointing our own weaknesses, raising questions about what constitutes a worthy survivor.

In the case of the Tales From The Cryptkeeper installment, the character's fate was clearly karmic - he was a bully who regarded fishing, much like everything else in his life, as an opportunity to revel in power over other living things - although ironically the talking fish that finally snagged him hadn't consciously plotted revenge, with its dialogue indicating that their culture did not tend to look on humans as individuals. Basically they echoed the same perspective the character had applied to them, with the distinguishing virtue that they abhorred wastefulness, leading to this awkward but fabulously morbid bit of wordplay: "A good manner-fish never catches more than he can can!" With Desserts, it's the film's title that carries the most weight in that regard, referring to the pivotal pastry while conveying a playful pun on the notion of getting what's coming to you. Stroller is, on the surface, an innocent. We see no evidence that he has ever personally wronged a fish, or indeed anybody. Even his name speaks to his guilelessness, suggesting someone who is going about their business in an entirely casual manner, as opposed to actively looking for trouble. And yet the title insinuates that the outcome should be seen as karmic. He is the only human who apparently exists in this time and space (although we do see a shape in the sand that resembles another footprint close to where he finds the eclair, suggesting that the process is potentially cyclic), and as such he becomes an everyman who pays the price for humanity's sins against the ocean. The sins, in this scenario, are not born of wilful malice, but of unwary consumption and the belief that whatever resources he happens across are his for the taking. The rapaciousness that compels him to bite off more than he can chew becomes a shorthand for humankind's reckless plundering of the Earth, something that's shown to be just as mindless as a fish's compulsions to chomp at any bit of bait that's dangled its way, and as likely to drag us toward our own destruction. 

It is hard to shake the sense that Stroller has been the victim of a grand conspiracy, as opposed to a random victim unfortunate enough to have stumbled upon the baited eclair. The opening credits show the underwater, distinctly inhuman perspective (its cold eeriness anticipating the alien gaze of Jonathan Glazer's 2013 feature Under The Skin) of our unseen aquatic angler as it identifies its prey approaching along the sands. Notably, it surveys Stroller's form up close (and with the waves visibly behind him), suggesting an omnipresent intimacy that feels at odds with the implied distance between the hunter and the hunted within the body of the short. To me, this indicates it is not vengeful fish per se that have targeted Stroller so much as the collective forces of nature all around him. Desserts imagines a world in which nature successfully eliminates humanity and then begins wiping away all traces of its existence; not content with merely swallowing Stroller whole, the ocean must subsequently wash over his footprints and begin the process of rubbing them out. There is something almost comical about this, as though the tides are consciously removing the evidence from a crime scene. One of the film's most vital ingredients is its puckish sense of humor, which is further accentuated when we fade to black and are greeted by a incongruously buoyant instrumental rendition of the music hall favourite "I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside".

But even if Stroller represents the failings of an inattentive human race, his fate still feels like a paradox. Throughout the short, a great deal of emphasis is placed on his insignificance in relation to his surroundings, with its opening wide shot making us particularly aware of the vastness and seeming infinity of the barren shoreline, against which he initially appears as nothing more than a tiny blot on the horizon. It underscores how nature will always be a fundamentally bigger force than man, but has the effect of making him seem like rather an unimposing entity, and thus a curious target for such a magnificent scheme. It recalls the 1972 Spanish television film La Cabina, with its protagonist who is at once too much of a nondescript everyman to appear in any way important, and yet has clearly been the victim of a plot purposely designed to consign him to oblivion. Stroller is established as a little fish in a big ocean, and we suspect that it is precisely this insignificance that makes him so vulnerable. It's here that we may be able to mine one further pun from the title, playing on our uneasy feeling that the wider world might have deliberately deserted him. Desserts grapples with the issue of mortality, touching on the extent to which humankind is as assailable as the creatures it is accustomed to exploiting, the fine line between life and death, and the helplessness of the individual fated to be removed from the picture sooner or later, only for the picture itself to shrug and carry on as if nothing much occurred. Stroller inhabits a landscape of endless and oppressive emptiness, with the opening illustrating how he is, unbeknownst to himself, already inside the belly of the beast before he's even been dragged into its depths. The barrenness of his space conveys the indifference of his own (non-existent) people, who have effectively abandoned him to his demise - we sense that the lack of anyone in sight who could potentially have deterred him from destruction or assisted him when he became caught on the line was likewise not a matter of mere misfortune, but of nobody caring to intervene. The world reacts to his obliteration with much the same coldness, as the tides wash over his footprints, negating what meagre imprint he might have left behind, and the absence of onlookers means that his vanishing does not even go acknowledged. There is no regard afforded to the little guy, and that might as well be the conspiracy in itself. 

Mr Hat's Second Biggest Mystery (South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut)

 

The single biggest mystery surrounding South Park's Mr Hat is obviously how he managed to reach the gas pedal in the episode "Chef Aid" in order to operate a truck and break Mr Garrison and Chef out of jail. That's something that is just flat-out unknowable. It's also not the kind of mystery that I suspect many of us are liable to lose a whole lot of sleep over. The inexplicability of it all is, in part, what makes it so hilarious. More crucially still, this was Mr Hat's finest hour, and the outcome was monumentally awesome. He'd used his preternatural puppet powers for heroic purposes, atoning to Garrison for being a two-timing whore and enabling Chef to attend the benefit concert his friends from the rock business were holding in his honor. The particulars of how he managed to pull this off seem irrelevant when he brought such cheers and lifted spirits all round.

The same cannot be said for Mr Hat's second biggest mystery, which is the one that caused yours truly quite a bit of heartbreak and confusion during the summer of 1999. I speak of the theatrical feature film, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and of the small role he played in its conclusion. Let's take a moment to reflect on how the movie, for all of its merits, has rather a vexing resolution insofar as Mr Hat is concerned, one that appears to leave him and Garrison dangling and gives out contradictory signals regarding which suitor's hand he ends up on. This one gets kind of personal, so buckle up. 

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut climaxes with combat breaking out between American and Canadian forces, and Kyle and Cartman getting caught in the crossfire. While fleeing the ensuing carnage they encounter a mortally wounded Garrison, who pleads with the boys to take Mr Hat with them. They initially attempt to honor his request, but Cartman quickly tires of hanging onto the puppet and discards it. Soon after, Satan arrives on Earth to bring about the apocalypse, accompanied by his manipulative and emotionally abusive lover, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, and trailed by the soul of a damned but determined Kenny McCormick. Satan continues to be subjugated by Saddam, but with the moral support of Kenny he finally summons the resolve to stand up to him. Out of gratitude to Kenny, Satan agrees to grant him one wish (apparently he can do that benignly, not just through Faustian bargains), and Kenny asks for things to go back to the way they were before the war (aware that this would not exempt him from his own dark fate). Satan laments that he seems destined to live forever in solitude, when he notices the discarded Mr Hat and asks if he'd be willing to accompany him back to Hell. Satan throws his voice to supply the puppet's response - "Sure, I bet we could be best friends, Mr Satan" - and in doing so he eerily acquires the accent and effeminate tones of Garrison. This can be interpreted in two different ways. Either Mr Hat is literally speaking through Satan, as he can be perceived as doing with Garrison, and is actively flirting with him (which I guess tracks with his record for being a two-timing whore), OR Satan has officially hit rock bottom in his desperation and risks sinking into Garrison's derangement. (I gave my thoughts on the question of Mr Hat's reality in my coverage of "Weight Gain 4000", and am once again inclined to apply the philosophy that both things can be true.) An uplifted Satan makes his departure, still holding onto Mr Hat, and the bloodshed on Earth is duly undone. Garrison recovers from his injuries and anxiously looks around for his puppet companion, unaware of what transpired. Meanwhile, the entire town joins hands and celebrates its miraculous deliverance with a reprise of the opening number, "Mountain Town".

There is one further twist to this scenario that we'll get to shortly, but let me first be upfront that for my young teenaged self, who had been sitting there lapping up every solitary second of this film until that moment, this aspect of the ending proved to be the humongous fly pissing nosily in the ointment. To say that it sat uneasily with me would be an understatement, since it's all well and good for Satan to want to alleviate his loneliness with an endearingly uncanny puppet, but where exactly would that leave Garrison? I felt so strongly that Satan's happiness should not come at the expense of Garrison's, and that's a sentiment I'll continue to stand by. Because Garrison has feelings too, you know. He might be a royal dickhole in most regards, but the puppet was the one thing he genuinely loved and cared about. At this point in the series he was still very dependent on his relationship with Mr Hat, and we'd already seen in "Summer Sucks" how depressed he became in being separated from him for a prolonged length of time. With the help of Mr Twig, he was able to bluff his way through most of that absence, but he was clearly not a happy bunny deep down. Whenever the children asked him when Mr Hat was coming back (as seen in "Clubhouses" and "Chef Aid") it cut right through his facade like a knife through butter. So the implication that he was about to be subjected to round two of that process seemed really unnecessarily cruel. Not to mention that we, like Garrison's class, had just spent a good chunk of Season 2 waiting for Mr Hat to return (because Mr Twig was blatantly never going to replace him), so were they seriously about to send him packing again, not even nine months after he and Garrison were reconciled in "Chef Aid"? Was this going to be a regular thing with that puppet?

Or was this all in fact a gigantic false alarm, and I was allowing myself to get stupid hung up over absolutely nothing (and not for the first time)? Because there is this one additional detail at the end of the film that I want to call attention to and cannot emphasise enough - Mr Hat is back with Mr Garrison in the final sequence. It isn't explained how, but he is. They appear together in two different shots, the first being in the crowd zoom-out during the reprise of "Mountain Town". And then at the very end, Garrison and Mr Hat are among the characters bidding farewell to Kenny as he rises out of Hell and, in recognition of his most noble deed, is welcomed by the angels into Heaven. Garrison is waving, while Mr Hat's gaze is directed upward, indicating that he's very attuned to what's going on. Neither reappearance went unnoticed in the cinema, and they definitely made me feel a whole lot better. In my head, I could rationalise it perfectly. After all, Kenny had wished for everything to be returned to the way it was before the war. He was, in effect, wishing for the restoration of the status quo, so that things could resume as normal and there would be no lasting consequences to have to grapple with in the series (his demise was the only outstanding matter that would explicitly not be remedied by the wish, but we all knew that was automatically being reset). Which ultimately required Mr Hat to go straight back to Garrison, whether Satan was on board with that or not. That might seem like a sorry turn of events for Satan, who would have had his sole consolation stripped away from him offscreen, but the dude can't just be stealing other people's puppet boyfriends. Not to mention, it wouldn't really have been a happy ending for him anyway, if the implication was that he'd have become as mentally damaged as Garrison (so which of them would actually have been taking the other to Hell?). Best just to let this one go, old Nick. You do have your upcoming relationship with Chris the nutritionist to look forward to. (Oh, and maybe give some attention to Damien, ya sodding deadbeat?)

It should also be noted that this was indeed consistent with the continuity of the series, where Mr Hat was still with Garrison, and there was never any reference to Satan coming between them - although I had to wait a few months to confirm it, as the UK was currently between Seasons 2 and 3, and I didn't really get into using this internet thing until the year 2000 (and even then, mostly to look up fake Pokémon cheats...I never did get that Pikablu after wandering round the Safari Zone for hours).

Technically everything worked out. But I still walked away from the experience with a sour taste in my mouth. Having Mr Hat show up at the end was absolutely better than nothing, but I didn't like the fact that they hadn't addressed it within the narrative, making his final status a little fuzzy. How could I be certain that his reappearance was even part of the plan and not some random animation error? That it happened in two shots and not just one, and that the second reappearance had seemed so prominent gave me some hope that this wasn't the case, but I couldn't say for sure. To this day, I still don't know what the intention was, and it's one of those things where if I dwell on it for more than ten seconds, it will bug the living snot out of me. It's for this reason that I've always had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. There's a lot that I can love about it - the soundtrack, the new characters of Gregory and Mole, the interplay between Saddam and Satan, the reveal of Kenny's face and his final redemption (not that Kenny was ever in any serious need of redemption from the viewer's perspective, but he demonstrated what a good kid he is at heart). But that moment where Garrison regains consciousness and asks "Where's Mr Hat?" hurts me too damned much, and since it occurs right at the end, that's the feeling I'm inevitably left with. I just said that I liked the soundtrack, but simply hearing that reprise of "Mountain Town" sends instantaneous chills down my spine.

It's also why I'll reflexively grit my teeth whenever I hear anyone suggest that Bigger, Longer and Uncut would have been a really magnificent and logical point on which to have concluded the franchise (a discussion that seemed more pertinent nearer the time, when there were doubts about the series' longevity). I cannot tell you how relieved I am that this wasn't where it ended. If we'd lived in an alternate reality where South Park had been required to bow out early, then I honestly believe that the Season 3 finale, "World Wide Recorder Concert", would have been a much more triumphant curtain call. I've some major biases on that point, since "World Wide Recorder Concert" is my favourite South Park episode, and it's probably not a coincidence that Garrison there gets the last word and it all ends happily for him (well, happily in the sense that what he doesn't know isn't hurting him). The allusion to the ending of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country might not be on quite so epic a scale as Kenny's final ascension in the movie, but in its own quiet way I find it every bit as moving.

One way or another, Mr Hat obviously did ditch Satan and find his way back to Garrison. That much is evident from how the series carried on, even if neither the movie or series cared to explicitly account for it. I'm also aware of how very silly it is to allow a matter so inconsequential to eat any kind of hole in you. So why does it continue to bother me?

 

Everything worked out...with a happy end?

Part of the problem is that it's not altogether clear where precisely in the series' chronology the events of the movie are intended to fall. I'm not sure if Parker and Stone have given any official confirmation on where they see BLaU as occurring, but from what we the viewers have to go on, we just know that it has to be some time between Season 2's "The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka" (which first set up the Satan-Saddam relationship) and the Season 4 two-parter "Do The Handicapped Go To Hell?" and "Probably" (which picked it up from where the movie left off). Bigger, Longer and Uncut hit US theatres on 30th June 1999, as Season 3 was roughly a third of the way through its run, and "Sexual Harassment Panda" was the first episode to air after its debut (on July 7th 1999), but I don't think that automatically makes it BLaU's immediate successor in terms of internal continuity. In my mind, BLaU takes place well before the entirety of Season 3. Sure, there are a handful of moments in Season 3 that were blatantly designed to coincide with BLaU's theatrical presence - "Cat Orgy" contained a shout-out to the film's most prominent box office competitor, the staggeringly brainless Will Smith vehicle Wild Wild West, while "Two Guys Naked In A Hot Tub" had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from Mole, a character otherwise exclusive to BLaU. But as to the contents of the movie itself, it seems more closely connected to what was going on in the second season, which is when I'm going to hazard a guess that it was scripted. Callbacks to the series are predominantly to Season 2, and to earlier Season 2 installments at that. The revelation from "Ike's Wee Wee" that Kyle's infant brother was Canadian-born proves significant, while Mr Mackey's naive and surface-level understanding of addiction from the same episode comes up again in his showstopper, "It's Easy, Mmmkay". A lot of the supporting kids in the movie are also quite vague and undefined, in a way that I'd associate with the first couple of seasons - Craig and Butters are still background characters, and I don't think Tweek (introduced in the penultimate episode of Season 2) shows up at all. But that's all very tenuous, right? Of course Kyle wasn't going to forget that his brother is Canadian (even if Sheila did), Mackey's well-intentioned condescension has long been one of his defining character traits, and when you've an extensive cast and only 80 minutes to spare, it is inevitable that not everybody is going to have a chance to stand out (heck, not even Pip, who at that point was one of the more established supporting child characters, got to be anything more than an extra in the movie). The essential detail that most firmly aligns BLaU with Season 2 would be the Saddam factor. He was kind of a looming figure in its opening stages, before just going quiet for a bit.

Saddam's appearance at the end of "The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka" was itself a continuity nod to the Terrance and Phillip special "Not Without My Anus", which had infamously aired in place of "Cartman's Mom Is Still A Dirty Slut", the much-anticipated follow-up to Season 1's closing cliffhanger, earlier that spring as an April Fools prank. (Note that when Sky 1 aired Season 2 in the UK, they did not attempt to replicate the trick and stuck "Not Without My Anus" on the tail-end as a weird little out of context extra, making it random as fuck when Saddam showed up in "Mexican Staring Frog", and with a Canadian accent to boot.) The term "continuity" might need to be applied quite loosely in this scenario, since "Not Without My Anus" was framed as a made-for-TV drama within the context of the South Park universe (albeit one purportedly based on a true story). The means by which Saddam met his demise in "Not Without My Anus" (suffocated by the farts of a stadium of flatulent Canadians) also differed from how he was later reported to have died within the movie (gored by a pack of wild boars), a discrepancy that I'm almost positive was due to them needing a concise explanation for the benefit of movie-goers who hadn't kept up with the series and would otherwise have been confused about why Saddam was in Hell (particularly with his real-life counterpart being alive at the time), and the events of "Not Without My Anus" being too baffling and convoluted to recap at the start of BLaU. The series offers a curious intersection between these disparate continuities - in the episode "Probably", when Satan recounts to God the circumstances under which he met Saddam, he reaffirms the death by wild boars backstory, but also specifies that it happened in April, a nod to the original air date of "Not Without My Anus". It's also notable that in the movie itself, the featured events are explicitly stated to take place six weeks after Saddam's swine-inflicted death, which suggests that they would have fallen some time soon after "Mexican Staring Frog", if Saddam was established to already be dead within the internal timeline.

Now let's consider how Garrison and Mr Hat might specifically fit into this. In the series, Mr Hat was with Garrison from the very beginning up until the Season 6 episode "The Death Camp of Tolerance" when Garrison decided to officially retire him (sob). The only exception in between would be that aforementioned arc in the middle of Season 2 where he went AWOL for a few episodes and was temporarily replaced by Mr Twig. So...if you're determined to tie Mr Hat's supposed disappearance at the end of the movie with the continuity of the series, that's the only window you have. But is that even doable? Could this actually be the origin of that whole bizarre love triangle arc in Season 2, rather than merely a harrowing echo of it? Perhaps. There is a fan theory proposing that "Summer Sucks" should be seen as the direct successor to the events of BLaU, as awkward as it would seem to have to retroactively factor in the movie before an episode that debuted a whole year ahead of it. After all, that installment opens with Mr Hat having already absconded, and Garrison struggling to comprehend what's become of him. It would also be consistent with what the movie indicates about Saddam and where he goes within the series' timeline, with bonus points for the fact that if his death occurred in April, six weeks along would be taking us into the run-up into summer. The obvious bugbear of this theory, from my perspective, is that it requires you to overlook Mr Hat's reappearance with Garrison at the end of BLaU, which I am loath to do, but I think it's an intriguing notion nevertheless and that it merits consideration.

The trouble is that the background information regarding Saddam might ultimately hold more water with this reading than what happens with Garrison and Hat in "Summer Sucks". There are certain narrative details it seems somewhat of a stretch to have to line up with the movie (notably, that in "Summer Sucks" Mr Hat specifically goes missing on the last day of school), but all in all it's more of a tonal mismatch that I'm feeling. The circumstances behind Mr Hat's mysterious disappearance in "Summer Sucks" are implied to be quieter and more mundane (relatively speaking) than the high-stakes drama of the movie's climax. Garrison spends the episode grappling with a low-key but intensely personal crisis that, so far as he's concerned, completely overshadows the town's apocalypse of the week, an out-of-control black snake firework destroying everything in its path. His immediate assumption is that one of the children has stolen the puppet as a prank, though he later reflects, during his psychiatry session with Dr Katz, that Mr Hat might have walked out because of a disagreement they'd had earlier that morning. What they disagreed about is anybody's guess (and Garrison seemingly attached less significance to it than did Mr Hat, if it was really that much of an afterthought to him), and I'd argue that the story works as well as it does because it keeps the details to such a vague and understated level (making it the perfect companion to the wilder, more overblown A-story about the snake). We learn few of the particulars, like what inspired Mr Hat to go or how he was able to leg it in the absence of legs, a choice that accentuates the absurdity of the situation, but also the pathos. Garrison's loneliness becomes twofold. Not only has he been unceremoniously ditched by his emotional support puppet, the rest of the town takes little to no interest in his plight and can't even begin to understand what he's going through. Even the viewer isn't totally sure on where to stand, with Katz's assessment suggesting that his testimony should be seen as unreliable, although toward the end we get a teasing glimpse into Mr Hat's side of the story, which corroborates at least some of what Garrison was saying. The puppet is revealed to have travelled to Green Bay, Wisconsin, apparently to live out his sexual fantasies involving Brett Favre (odds are that he succeeded, given that Favre seemed to be returning his interest). So if this does take place right after BLaU, then presumably he's already dumped Satan and is weighing up his options before going back to Garrison.

I do find it basically plausible that Parker and Stone might well have conceived the movie's conclusion first and then been inspired by that to do the whole arc in Season 2 where Garrison and Mr Hat spend several episodes estranged. On a conceptual level it certainly feels as though there could be some intersection, especially since they didn't land that far apart, all things considered. At any rate, it's an idea they did better justice to in the series, where they had a lot more time to explore its implications. And since Season 2 saw the light of day first, it makes the ending of BLaU feel kind of redundant as well as mean. Whatever Garrison did prior to "Summer Sucks" to drive Mr Hat away, he had suffered enough for it, and my feeling is that he'd earned the right to keep the puppet at his side uninterrupted for a few more seasons. So yes, I definitely understand the appeal of the theory. It takes what amounted to a joke and a loose end in the movie and allows it to have meaningful follow-up with a clear resolution in the series, in a way that doesn't feel as if it's rolling back on any prior development. I'm not sure that I buy the two premises as totally compatible, however. At most, I can see one idea giving rise to the other, but I'm not really sensing that they are one and the same. I don't subscribe to the theory, but I will make this one further observation about it. When Mr Hat finally returns to Garrison in "Chef Aid", Garrison is initially reluctant to take him back and throws him out the door, telling him to go to Hell. That's standard retaliation from Garrison (he said the same thing to Mackey in "Summer Sucks"), but it gives it a little extra resonance when you're watching it through the lens of Mr Hat having potentially already been there.

As I say, I'd rather not ignore the fact that Mr Hat IS with Garrison during the final sequence of BLaU. That is what my heart and my gut tell me to look toward, even if my brain is inevitably going to get in the way by asking questions. We've already discussed how the nature of Kenny's wish might potentially account for Mr Hat's return within the narrative, but since it's not acknowledged we can't be certain what's actually supposed to be going on, and that keeps me in such a queasy state of limbo when processing this ending. For that much I will forever curse South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, even as the "Uncle Fucka" sequence retains its devilish power to have me collapsing into fits of giggles. It is what it is nonetheless, and do we have any means of making sense of why the sequence plays out as it does? I suspect that I've given the matter more thought than anybody else on Earth, and as I see it there are three different possibilities we have to choose from.

The first is that Mr Hat's reappearance is indicative of something being cut from the final sequence (in spite of the film's innuendo-laden title, we know from the trailer alone that there was excised material). It's entirely possible that the epilogue was running on a little too long and needed to be trimmed down, and the solutions to Stan and Kyle's respective arcs would naturally take priority. In which case they might have taken out a follow-up moment with Mr Hat and Garrison and hoped that audiences would just roll with it. Irritating shortcuts will sometimes be taken (Pixar's Soul, for example, was meant to incorporate a sequence explaining Mr Mittens' survival that was ultimately excised, although they showed Mittens alive and well anyway, to the relief but also confusion of cat-loving audiences all over). Back in 1999, this is what I'd desperately hoped would turn out to be the case, but I don't think anything ever came of it.

The second is that Mr Hat being with Garrison in those two closing shots was an animation error that was somehow made twice over. This is by and far my least favourite possibility, since it makes that final glimmer of comfort a total fluke and suggests that the intentions of the film were a whole lot meaner, although it isn't completely unsalvageable, by virtue of the fact that it still happened. I'm of the opinion that there can be happy accidents. Just look to the ending of "World Wide Recorder Concert". When Garrison boards the bus in the final scene and gives his directions to Ms Crabtree, you might notice that Kenny is alive and seated in the background, despite having already been killed during the disastrous brown noise incident. While it wasn't entirely out of the question for Kenny to die and be immediately resurrected (it happened earlier that season as part of a meta joke in "Succubus"), my intuition here is that Kenny's return was indeed a mistake. Bugs in the visuals are to be expected from time to time. But you know what, I'm glad that he's there. I think the closing Undiscovered Country allusion is simply wonderful, and it strikes me as only right and proper that even Kenny was allowed to be a part of it. We can apply that same logic to BLaU. If nothing else, those final shots give the appearance of Garrison not being left alone at the end or excluded from the celebration, and that too seems only right and proper. If it was an honest error, then all I can say is, bless the inattentive animators who were responsible. Whatever they were paying you was not enough.

The third possibility is the one that I tend to lean toward nowadays, which is that Parker and Stone were straight-up trolling us. They worked that interaction between Satan and Mr Hat into the resolution because it amused them, but at this stage weren't actually looking to mess with the status quo and just stuck Mr Hat back with Garrison anyway, in stark defiance of any and all prospects of there being genuine consequences. The question of where precisely the movie is supposed to fall within with the series' timeline becomes irrelevant, because everything is reset at the end, the situation with Garrison and Mr Hat included. If anybody cared enough to get their knickers in a twist about the lack of explanation, then that would be hilarious, wouldn't it? I, unfortunately, was the easiest victim in the world. But hey, at least the outcome actually went in my favour, in terms of what I'd wanted to see happen. And the following year they gave us "World Wide Recorder Concert", which I wholeheartedly adore and see as compensating for any callous disregard Garrison might have received at the end of the movie, so it's all good.

Besides which, I've made the point twice already that a number of Mr Hat's most memorable moments were rooted in a degree of inexplicability. As is befitting a character who is a puppet of ambiguous autonomy. The question of how he managed to ditch Satan and get back to Garrison's hand at the end of BLaU will just have to be added to that same list. We all know that it wouldn't have worked out between Mr Hat and Satan anyway, in the same way that it ultimately didn't work out between him and Brett Favre. Mr Hat is a flirtatious son of a bitch, but Satan is so touchy-feely, and I could see that pissing Mr Hat off before long. Maybe his last-minute u-turn was entirely unrelated to Kenny's wish, and he just realised then and there that Satan really wasn't as hot as all that and he was getting out of the arrangement through his own volition. You underestimate those preternatural puppet powers at your own peril (unless of course you're Kathie Lee).

How Deep Is Your Love: Take That's Bizarre Farewell Video

The announcement on 13th February 1996 that UK pop act Take That were no more was one of those moments that defined the passing of childhood for many an 80s baby. 

The news itself did not come as much of a shock, for the pieces were already beginning to crumble. Once a perfectly-assembled quintet, they'd been a man down since the previous summer, when band black sheep Robbie Williams had departed with immense acrimony, and under much tabloid scrutiny. Frontman Gary Barlow, the songwriting talent behind the group, sensed that the time was right for him to cut his remaining bandmates loose and make a bid for his own solo career. Famously, the Samaritans set up special hotlines to counsel distraught fans, and I saw the news reports of teenage girls sobbing and begging their idols not to desert them - although the only anecdote I personally have to share involved a girl at my local youth club who reacted to the breakup by gleefully snapping a Take That pencil into four separate pieces. I'm guessing she was an East 17 diehard.

Still, even if you didn't share in the fans' howling attachment (as I certainly couldn't), it was hard not to feel disconcerted at the announcement, particularly if, like me, you were a kid, and Take That had been around and dominated the charts for such a significant portion of your lifetime that a world without them seemed a little more depleted. I couldn't help but partake in that melancholic sense that things were changing, even as I hid behind a wall of schadenfreude (just not to the same flamboyant degree as my pencil-snapping acquaintance). I was old enough to know that music acts came and went (when was the last time anyone in the UK had given thought to New Kids on The Block, the boy band from across the pond whose success had paved the way for the likes of Take That?), but Take That were one of the biggies, and it was the first time that I had borne witness to a band giving a press conference to say, "That's it, we're done." This wasn't one of those soft-pedalled breakups where decisions to part ways are tempered with insistences that it's just a hiatus to pursue other things, with the door always open for further collaborations. They were very clear that this was where the Take That train would terminate. They had one last bit of unfinished business in the form of their upcoming Greatest Hits release, and its promo single, a cover of the 1977 Bee Gees hit "How Deep Is Your Love", but it would be their absolute last as a unit. Said Barlow: "Unfortunately, the rumors are true. "How Deep Is Your Love" is going to be our last single together, and the Greatest Hits is going to be our last album. And from today, is no more." We were assured that the end of Take That didn't mean the end of the group's stories as individuals, with Barlow being particularly ambitious about jumping into his solo career straight off the bat. Nobody could have been prepared for what was coming right around the corner - that in the twist of separation, it'd be Williams who'd excel at being free - or indeed ten years down the line. Right now it was February 1996 and as we understood it, things were never going to be the same again.

"How Deep Is Your Love" was released on 26th February and, with listeners eager to savour that final flurry of Take That momentum, occupied the top spot of the UK charts for three weeks. Even so, it felt like a curiously modest offering for such a momentous occasion. The band's treatment of the Gibbs' disco-era classic is perfectly nice. As a record there's not a good deal wrong with it, unless you're one of those purists who turns your nose up at covers on principle. But I doubt that many fans are going to rank it among their strongest output, and as the swan song to a glittering career it had the whiff of an anti-climax. Some questioned why they'd chosen to bow out with something as perfunctory as a cover, particularly when their previous single "Never Forget", with its extravagant meditations on the mutually transient nature of youth and celebrity, had felt like it was practically destined to be their grand finale. "How Deep Is Your Love" became the would-be palate cleanser that gave off its own bemusing aftertaste, as sure a sign as any of the band's waned morale post-Williams. But the video was a different story. The video was where all the farewell energy had gone, and it was...a choice, to say the least.

I say "energy", but I'm not sure if that's really an apt word for a video where the band spend the duration in a sedentary position, tied to chairs while a crazed abductor subjects them to various tortures. But it gives the single a sense of finality that the song alone couldn't convey - and that too is quite the choice. On the cheekiest of levels, it saw them coming full circle. Take That had started their career with the BDSM-friendly "Do What U Like", so maybe they'd seen something poetic in the idea of ending with a video themed around bondage. There's none of that joyous jelly-smearing going on here, mind, with "How Deep Is Your Love" being intent on combining two differing, even opposing moods. Director Nick Drandt gives the video a dark and gloomy look that captures the overhanging solemnity of the matter, with the knowledge that we were at the end of an era. But it's also a knowingly silly piece (if in a much moodier, more restrained manner than "Do What U Like") as if the band were aware that they shouldn't take themselves so seriously and that the best thing they could do, under the circumstances, would be to go out with a dash of humour. The abductor, played by model Paula Hamilton, is genuinely creepy, but in the campest of ways. You can tell she's crazy because of the weird panda eyes she's acquired through her excessive use of eyeshadow. And also because she dresses like Cruella de Vil in the latter half of the video, when, not content simply to jab Barlow in the throat with a fork, she takes all four of them out on a road trip and positions them atop a steep slope overlooking a reservoir in Middlesex. She seemingly does an eeny meeny miny moe to select at random which one she's going to torture next, but it's of no surprise when she singles out Barlow yet again. He was the undisputed star of the final curtain, nabbing the lead vocals and leaving Howard Donald, Jason Orange and Mark Owen with little to do on "How Deep Is Your Love" outside of harmonising and looking on in horror. 

What's interesting about the video (aside from how it ends) is its casting of the obsessive fan as the villain, particularly in light of the distress exhibited by the real-world fans at the prospect of having to bid their beloved popsters farewell, at least in their current form. Here, the band are literally held captive and constrained by a fan who would seemingly rather destroy them than let them be free. Obviously, it's an ironic take on the depths of devotion; we have a fan whose passion for Take That is so uncontainable that she needs to keep them roped and duct taped in her basement and make them her personal playthings. But the context of the video also makes the choice of song a lot less arbitrary as a finale. It wasn't just a pretty tune they could cover convincingly, and old enough that their teenaged fanbase wouldn't necessarily be comparing it to the Bee Gees original (unless their mothers had introduced them to Saturday Night Fever). It was a plea to the fans, asking them if they loved them enough that they'd be willing to let them go, let them grow and let them blossom into something else. To bear with them, as they had asked the anonymous 14-year-old who had called into her local media outlet in tears during that fateful press conference, and to embrace change and all the possibilities it might bring. The alternative, the video proposed, would be analogous to keeping the band stagnant and confined, each bound to their assigned positions as part of Take That, for no other purpose other than to suit the fans' needs for comfort and diversion. 

This depiction of Hamilton as a twisted representation of the band's fanbase was not, I believe, intended with any malice. There was a winking wryness to the affair, as is particularly evident in the video's resolution. "How Deep Is Your Love" does not have a bittersweetly triumphant ending, where Hamilton realises the error of her ways and the band goes gracefully into the sunset, promising to make the most of whatever lies ahead on their diverging paths. No, it fades out in the most spectacularly morbid fashion, with Hamilton grabbing Barlow and dangling him over the drop; as he continues to challenge her over the extent of her devotion, we focus on that telltale smudge trailing from one of her panda eyes, a sign of her inner turmoil, until finally she lets him go. As in, she lets him fall from her grasp, and he's apparently about to find out how deep is that reservoir. Donald, Orange and Owen look on in horror, as they've been doing this entire time, while Hamilton stands aghast, struggling to process what she's done, until she takes note of the other band members sitting there, and that sociopathic smile returns as she heads in their direction. You get the impression that she's not one to break up a collection. So that's it. The end. Take That are all dead. Williams might think he's off the hook, but what are the odds that Hamilton will be hunting him down in the aftermath and bringing him to the same location?

A final video in which the group's disbandment was signified through their fictitious murders was certainly a novel means of attempting to tie a bow on the Take That story. You could argue that it was even a misjudged one - I'm not sure how receptive those distraught fans would have been to the implicit humour, or if watching the band's implied demises would have brought them any lick of solace in this darkest of hours. Maybe they'd have preferred something a little more wholesome and reassuring. But for all its macabre quirkiness, there's an emotional honesty about the video that I find intriguing, and admirable. If "Never Forget" was the band's proclamation, loud and victorious, about the exhilaration and precariousness that came with having reached the top of the world, looking down and seeing how far you'd come but also how far you potentially had to fall, "How Deep Is Your Love" was their quieter acknowledgement that the moment had simply passed and there was no going back. It wasn't the mighty bang of a finish that "Never Forget" would have been, but so what? Sometimes a resigned whimper can be as resounding, especially when it's so gloriously weird a whimper as this.

Williams echoed the sentiment (albeit more bitterly) in his 1998 single "No Regrets". By this point he was feeling confident enough as a solo artist to be taking potshots at his former bandmates - while "No Regrets" sounds on the surface like it's detailing the conflicting emotions arising from the breakdown of a more conventional romantic pairing, the lyrics "You're far too short to carry weight" (performed as backing vocals by Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys) are often cited as the giveaway that he was airing his dirty laundry with Barlow. And the music video ended with his own implied demise - or at least, that was always my impression at the time. We watch as he abandons a glitzy stage performance and goes on a little meander with a leaking jerry can in hand, leaving a trail of highly flammable liquid behind him; inevitably, it catches fire, and the flames come rushing in his direction as he delivers the dramatic punchline: "I guess the love we once had is officially...DEAD!" Sure, there's an obvious metaphor to be had in there about burned bridges, but it was also my presumption that he was about to be engulfed by an inferno of his own making - the imagery is a little more abstract compared to Barlow's demise in "How Deep Is Your Love", but the detonating of that final whammy right as the flames are at his heels has us exiting on a note of hair-raising dread. For although Williams crowed about being a survivor ("Suppose it's just a point of view, but they tell me I'm doing fine"), the song made plain that he actually harboured a myriad of regrets about the situation ("If I could just stop hating you, I'd feel sorry for us instead"). He'd like the Take That moment to have resolved differently, but he concurred that it was over and there was no going back. 

The funny thing is, of course, that the sentiment would prove incorrect on both sides of the equation. Sometimes a moment that seems permanently faded does come back around, if not necessarily in any great hurry. The years that followed Take That's split would be punishing for Barlow. He didn't really go plummeting into a watery grave, but he was forced to retreat into the wilderness when his solo career didn't take off the way he'd hoped, despite an auspicious start, and could only watch as Williams ascended to a level of mega stardom that most musicians only dream of. By the end of 1996 the vacant spot Take That had left as the faces of British pop had been claimed by the Spice Girls, with the success of "Wannabe" indicating that listeners had an appetite for something with a little more brashness; it took Williams a few goes to get it right, but the public responded to the cheeky personality he brought to his output, all while Barlow struggled to stay afloat. The black sheep had had his revenge and then some, and for a time it looked as though the rest of Take That were destined to become mere footnotes in Williams' saga, the world seemingly happy to leave them dumped and decomposing at the bottom of that lonely reservoir in Middlesex. Then in late 2006, more than a decade after the split and "How Deep Is Your Love", Barlow, Donald, Orange and Owen were able to crawl back out of their metaphorical quarry and pull off one of the most impressive comebacks in pop history. Their new single, "Patience", was a major hit, topping the UK charts for four weeks and picking up the prize for Best British Single at the 2007 Brit Awards. In the end those assurances to the tearful 14-year-old who'd been asked to bear with them were no bluff, even if the journey had been a far twistier one than either the band or the fans could have anticipated. And although Williams initially declined to be part of the reunion, even he was won over by the goodwill it engendered, reconciling with his bandmates and updating the final punchline of "No Regrets" to "ALIVE!"

All of which retroactively changes the meaning of the "How Deep Is Your Love" video. It ceases to be an allegory for the band's demise, but rather their temporary casting into irrelevance, as well as a haunting peek into an alternate timeline where this might indeed have been our perturbing adieu. But it certainly does capture the rockiness of its moment.

Maxwell House (We Don't Like Change, Do We Deirdre?)

The Maxwell House "Deirdre" ad from 1994 is one of those campaigns that didn't really catch on with zeitgeist in any significant way, but that I've found definitely made a quieter impression on the people who saw it - particularly if, like myself, they were young and ultra-susceptible to a gloriously uncanny sign-off. For many years, my quest to locate the Imperial Leather spot about the dishonest minimalists that had so unsettled me in 1996 was impeded by the problem that no one besides myself seemed to so much as remember the premise (much less the brand it was promoting). If I mentioned this freaky black and white ad from the mid-1990s about a couple who lived in a surreal abode and were concealing bars of luxury soap from one another beneath the plant pots beside their bathtub, I was met with blank stares all around. But if I brought up the mid-90s ad about another couple who lived in an eerily drab living room and were complaining about their next door neighbours and how they'd stopped liking them ever since they'd switched coffee brands, then it was a different story entirely: "Oh bloody hell! Yes, I remember, that advert scared the crap out me. That freeze frame at the end was diabolical!" I wouldn't go so far as to claim that the eponymous "Deirdre" ever gave me nightmares as a child, but I do have distinct memories of waking up in the early hours, Skinamarink-style, and being haunted by the mental image of her monstrously contorted face in the darkness. I was certainly old enough to know that there was no way that that woman was going to emerge from the television and devour me, but in practice that mattered little. She had already gotten to me where I felt most powerless. She was, without doubt, one of the most terrifying presences to stalk the advertising airwaves in the 1990s, and I say it's high time we gave her her flowers.

There is actually quite a bit of thematic overlap between the "Dierdre" ad and the aforementioned Imperial Leather "minimalist" ad, in that we glimpse their respective products from primarily the perspective of people who would, on the surface, be inclined to shun such things. We could even combine them with the Toyota Roadster "ascetic" ad from 2000 to form a lose sort of trilogy of advertising scenarios regarding people leading deliberately spartan existences, in which said product acquired a haunting and/or intrusive presence as a sinfully destructive item to be resisted at all costs. They were all profoundly odd and disconcerting pieces that hinged on a tension between abstinence and clandestine desire in a way that clearly rattled me at various stages of my childhood development. In the ascetic's case, he lived alone out in the wilderness and had only himself to answer to for his lurid Roadster-inspired fantasies (and, in the extended cut, the suit and tie he had stashed away), but the other two involved deception amongst couples who'd made a conscious decision to forgo certain creature comforts, whether as a bold lifestyle statement or out of a sense of social superiority. For the Imperial Leather minimalists, the deception was mutual (and potentially something that both parties were fully aware of), but in "Deirdre" it was a joke that only one partner was tauntingly in on. Of the three, "Deirdre" is the most overtly comedic, but it's also by and far the most hair-raising, both on account of the fiendish sting in its tail and the repeated atmospheric dissonance to which it subjects viewers on the route to its psyche-scarring payoff.

The genius of "Deirdre" is that it effectively gives you two ads in one. One is breezy and conventional, the other is arch and sardonic. They represent the opposing characters of two different households, which are intercut with an incongruity so jarring as to evoke the sensation of flicking back and forth between two channels. The couples in question frankly don't feel as though they could inhabit the same universe, let alone live side by side on the same street. The Maxwell-drinking couple (never named, but we'll deem them our "protagonist couple", on account of them being the ones we're supposed to want to emulate) are presented in a succession of exuberant cuts that call to the mind the types of ad campaigns that would have populated breaks a few years back, when the 80s were transitioning into the 90s and there was an extensive reliance on upbeat jingles and sun-kissed images (for an example from Maxwell House's own arsenal, check out "Get The Max" from 1988). The time we spend with the protagonist couple is agreeable, if utterly banal. Taken on their own, it's a straightforward demonstration of how an activity as mundane as downing a morning cup of Joe might become an invaluable ritual in reaffirming familial connections and greeting the possibilities that each new day has to offer, with only the excessive jauntiness of the accompanying music track suggesting any kind of parodic intention. The cliched nature of the images is given a more thorough recontextualisation through the input of our antagonist couple, who comment on the action from their own lustreless confines. The bespectacled husband (also unnamed) is the only one who speaks, while the wife (she's Deirdre) stands expressionless in the backdrop. In their pre-Maxwell days, the protagonist couple were apparently just like them ("our sort of people"). The tale of how they changed their coffee and in the process ceased to be the kind of neighbours the antagonist couple could jibe with is revealed to us as though the husband were divulging some form of community-rocking scandal, with the final assurance that, "We try to avoid them nowadays".

Already there is an atmospheric unease, generated by the rapid intercutting of the motion and blaring party music characterising the coffee-induced euphoria next door and the silent inertia conveying the coldly puritanical flavour of the antagonist couple's lifestyle. It will likely not escape us that the protagonist couple are always seen surrounded by greenery, embracing the open world, while the antagonist couple never venture from their living room, making them prisoners of their own close-mindedness. But it also rests on a tension between what plays like a feverishly heightened fantasy and a cartoonishly tedious reality. Neither side feels particularly real. For all of their vapidity, the scenes with the protagonist couple have a surreal, dream-like quality, suggesting an exaggerated proposal for how a consumer product could transform your life, and with the framing commentary from the antagonist couple implying a self-awareness on the ad's part of its own falseness. The antagonists' world has, on the one hand, a stronger grounding in reality, with its lack of music and frenetic energy, but that's negated by the humorously caricatured nature of their conservatism. Although the two worlds appear to be at total odds, they represent the perfect balancing act - the make-believe paradise of the protagonist couple is both a knowing joke and a sympathetic refuge from the overbearing austerity next door. The antagonists' angle might give us an outlet for sneering at the more banal advertising conventions in which the protagonists are revel, but they themselves are ultimately too grotesque to elicit much affinity.

Which takes us to our infamous ending. A third-person voice-over imparts the slogan, "The full of beans coffee for full beans people", suggesting that this is the fundamental distinction being drawn between the two sides. Some people are "full of beans", possessing all of the enthusiasm for life that Maxwell House typifies, and those who aren't a part of that privileged group will simply not comprehend. The closing twist, however, implies that it is a potential that just about anybody can unlock. The antagonist husband acknowledges his wife for the first time: "We don't like change, do we, Deirdre?" Deirdre has spent the entire ad in silence, which ostensibly signals accordance with her husband's sneery sentiments. In the final seconds, she maintains her silence, but gets in the last word regardless. Her face alters dramatically as she holds up a jar of the forbidden product and demonstrates where her own allegiances really lie. She is willing to embrace the Maxwell House revolution, if literally behind her husband's back, and change is coming, whether he's ready for it or not. While her husband embodies the smug front of people set in her ways, Deirdre expresses the latent potential yearning to break free.

As a twist, it seems cute and logical, but the execution is disproportionately disturbing. Deirdre doesn't merely hold up the jar of freeze-dried beans with an air of surreptitious triumph. Her face contorts horrifically, in a manner that is presumably intended to indicate an intense and uninhibited elation bursting belatedly to the surface. In practice, she looks like she's possessed, a testament to the insidious power of the Maxwell House brand and its ability to warp everything it touches beyond recognition. It was an expression that sent shivers down the spines of innumerable young viewers, its horrors amplified by its insistence on lingering for good measure as a torturously drawn out freeze frame. I swear that the folks responsible for cutting together advertising blocks knew exactly what they were doing and had a penchant for inserting it right at the end so that the cursed image would be prolonged even further. It seemed to persist for an eternity regardless, a perfect vision of unfiltered monstrosity forever etched onto my brain, ready to strike whenever I was feeling in any way vulnerable. I don't think the closing sense of dread was entirely accidental either. The way Deirdre holds up the jar at the end, it frankly looks as though she could use it to bonk her oblivious husband on the head. Maxwell House takes the form of a deadly invading presence, already much closer than the husband assumes, being right behind him and inside his seeming place of safety. The barriers have been eradicated and we're left with an uncanny intersection between the exaggerated caricatures of one world and the excessive animation of the other. A distressing transformation indeed. 

The original Deidre ad is the only one I remember seeing at the time, but there was indeed an entire series spun around the premise, in which the husband got to exercise his equal disdain for Noel Edmonds (who'd also infiltrated their house unbeknownst to him and was unambiguously looking to strike his head with the jar of Maxwell House) and for Penguins (the brand of chocolate-coated tea biscuit and not the bird, although odds are that he didn't care for them much either). I'm not 100% sure, but I could swear the actress who played Deirdre kept changing with new installment - a subtle commentary on the inevitably of change and the husband's ongoing obliviousness? And then there was at least one ad that swapped out the cast entirely, centring on a different set of couples divided by Maxwell House, and with a holiday-making theme. The protagonist couple were there identified as "Ron" and "Fran", with Deirdre having been supplanted by "Laura". The antagonist husband still went unnamed, but here had acquired a wetter sense of humor to go with his new rain-soaked environs. I'm not sure, but I think this might have been the only installment in which the husband actually cottoned on to his wife's being a closet Maxwell drinker. "This isn't our usual coffee, Laura? LAURA!!!" 

 

 

Two versions of the original ad existed, one 46 seconds in length, the other a shorter 30 second edit, which saved time by trimming down the sequences with the protagonist couple, incorporating only one iteration of the "full of beans" slogan and, most curiously, using alternate takes of the antagonist couple, in which their dialogue was more concise ("Could changing their coffee be responsible for this distressing transformation?" becomes "Could changing their coffee have changed them?", and "We try to avoid them nowadays," becomes a more definite "We avoid them nowadays"). The husband's closing expression also differs slightly between the versions, with him gazing more intently at the camera in the longer cut and in the shorter cut wearing more a look of self-satisfied complacency. No massive differences to report between Deirdre's final poses, but for what it's worth I'd rate her as being marginally more terrifying in the shorter edition.

The Man Who Blew Away (One Foot In The Grave)

 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.