Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Eyes

As the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" series goes, the 1992 offering "Eyes" is a particularly unlovely one to have to look at, although it starts out, deceptively, by emphasising the apparent beauty of its subject. The young woman at the centre of the film looks perfectly pretty in her opening close-up, as though she could be staring off dreamily into the distance. Straight off the bat, however, are clues that we haven't walked in on an innocuous scenario, if we should happen to notice that one of her pupils is dilated, or the strange objects protruding from her mouth. The film pivots on a simple technique - a gradual pull-back from the face of the woman, shortly revealed to be the victim of a road accident, as paramedics attempt, to no avail, to revive her. We continue to move away, but her expression remains unnervingly static. Interspersed with the paramedic's procedural commentary is the voice of the driver, who stays off-screen for the duration. What we have is a juxtaposition of two parallel narratives, in the woman's unresponsive form and the driver's disembodied voice, with each conveying their own individual despair. The driver's account is an entirely familiar one - almost word-for-word identical, in fact, to the circumstances that reportedly convinced Mark he was okay to drive on that fateful Christmas night.

D&DWL was never an especially gory series, preferring to seek out horror from the emotional debris of each featured calamity, although "Eyes" might be considered a slight outlier in that regard. It offers only minimal blood, yet it still ranks as the most disturbingly graphic of the D&DWL canon, being the entry that's most fixated on the blunt physicality of death, and in the sheer discomfort of watching a body slip past that queasy barrier between being and corpse as its last waning flickers of function are slowly extinguished. Technically, the protagonist is never actually dead for the span of the film - at the end the paramedic pronounces her asystolic, which isn't exactly the same as death but does mean that her chances ought probably to be considered non-existent. In practice, it makes very little difference - with her pallid skin and stationary gaze, it's an exercise in horror as worthy as any video nasty. The technique used in "Eyes" is something of a variation on an earlier D&DWL film, "Kathy", which also had a character affected by a drink driving incident stare directly into the camera while a disembodied voice filled in the narrative gaps and impressed the moral weight of the scenario. In both cases the fourth wall breaking is implicitly accusatory - the subject, while powerless to change their situation, is utterly merciless in challenging the viewer to return their gaze and to confront the consequences of their own prospective actions (something explicitly evoked in the film's print counterpart, which instructed spectators to "Look her in the eye. Then say a quick drink never hurt anyone"). In the case of "Eyes", the subject's expression is entirely vacant, conveying absolutely nothing, and yet so much at the same time. There is a certain ironic tension between the subject's physical inertia and the stony relentlessness of her stare, her seeming refusal to back down from presenting us with the impacts of drink driving in their harshest, ugliest detail. Who this woman is and the repercussions of her demise go unexplored, which here only adds to the impact; we do not venture outside of this very specific moment in which she is reduced to only a stagnant image, as all prospects of progressing beyond this are tragically shut off to her.

"Eyes" was, along with "Kathy" and "Arrest", part of a sequence of D&DWL entries that bucked the trends of the opening wave of PIFs by shifting the focus more toward the offender's side of the equation, and of the ramifications (both legal and emotional) for them. Noteworthy is that the driver was still denied corporeality in any of those three films, allowing the outcomes of their poor choices to continue to define them visually, although "Eyes" is unusual in actually giving them a voice. The driver is humanised, but through distinctively debasing means, with his final insistence that he "didn't mean it" emphasising his fundamental limpness; we do not doubt the truthfulness of that statement, but it seems a distressingly futile response to such a dire situation - a point underlined by whichever of the first responders (I'm not sure if it's the police officer or the paramedic) is heard to scoff after the fade-out. There is, again, an ironic tension between the evident patheticness of the driver and the harrowing destructiveness of his actions.

What might take the sting off a little, if you find yourself losing sleep over the imagery in "Eyes", is the realisation that the subject in question is actually a teenaged Denise van Outen, who later rose to prominence as a presenter on The Big Breakfast at the latter end of the decade. Her familiarity comes as a reassuring reminder that, for as horrifying as this PIF's contents are, they were only feigned and she did, in reality, progress beyond the gruesome stasis encapsulated here. I fear that stasis may be forever etched into my skull, however.

"Eyes" is, as far as I'm aware, the only D&DWL film to have been made commercially available for home viewing - you can find it on the BFI release The COI Collection Volume Four: Stop! Look! Listen!, along with "Lonely Water". (EDIT: Correction. "Dave" was also released on the sixth volume, Worth The Risk?)

Texas: In Demand (Alan Rickman's Long Night's Journey Into Day)

There are few music videos I'd rate as quite so silently haunting as that of "In Demand", a hit for Scottish pop rockers Texas, released in late 2000 to plug their new compilation album, The Greatest Hits. The video was directed by Vaughan Arnell, noted at the time for his collaborations with Robbie Williams (the psychological scar-fest that accompanied "Rock DJ", where Williams is seen to rip out hunks of his own flesh and muscle and throw them to his screaming cannibal fangirls? That was Arnell's), and depicts an overnight drive from London to Brighton being undertaken by band frontwoman Sharleen Spiteri. Spiteri rides in style, in a chauffeur-driven Bentley Azure, and with actor Alan Rickman (just a year before his tenure as Severus Snape began) as a fellow passenger who intermittently caresses her (no seat belts on either of them, though? Tut tut...). Things reach a tantalising climax when they stop to refuel at a Shell garage and engage in a spontaneous tango out there in the forecourt, before resuming their journey and arriving at Brighton in dawn's early light. At this point, the nocturnal travellers go their separate ways, with the suited Rickman (somewhat incongruously) retrieving a backpack from the boot of the vehicle and heading for a decrepit apartment block, leaving a doleful Spiteri to continue on to her unknown destination with only her chauffeur for company.

This Smooth Radio article sheds some light on how Rickman came to be involved in the project, although there isn't really a whole lot to the story as author Georgina Ramazzotti describes it. Rickman liked the band's output and was willing to be in the video, is the gist of it. There is a heartening epilogue to the alliance, in the acknowledgement that Spiteri and Rickman remained friends in the aftermath, up until the latter's death in 2016, and that the "In Demand" video was not Rickman's only contribution to the Texas catalogue; he also provided vocals for the band's 2015 recording, "Start A Family". The most inflammatory aspect of the article would be Ramazzotti's assertion that the video is currently "forgotten", which...well, it would be to my chagrin if so. Arnell's video is simple but effective - visually captivating, and with the presence of an equivocally contemplative Rickman giving it a persistent air of beguiling uncertainty. Perhaps it's an easy video to take for granted because Texas in general seem somewhat taken for granted these days; despite their various chart successes in the 1990s and into the new millennium, they were an offbeat band to factor into the contemporary music climate, for reasons summarised in Stephen Thomas Erlewine's review of The Greatest Hits: "They may have been able to gain momentum from Britpop, but they didn't really belong, since their sensibility was far too soulful and classy, borrowing equally from the smooth soul of the '70s, Americana fascinations, and, in a roundabout way, the sophisti-pop of the '80s."

The song itself is fairly upfront about its own meaning, with the lyrics detailing the aftermath of a bitter breakup; the protagonist indicates that the relationship did not endure because her ex was not inclined to take it seriously, although now that she has moved on and found a new, more stable partner, they seem to be having second thoughts on the matter. The protagonist chews on the implication that it took their jealousy of a third party (the fact that she is "in demand") for her ex to realise what a catch she truly was, while making it plain that she isn't looking backwards. Muddying the waters slightly is her admission that "when I fall asleep, I see that winning smile", suggesting that she does, on some level, harbor her own wistful fantasy vision of how things might have worked out under different circumstances - although she counters this with the assertion that, "When my dreams just move along, you've lost the race by miles", maintaining that it is, fundamentally, only a fantasy. Nevertheless, the pining, melancholic nature of the tune means that the song is not quite the triumphant kiss-off suggested by the lyrics, with tinges of underlying regret tempering the protagonist's affirmations of having emerged as the winner of the scenario. The first mystery, in terms of how this bolsters our understanding of what's going on in the video, is which participant in this tetchy love triangle Rickman is intended to represent - are we to see him as the third party or the ex? The aforementioned Smooth Radio article seems pretty confident that he's the latter, but I will admit that - in spite of how the video ends - my gut reading was always that Rickman is the doting new partner, and the unseen pilot of the helicopter apparently pursuing them in the second verse represents the voyeuristic intrusions of her jealous old flame..as to an extent does our own inquisitive spectatorship. I guess I'm basing that largely on Spiteri's tendency to nuzzle Rickman and gaze elatedly into the camera whenever she sings about being "in demand", implying that her current position, in the backseat of that Bentley with Rickman, represents the peak of her emotional prosperity, and implicating any onlookers (the viewers, the camera, the helicopter searchlight) as outsiders who can gape upon their one-to-one nirvana but can't get in. I'd also note that Spiteri is seen whispering in Rickman's ear during the song's taunting remark, "There's a side you'll never know", while the helicopter watches from above, aggressively probing but firmly excluded from their private exchange.

What really intrigues me about the video is the interplay between the kind of sultry dream space suggested by Spiteri and Rickman's fairy tale backseat ride - the sumptuous effortlessness with which they glide from Point A to Point B - and the mundane realities that infringe on it. There is, presumably, an intentional irony to the climax, in which the couple experience their most intimate moment in a location as thoroughly banal as a Shell garage in the middle of nowhere (or in Bordon, Hampshire, to be precise). The garage itself makes for a curious ballroom stand-in, a garish onslaught of unlovely reds and yellows littered with signage promoting humdrum consumption, and yet the glare of the forecourt lights seem as hypnotic as any mirror ball. It calls attention to the fact that, a couple of hokey shots of the full moon notwithstanding, the blackness of the characters' world is punctuated mainly by artificial lighting from various sources (streetlights, car headlights, motorway signage), by turns magic and monotonous. Night becomes an open canvas in which the couple have the deserted road predominantly to themselves, with only the occasional freight vehicle travelling in the opposite direction to remind us of the lonely drudgery of nocturnal travel happening on the sidelines of their narrative. The appearance of the helicopter yields the only inkling of prospective antagonism en route, while a squad of motorcyclists travelling their way offer a moment of affinity - they are the only fellow travellers, other than Rickman, with whom Spiteri exchanges any kind of amicable interaction, and the manner in which they flock around the vehicle gives them the appearance of a protective brigade. As for the significance of the Shell garage, I am put in mind of Edward Hopper's Gas, with the garage providing a last refuge for our amorous night owls before they're forced to venture into a forbidding unknown - or in their case, the Brighton seafront in the bleak light of day. The darkness and the journey provide a dreamscape - perhaps the very fantasy space alluded to within the lyrics - the adventure of the open road sheathing the couple in an interval of of idyllic connection, with the emergence of dawn and their inevitable return to civilisation signalling the need to come back down to reality, and to contemplate the diverging roads ahead of them. Rickman, looking notably less kempt the instant he dons his rucksack, leaves the Bentley and Spiteri and disappears into a greyer reality; she rides on, mobilised by her emotional urges but visibly wounded by her companion's departure.

If we interpret the journey as signifying the forward momentum of Spiteri's life, and her time carpooling with Rickman as indicative of the duration of the characters' relationship, then the video can be read as an ode to the exhilaration but also the potential impermanence of such connections, however powerfully felt in the moment (in that regard, the concept is quite similar to the Cartoon Saloon short, Somewhere Down The Line). As with the lyrics of "In Demand", it is built on the recognition that the highs of any relationship may eventually culminate in the need to move on, emphasising the track's unspoken mournfulness of over its proclamations of survival. And if Rickman isn't the suitor Spiteri has spent the duration rebuffing, then I guess it speaks of the precariousness of whatever lies ahead for her, and the inherent but unavoidable risks of starting over.

 

 

As for the chauffeur, he's a total non-entity throughout. Neither Spiteri or Rickman communicate with him at any point, and they even obscure most of his face during the helicopter's offensive. He's window dressing in their little joy ride and he knows it.

Chief Wiggum, P.I. (aka When The Big Easy Calls, You Gotta Accept The Charges)

Something I'm definitely aiming to achieve more of in 2023 would be greater in-depth coverage of The Simpsons' Season 8. I've gone on record as saying that it is my favourite Simpsons season, and yet I'm deeply conscious of the fact that I've had less to say about it, thus far, than any of the seasons before it (except for Season 5, which I also hope to give a whisker more focus this year). And what with Mardi Gras upon us, now seems the perfect time to revisit "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" (4F20), and take look at the first of our trio of possible (though improbable) Simpsons sequels, "Chief Wiggum, P.I.", in which we follow Clancy Wiggum to New Orleans, and his futile attempts to reinvent himself as the star of a gutsy new action series. I covered the second segment, "The Love-Matic Grampa", a number of years ago in this piece, and while Moe and Abe's pseudo-sitcom still endures as my favourite of the three, there's a devoted place in my affections for this one too.

I think of Season 8 as a pretty underrated season on the whole (it has two really formidable fan favourites, "You Only Move Twice" and "Homer's Enemy", but in my experience most viewers tend to prefer Season 7), and "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" may well be the most underrated of them all. When it first aired, on May 4th 1997, a lot of viewers were uncertain what to make of it (like much of Season 8 in general!). A decade or so onward, and I'm not sure if that prevailing sentiment had really shifted - I can recall back when Wikipedia was a wee young thing, and their entry on "Jumping The Shark" cited this episode for lampooning the various ways in which a TV series can slip past its prime, before adding that, most ironically, "Spin-Off" was itself seen as a jump the shark episode by numerous fans "due to its poor quality". "Poor quality", as though it were fact. Nowadays, it's generally appreciated that the writers were up to something intensely meta with this installment, and that if you were taking each segment at face value then you were doing it wrong. And yet I still don't think it gets even half the credit that it deserves. An episode as balls to the wall odd and as doggedly outside of the box as this frankly belongs in more Top 10s than I'm accustomed to seeing it in.

"Spin-Off" was the third installment in what I'm henceforth going to refer to as "The Death Trilogy" (to pilfer a term from Gus Van Sant), following on the heels of "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show" and "Homer's Enemy", episodes all built around showrunners Oakley and Weinstein's increasing preoccupation with the likelihood that they'd inherited the series in the evening of its life ("The Principal and The Pauper" can be seen as a close cousin of the Death Trilogy, but I'm content to look at that one as an outlier that got fortuitously packed off to become Season 9's problem). "Poochie" gives us Denial, Fear and Anger all wrapped up in one highly defensive package - it grapples with the paradox of how a long-running series can be as strong as it ever was, and yet not hit the mark because its audience is no longer impressed by such perfection. "Enemy" is an altogether stranger beast, a commentary on the series' increasing disconnection from reality and its degeneration into the territory of nonsensical cartoons - it represents the Searching/Bargaining stage of Season 8's journey, and is more introspective in nature than "Poochie", even if the answer it ultimately reaches is an indifferent shrug from a hardening heart. "Spin-Off" rounds off the trilogy with a lavish Acceptance party - notably, it feels like it has less of an axe to grind than either "Poochie" or "Enemy", having already vented the worst of its anxieties on Frank Grimes and Poochie the dog, and being more open to embracing the maelstrom of mediocrity it senses will shortly consume it. "Spin-Off" is about the general lousiness of television, but it's made with real love and affection for that lousiness. Some commentators, including Robert Sloane, author of the essay, "Who Wants Candy? Disenchantment In The Simpsons" (featured in the 2004 book Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture), identify a self-congratulatory underpinning to the entire enterprise, asserting that the main purpose of "Spin-Off" is to remind viewers what superior programming The Simpsons is compared to 99% of the dreck they could potentially be watching instead. And while "Spin-Off" is, indisputably, expounding a point about the creative bankruptcy that fuels a lot of the decision-making in the television industry, it avoids coming across as overly petty or spiteful in its observations (except perhaps in the base assumption that a spin-off is an inherently tacky concept, which would be steeped in all kinds of irony). For one thing, all three proposed spin-offs were parodies of archetypal programs from earlier eras in television - cop dramas of the 1980s, fantasy sitcoms of the 1960s, and variety shows of the 1970s - as opposed to reflections of trends in contemporary entertainment. Part of the joke is that these hypothetical series were always going to seem hopelessly out of the place in the television climate of the 1990s. But there's also a level on which the writers appear to have had fun looking back on television's history and reimagining the shows of yesteryear to accommodate their own ingenious Simpsons twists; for an episode so concerned with what Sloane describes as "the general banality of television", it gave the crew leeway to flex some pleasingly inventive muscles.

"Spin-Off" pokes fun at television conventions of all stripes, but in the end (and this may be the single greatest factor differentiating it from the rest of the Death Trilogy), the butt of the joke turns out, in no small way, to be The Simpsons itself. Linking the three segments is a subtle but all-encompassing sense of existential despair, the nature of which doesn't completely reveal itself until the third spin-off, "The Simpsons' Smile-Time Variety Hour", which Kent Brockman introduces as coming from "the family that doesn't know the meaning of the word cancelled." The implication being that "Smile-Time" is to be viewed as a pre-emptive afterlife for The Simpsons following its impending (or so it seemed in 1997) cancellation. This is the most forthright the episode gets in communicating the uncomfortable subtext lurking beneath each hypothetical offshoot - the insinuation that the show is weighing up its options because The Simpsons cannot unreasonably hope to sustain itself for much longer. Troy reaffirms this sentiment in the closing sequence, when he offers a purported preview of Season 9 that includes magic powers, long-lost triplets, and Ozmodiar, a tiny green space alien that only Homer can see. One wonders, with hindsight, if Oakley and Weinstein had had a premonition of where Mike Scully would be taking the series after their departure. Ozmodiar wouldn't have been any more offensive than a lot of what we actually got.

Troy's presence, and his fourth wall-breaking wraparounds, obviously recall the very similar device used in the previous season's "The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular". But the true evolutionary ancestor to "Spin-Off" would be "22 Short Films About Springfield", also of Season 7, an episode heavily rumored to have itself been considered as the model for a potential Simpsons spin-off about the lives of the supporting Springfieldians. It and "Spin-Off" have the same interest in the kinds of parallel stories suggested by the intricacies of the Simpsons universe, and what we could be watching if narrative bias wasn't so heavily slanted toward the titular family, with many of those individual sketches in "22" playing like miniature pitches for their own self-contained series (some with their own introductory credit sequences). The brief running time of each individual spin-off and the "variety pack" nature of the episode appears to mimic, as with the structure of "22", the impatient attention span of a viewer with a finger pounding compulsively on the button of their remote, anxious to know what might be unfolding concurrently on the next channel. What both episodes finally confirm is that all roads eventually lead back to the titular family, upheld as the inevitable nexus of their mutual universe - whereas "22" (perhaps unconsciously) undermines its suggested spin-off potential with its need to keep returning to the happenings in the Simpsons' kitchen, "Spin-Off" knowingly inserts the family into all three segments as a means of reenforcing the inescapability of each offshoot's roots. Not only do the Simpsons get the final spin-off to themselves, they make an awkwardly-implemented "guest" appearance in "Chief Wiggum, P.I.", and Homer drops in for a brief chin-wag in "The Love-Matic Grampa". Cross-overs with the parent series are a common device in spin-offs (recall those divisive appearances from the cast of Cheers throughout the run of Frasier), and are implemented here with a deliberate clunkiness that (in "Wiggum" in particular) echoes the kind of cross-promotional tactics previously used in service of The Critic in "A Star Is Burns". This continued reliance on the family is used as yet another shorthand for a creative dead-end, their familiarity and tried and tested star power apparently necessary to keep these flailing new enterprises propped up...even if (as "Smile-Time" seemingly confirms) the Simpsons were, at the time, finding it a struggle enough just keeping themselves afloat.

Of the three hypothetical spin-offs, "Chief Wiggum, P.I." is the one that feels the least divorced from the series proper, tonally speaking, and as such may be the most palatable to casual viewers more interested in an enjoyable Simpsons story than in anything too arch. The Simpsons was already well within its element spoofing ridiculous action-orientated dramas of this ilk, a practice it initially restricted mostly to footage from "McBain" movies, but which had, in recent years started to bleed over into the dynamics of the Simpsons' everyday existence. There isn't such a world of difference between the climactic boat chase up to Big Daddy's mansion and the kinds of overblown action sequences periodically favoured by Oakley and Weinstein during their run (the part where Wiggum expels Daddy's henchman by blowing him away with the boat propeller in particular feels like a gag that could have happened in any contemporary episode). I've no end of praise for Oakley and Weinstein, for their intelligence and their willingness to take risks, but this is the one aspect of their tenure on which I'm a little more mixed. (Bob swinging off of a dam by holding onto a detonating cord in "Brother From Another Series" is fucking awesome and I will never tire of seeing it; by contrast, that climactic showdown between Lovejoy and the baboons in "In Marge We Trust" always struck me as kind of dumb. Less dumb than the baboon showdown in Ad Astra, mind you.) There are also jokes about New Orleans culture that wouldn't have felt at all out of place in a regular episode entailing a trip to the Big Easy - notably, an appearance from chef Paul Prudhomme, espousing (somewhat inexplicably) the catchphrase of fellow purveyor of Cajun cookery Justin Wilson ("I Gar-Ron-Tee!"), to the irritation of Skinner. In other regards, "Chief Wiggum, P.I." marks itself out as a very specific pastiche of 1980s crime dramas, most obviously Magnum, P.I. and Miami Vice. It's noteworthy that, while such shows might have been looking distinctly old hat in 1997, when "Spin-Off" was made, more recent years have seen the rise of the cultural movement known as synthwave, a niche genre of electronic music/art dedicated to evoking a characteristically 1980s flavour, and for which Miami Vice, with its sun-drenched palm trees, bright colours and weakness for showy vehicles and swanky attire, has proven a cornerstone aesthetic. The series has gained fresh relevance, in helping to construct a mythical vision of the 1980s, one that's instantly recognisable but might never have existed, except in media image. The opening sequence to "Wiggum" has most of the cliches down - the obligatory shot of Wiggum whizzing along in a shiny convertible with the wind in his hair, the opening theme tune conspicuously striving to recreate the sound Jan Hammer's discography, the clip montage offering individual introductions to the principal cast, each culminating in a comical freeze frame (though I'd associate that particular quirk more with The A Team than either Vice or Magnum). What's evident from the narrative itself is that the chimerical cool that Wiggum has gone in search of, and which once came so effortlessly to the likes of Magnum, Tubbs and Crockett, just seems to keep eluding our hero.

The premise of this faux pilot has Wiggum relocating to New Orleans to pursue a new career as a private investigator; in a hilariously graceless chunk of exposition, we learn that he was compelled to leave his former stomping ground of Springfield after suffering disgrace for his "massive corruption" as chief of police. That in itself is not such an implausible outcome for old Clancy. His exodus does not go unaccompanied - Wiggum's marriage to Sarah has also broken down, for reasons that the script does not care to specify, and he has custody of Ralph. The curveball of the arrangement is in the casting of Skinner as Wiggum's sidekick, "Skinny Boy". Wiggum and Skinner seem an unlikely pairing off the bat (in the series proper they had little connection, outside of Skinner being principal of the school Wiggum's son attends), but the real kicker is in the reference to Skinner's former life as a hustler on the streets of New Orleans, from which his foray into a career in education was apparently just a meagre distraction. Here, this plays as a deliberately clunky means of transplanting him into the action, the joke being that a character as categorically prim and starchy as Skinner should be a woefully unconvincing fit for such a backstory. But...the thing is that it's not altogether far removed from what we were shortly expected to swallow as canon in "The Principal and The Pauper" (there, he was an ex-street punk, as opposed to an ex-hustler, but it's in a near enough ballpark). That the two episodes landed so close together is eyebrow-raising enough in itself. For now, I don't want to get into the specifics of "The Principal and The Pauper" and the contentious matter of whether it does or doesn't succeed, but it is interesting to note that the two episodes take what is effectively the same joke and give it a radically different treatment. In "Wiggum", it's never presented as anything other than knowingly ludicrous writing, and while there's an element of that in "Principal", it also attempts to use it as the basis of a serious character drama involving Skinner's bifurcated sense of identity. 

Complicating the gag in "Wiggum" is that the episode seems to vacillate on just how viable Skinner is in the role of streetwise sidekick, presenting the character as both ridiculously out of his element in theory and yet absurdly proficient when it comes to the crunch. In one scene, Wiggum asks for the word on the street and Skinner admits that he hasn't lived in New Orleans for forty-two years and much of his contemporary understanding of the city comes from an article he read in "Parade" magazine. In "Grade School Confidential", an episode in very recent memory, Skinner's age was given as forty-four, so...are we to believe that he honed his tough street guy credentials when he was just two? Then again, Skinner isn't exactly bluffing about those credentials either - given that he manages to subdue an alligator with his bare hands, albeit one with corks around its teeth (of course, he was also a soldier in Vietnam, but that aspect of his backstory isn't raised here). I'll credit Seymour with being the magic ingredient that makes the whole parody tick; his hidden talent for gator-wrestling notwithstanding, his fundamental Skinner-ishness remains perfectly intact for the duration. The joke about him having only vague awareness of that Mardi Gras function the city intermittently throws would feel wonderfully in character even if he were a native New Orleanian - he's such a thoroughgoing square as to be totally indifferent to such things, even when they're happening right on his doorstep.

From the outset, Troy promises us a "gritty crime drama, starring Springfield's beloved Police Chief Wiggum," - a statement that, to anyone familiar with Wiggum and his staggering incompetence, rings as flagrantly oxymoronic (and what happens in "Spin-Off" certainly feels less gritty than Wiggum's disturbing encounter with Snake and Herman in "22 Short Films About Springfield"). Adjectives featured throughout the segment itself, in poorly-disguised snippets of self-promotion, include "exciting" and "sexy" - words first used by Lisa when she and the family conveniently show up during the Mardi Gras parade to give Wiggum's new ambitions their tacky-ass seal of approval. Despite being explicitly signposted by Troy before the segment begins, the Simpsons' entry into this world is jarring, not least because it brings what meagre plot "Wiggum" has going to an abrupt halt. Bart insists that the family are in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras celebrations, but the real purpose of their visit is made plain when Lisa interjects (in what turns out to be her only line of the episode) that she "can't wait to hear about the exciting, sexy adventures you're sure to have against this colourful backdrop." This statement would have felt odd coming from any of the family's mouths, but seems especially jarring for Lisa, a point made all the more salient later on, when we learn of her principled refusal to take part in the gruesomely tacky "Smile-Time Variety Hour". In his essay, Sloane notes that "the line is awkward and forced, particularly coming from the rather self-aware Lisa," (p.155), although he doesn't highlight the most skin-crawling element of Lisa's pitch, which is the questionable appropriateness of an eight-year-old child, albeit one characterised as having the mentality of an adult, selling something as "sexy". Wiggum later echoes these very words at the end of the episode, when he anticipates a long-running enmity with crime boss Big Daddy that will take "more sexy and exciting" forms with each passing week. What's important is that the characters spend more time taking about how alluring and adrenalin-packed their adventures will be than is actually evidenced onscreen throughout the adventure, which is a predominantly empty affair, despite occasional morsels of dramatic development. In that regard, it could be seen to vacillate as much as Skinner; there is an inkling of genuine peril when Ralph is abducted, and the story climaxes in a legitimate (albeit ridiculous) action sequence, yet the final confrontation with Big Daddy (who, despite possessing the suave Southern vocals of Gailard Sartain, appears to be every bit as incompetent in his allotted role as Wiggum) is a total anti-climax. Daddy exchanges a lot of nonsensical bluster with our heroes, before suddenly bailing, surrendering Ralph and making his (prolonged) escape, which Wiggum allows for the expressed purpose of securing a recurring nemesis for his upcoming (although not) series. The whole thing is implemented with the obvious intention of instilling a marketing hook in audiences, and the lack of closure, rather than opening up narrative possibilities, suggests an overall aimlessness to the enterprise - an indication that the real interests lie in longevity, and in keeping the Simpsons train running, than in accomplishing anything of genuine merit.

The most revealing aspects of "Wiggum" lie not in any pulse-racing action sequences, but in the parts of the segment that take place in the sparseness of Wiggum's new office, as he attempts to set up his detective business with meagre resources. Just as Moe's allegiance with the possessed love tester in "The Love-Matic Grampa" was entrenched in a pitiful desolation barely disguised by the machinations of the laugh track, so too does the heart of "Wiggum" secretly lurk in the overwhelming emptiness that pervades the segment. The doomed nature of the spin-off is depicted in the drab vacancy of the building interior, and in the (beautifully executed) sequence where Wiggum and Skinner open the windows to find the Mardi Gras celebrations happening right outside; there's always a party going on somewhere near Wiggum, but he just can't seem to find his way in. Like "Love-Matic", it ends up being a story of lonely individuals, of a couple of outcasts struggling to find their niche in a landscape that is both emotionally and creatively barren, and likely to discard their bid for the spotlight with total indifference. The joy of the segment lies in the chemistry between Wiggum and Skinner, which is genuinely delectable; both characters are equally at sea in their tough new environs, with the result that their mutual hopelessness manages to sell the absurdities of the spin-off as outright endearing. An anti-actioner with a King-of-Square Vladimir and perpetually clueless Estragon itching for a reckoning with a Godot to whom they can't get remotely close; don't tell me you wouldn't all watch the shit out of that.

"Wiggum" ends with a callback to the comical freeze frames that populated the opening montage, with Skinner making some lame wisecrack and the cast reacting uproariously. Freeze frame endings were another technique heavily favoured by Miami Vice, although "Wiggum" subverts the aura of uncompromising cool that accompanied its model series, using it to segue into the territory of cheesy sitcoms (also partial to a final freeze), with glib humor substituting for closure and an upbeat leitmotif that's every bit as phoney as any of the Pavlovian devices deployed in "The Love-Matic Grampa". It's always struck me as immensely significant that, in the specific frame they freeze on, Ralph doesn't look as though he's laughing so much as screaming. It's in his wide-eyed, tortured outburst that the segment lets us in most prominently on the cry of desperation that's manifest all throughout the episode, proving to be just as evident in the phoney-baloney laugh track of "Love-Matic" and the fixed plastic smiles of the family in "Smile-Time". A fraught compulsion to stave off a beckoning oblivion is the motivating factor behind every single ill-advised gimmick within the showcase, but there is, as Abe will shortly illuminate in "Love-Matic" with his "suffered so long" admission, a certain horror in the realisation that there is no end, that you have to keep on going, jumping through an interminable line-up of hoops for as long as you continue to draw a sufficient-sized crowd. What's articulated by Abe and hinted at in Ralph's expression is that each of these spin-offs constitutes a different vision of purgatory for the ailing series, a means for the media machine to carry on exploiting the property long after its dignity has expired (the freeze frame itself can likewise be seen as a signifier of such stagnation, with the characters trapped in a single moment ad infinitum). Of all of the Death Trilogy, "Spin-Off" comes off as by far the most pessimistic in terms of what lies in store for The Simpsons' future, the churlish frustrations of "Poochie" and the dark cynicism of "Enemy" having been supplanted with a queasy contemplation of the stalemate aligning on the horizon. As the swan song of this particular chapter in the series' history, it certainly goes down swinging with all the creative defiance it can muster.

Papa and Nicole: Interesting (1991)

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #46: Iguana Pool Party (Benson & Hedges)

Let's be real here - when you're dealing with a product as heinous as cigarettes, there is an argument to be had that any animal involved in the shilling process can be automatically construed as "horrifying". The intention is, after all, to get you curious about a substance that's both highly addictive and recognised universally as hazardous to you and to the people around you. With cigarette advertising I've always found there to be this weird dichotomy; I see the government health warning splashed across the screen in big bold lettering and my reflexes are immediately going to want to interpret it as an anti-smoking PSA - which is of course entirely at odds with what the imagery itself is attempting to convey. Not that the two forces were necessarily so incompatible - the challenge was to make the deadly look sexy, and I'm sure that advertising agencies were exuberant at the prospect.

In the UK, televised adverts for cigarettes had been banned long before I was born (cigars and loose tobacco were exempt until 1991, which is why the Hamlet campaign endured in popular memory as long as it did) but they were still allowed to advertise them on billboards right up until my late teens and, odiously enough, it was entirely the norm to see adverts for cigarettes (and alcohol) on the billboard positioned right outside my school. The ubiquitousness of cigarette advertising (outside of the chattering cyclops) struck me as bizarrely contradictory at the time - from a young age, a multitude of authorities were keen to impress on us the message that smoking was bad and we were better off not dabbling in it, and yet there was clearly this other, more invisible authority at work, whose voice was, in its way, every bit as loud, and as every bit as eager for us to know that the product existed. The only thing more disconcerting to me than the idea of hawking something that required such a terrifying health warning was my not having the foggiest what any of the featured imagery had to do with cigarettes anyhow. One of the major limitations imposed on such advertising was that you weren't actually allowed to show anybody doing the recommended-but-not-recommended action, so agencies had to resort to strange, abstract gimmicks to get their pitches across. The granddaddy of strange, abstract gimmicks being this 1979 cinema advert for Benson & Hedges, which forged some enigmatic connection between smoking and poolside iguana gatherings. Devised by Collett Dickenson Pearce and directed by Hugh Hudson, who would soon be better known as the director of Chariots of Fire, it spared no expenses and turned numerous heads in its day. I first came across it as part of a YouTube compilation and immediately wondered what on earth could it be hawking - regardless, it had a whole lot of weird imagery involving lizards chilling around an unfilled swimming pool, so it had my attention. When the final reveal came, well, it shouldn't have surprised me. Leave it to tobacco advertising to be this aggressively overwrought with its abstractness.

To give "Swimming Pool" full credit, it is properly a cinematic creation, comprised of shots that feel wild, alive and invigorating (set to the sounds of "Wind" by Godley & Creme). In terms of its boldness and originality, it is very hard to fault the thing, even if it is in aid of such an insidious product. The 90-second ad shows a helicopter flying over the Arizona desert carrying some precious cargo, which appears to pique the interests of the various reptiles soaking up the sunshine down below (mostly iguanas in swimming pool territory, but a snake gets in on the observation too). This is all intercut with footage of a camera peering out from behind some Venetian blinds, before the helicopter drops its cargo into a pool and an iguana swims toward it, apparently turning into a scuba diver who proceeds to open the box with a sardine key. The film then closes with an ad-within-an-ad, revealing the preceding action to have been playing out "inside" a billboard positioned alongside Battersea Power Station, and finally that government health warning, to remind us that we're playing with fire, which Collet Dickenson Pearce no doubt saw as bolstering the film's seductively dangerous aura.

The meaning behind the visual punchline with Battersea Power Station is itself not so enigmatic - it represents the grey humdrum from which the exoticism of Benson & Hedges is purported to provide elevation. In that regard the ad might be perceived as much as a love letter to the power of advertising as to the joys of Benson & Hedges, if the billboard image itself is meant to be so alive with suggestive pleasures. The ad displays a fascination with the act of looking, albeit through a predominantly non-human gaze, from the obvious voyeuristic allusions of the seemingly unmanned camera to the pool outlets, which eerily evoke the eyes of an awakening monster. The use of reptiles (as opposed to anything more fluffy-looking) implies an adult-orientated exoticism tinged with menace. The snake, a classic symbol of danger, here seems wary of the approaching crate of cigarettes, indicating that it sees itself as lower down in the predatory hierarchy (clearly, it has the good sense to know what kinds of carcinogens are being hauled above it). Meanwhile, the pool-dwelling iguanas, besides providing a cool visual, evoke a sense of a badland subsisting upon the fringes of your personal play area, a meeting of the wild and the recreational. When a human finally appears on screen, in the form of the scuba diver, his wetsuit-coated body seems redolent of that of the swimming iguana, suggesting that a transformation has occurred. At this point it becomes tempting, however facetiously, to read the sequence as analogous to the opening chapter of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the discovery of the crate elevating these lizard brains to the level of cultured beings given to constructing vast civilisations (hence our journey to Battersea Power Station at the end). Except the silhouettes of the two passers-by in the final frame have a similarly obscured appearance that does not transcend the uncanniness of the lizards' domain, implying that we haven't completely left it. Besides, the film clearly has an affinity for this otherworldly wilderness, consumption of the Benson & Hedges brand being posited as an ideal balance between animal impulse and chic sophistication.

But like I say, weird dichotomy. There's no way I can personally interpret the full-on outlandishness of this ad, as slickly directed as it may be, as anything other than a reflection of how badly smoking screws you up. In that regard it's practically a comedy sketch. Cool lizards, though.

Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Recovery (aka Victim II?)

Here we have yet another "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" installment with some discrepancy over what we're to call it. I've seen both "Recovery" and "Victim" given as possible candidates, and while I'm not sure which, if either, is the official of the two, that last one definitely has the capacity to cause greater confusion, given that "Victim" is also the title sometimes ascribed to the PIF alternatively known as "Pier". As a title, I'd say it applies a notch more aptly to "Pier", where the dialogue makes it explicit that we're hanging with the victim of a drink driving accident, as opposed to the drink driver themselves. Here, I almost think it gives away more narrative information than is necessary. But then "Recovery" is itself something of a deceptive title, suggesting as it does a more optimistic outcome than the film has to offer. Which is another advantage as a title - it has a certain bitter irony that feels properly in line with the increasing sardonicism the series was slowly adopting.

"Recovery" might actually be the single most anomalous entry in the D&DWL canon, in that there's nothing within that's explicitly connected to either drinking or driving - outside of the closing title card, which supplies our only indication as to the narrative and moral weight we're intended to place on the scenario. We start out in a hospital corridor, making our way into a large room and gradually zeroing in on our protagonist, a patient undergoing physiotherapy to enable him to walk again.We get no further in our exploration than in the intense physical pain he is clearly feeling in present and, if not for the appearance of that familiar slogan at the end, would have no means of knowing just what kind of circumstances have brought him to the situation at hand. The film debuted at the tail-end of the 1980s, and is characteristic of that earlier wave of PIFs under the D&DWL banner, with their haunting austerity and emphasis on the deceiving mundaneness with which long-standing trauma is inevitably assimilated. It assumes a similar faux documentary approach to "Fireman's Story"; unlike most of those early entries it is not a monologue, although the protagonist does still acknowledge the presence of the camera by looking at it, briefly, in a manner that recalls the unspoken aggravation of the protagonist's final glance in "Pier". Compared to "Pier" and "Fireman's Story", in which the camera served as a confidant to the featured monologuer, here there is a sense of the camera as an intrusive presence, its closing in on the protagonist mirroring the pain as it swells and ultimately overwhelms him. Unusual about "Recovery" is this predominant focus on physical suffering, as opposed to emotional turmoil or bereavement, and use of narrative tactics all the more minimalist than those of its peers.

As part of this minimalism, "Recovery" favours a certain moral ambiguity, in choosing to withhold any information on the nature of the protagonist's involvement in the drink driving accident - it is not revealed if he was the drink driver, a passenger of the drink driver, or an external party unfortunate enough to have been caught up in the crash. The possible title of "Victim" notwithstanding, there is no indication within the film itself as to whether we're to view his suffering as a consequences of somebody else's bad choices or  of his own, and for the purposes of its particular message that does not matter. The point here is simply to illustrate how thoroughly and distressingly arduous a process it can be, following a serious accident, to regain an ability as ostensibly basic and as easy to take for granted as walking. The film does not attempt to influence our judgements or sympathies beyond the immediacy of the protagonist's struggle; the emphasis is on the anguish of our human frailties, and how universally harrowing it is to have to grapple against them.

On the surface, "Recovery" might actually strike you as one of the "happier" films in the D&DWL series (relatively speaking). The protagonist has survived and it is not specified that there were any additional casualties. Meanwhile, his injuries are evidently less severe than those of the crash survivor in "Pier", and his undergoing rehabilitation suggests the possibility of regaining a degree of the normalcy he experienced prior to his accident. This much is implied in the title "Recovery", and the dominant dialogue heard throughout the PIF is the repeated encouragement of the nurse, assuring him of how well he is doing. Yet the closing moments insist on disturbing that, subverting our preferences for a reaffirming conclusion, as the protagonist is finally overwhelmed by pain and blurts out what is effectively his only statement - "I can't!" This is how it ends, not with the triumph of overcoming a setback, but with the grim reassertion of physical limitation.

(Note: this upload is a mite truncated, missing out the beginning section in the hospital corridor, but the really hard-hitting parts are all there.)

Bart Gets an F (aka Well, Back To The Forecastle of The Pequod)

In the midsection of 1990, back when The Simpsons was culture's hottest new plaything, revered by zeitgeist and loudly denounced as a threat by various conservative commentators, its early propensity for boat-rocking could be recapitulated in a single item of merchandise - the infamous t-shirt in which Bart claimed to be an underachiever "And proud of it, man". The statement was deemed so inflammatory, and so contrary to the ethos of the American education system, that it was cited as the primary stimulus for a spate of bannings of Bart Simpson t-shirts in numerous schools across America. The nature of that shirt was really two-fold, communicating the anarchic spirit of the callow cartoon sitcom and its willingness to ruffle the feathers of the established order, while being symptomatic of the money-spinning sloganeering that threatened to brand the series as an obnoxious fad (of the kind The Simpsons would later brutally skewer in the 1994 episode "Bart Gets Famous"). Judging by the various little nods and in-jokes that were already working their way into the scripts by the show's second season, the writers viewed the explosion of Simpsons merchandise as a mixed blessing, treating it with bemusement but also anxiety. The series may have been becoming more confident and refined off the back of Season 1, but there was also a certain wariness that accompanied its rapid rise to fame, a cautiousness about the possibility that it could all come crashing down at any second. At first glance, "Bart Gets an F" (7F03), which had the honor of opening the greatly-anticipated Season 2, on October 11th 1990, appears to have been purposely conceived in an effort to put that contentious t-shirt slogan into a broader context; this much is explicitly denied on the episode's DVD commentary, but it's hard to believe that it wasn't an influence in some way -  there's a scene where Dr Pryor, Springfield Elementary's little-seen educational psychologist, appropriates the wording of the infamous t-shirt, transforming it into the judgement of a befuddled authority figure attempting to force Bart into a tidy little pigeonhole. It's a joke at the expense of the shirt, but also the people who didn't get the message of the shirt and insisted on turning its very existence into an exercise in hand-wringing.

Those looking to defend the controversial shirt would point out that, if you looked closely, the word "underachiever" was featured in quotation marks, in a box above Bart's head, and was not actually included in his speech bubble. As such, it would be wrong to interpret the designation as coming from Bart's own lips. "Underachiever" was the unhelpful and derogatory label, handed down by authorities who were less interested in understanding Bart than in compartmentalising him, "And proud of it, man!" was the defiant response. All that Bart was really conveying is that he was a survivor, ready to take whatever snap judgements were assigned him and to wield them against his detractors (not that the t-shirts could necessarily be read as meaningful indicators of the show's intentions - elsewhere on the commentary for "Bart Gets an F", the staff are surprised to note that Bart actually does say "Cowabunga!" in this episode, and that it wasn't just an attempt by the merchandising department to ride on the coattails of the Ninja Turtles). Bart did not actually aspire to be an underachiever, as anyone who'd seen the Season 1 episode "Bart The Genius" could have told you. There, we saw Bart take a sincere crack at completing a math test, before succumbing to the temptation to cheat, and pride was certainly not what he felt on being trolled by his precocious classmates during a lunch break. "Bart Gets an F" makes the theme pivotal to "Genius" even more pronounced - namely, the problem of how Bart is to survive, knowing that he won't survive by merely adhering to the rules the established system requires of him. An irony that's present throughout the episode is that Bart clearly is a child with a great deal of ingenuity and creativity, as he demonstrates with the assortment of wily tricks he pulls in the hopes of circumventing his situation and preventing his academic deficiencies from being exposed. But this is not the kind of ingenuity the system favours, and in "F" Bart is made to face the worst of his fears - that after one failure too many, he'll be caught out, branded as stupid and denied the possibility to ever be recognised as anything else. "F" deals with how much it hurts to be labelled; whatever profession Bart could possibly have to be proud of being called an underachiever is blatantly in self-defence.

Like "Bart The General", "Bart Gets an F" takes a universally relatable subject and humanises Bart by having him grapple with it. Who hasn't had their stomach absolutely wrenched by the prospect of sitting an exam for which we felt ill-prepared? Even the swottiest of us have little immunity to the examination blues, and the psychological scars they leave behind run deep. The last exam I personally took was in 2007, yet I still intermittently have nightmares about them to this day, and I know I'm not alone - it's the most cliched type of bad dream you can possibly have, next to being caught naked in public. Here, the test Bart is required to take is not in itself an especially major one, but there is an awful lot riding on it. Following a string of recent failures, Bart has been given an ultimatum; either he passes his upcoming history test or he'll made to repeat the fourth grade, something that Pryor admits upfront is going to be shameful and emotionally crippling to him. On this occasion, Bart has no choice but to do things by the book, the one thing he suspects may be beyond his skill set.

Bart's battle for survival was, appropriately enough, echoed in the concurrent fortunes of the series, for at the time that "Bart Gets an F" debuted, The Simpsons was facing an insurmountable challenge of its own. Keeping momentum going after the monster success of Season 1 was always going to be an uphill task, but compounding the matter was Fox's decision to move the show from its established Sunday timeslot to Thursday night, to compete directly against one of the heavy-hitters of the era, NBC's The Cosby Show. The media had an absolute field day in drumming up the rivalry between the brash young Bart and the reliable (now disgraced) Bill Cosby, with most camps expecting Cosby's sitcom to come out on top. They were right, too - although initial estimates had "Bart Gets an F" pegged as the ratings victor, the final results gave the edge to Cosby, and he continued to best them for most of the duration of their rivalry. On the commentary, the production team make it clear that they were opposed to the move, and a good chunk of their discussion therein is taken up lamenting the impact on the show's ratings. The ratings it did achieve were deemed strong enough by Fox standards for the series to endure, but The Simpsons didn't thrive in the Thursday night line-up as it had on Sunday. Mike Reiss goes so far as to question how much bigger the show might have been if the move had never been imposed. I'll admit that I was a bit taken back by that suggestion - after all, it's The Simpsons. How much bigger did it need to be? But I suppose it's important to keep in mind that, in terms of purely ratings, "Bart Gets an F" represented the absolute peak of the series' popularity. That, by no small means, can be attributed to the stronghold that Bart as a character currently had on zeitgeist. While "Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish" was at one time slated to be the season premiere, "Bart Gets an F" was ultimately moved to the front due to it being the age of Bartmania, and kicking things off with a Bart-centred story was deemed the best strategy. This was a good move - its failure to beat The Cosby Show notwithstanding, "Bart Gets an F" still drew higher ratings than any other episode in the series' history. More than three decades on and its status as the highest rated episode of The Simpsons has yet to be surpassed. In other words, it reached its zenith as it was barely getting started.

The series' remarkable longevity also means that there is an additional irony that pervades "Bart Gets an F", and which would have been totally non-existent back in 1990. The threat Bart faces is one of stagnation, which he visualises by means of a nightmare in which he is literally trapped in the fourth grade a good three decades or so onward, and still hasn't memorised the name of that dratted pirate from Treasure Island (his son, Bart Junior, has already surpassed him on that front). It is a patently ridiculous scenario, but it touches on a deeper fear still, that once he has been pigeonholed as academically challenged he will never transcend this, be it through his own inability or the weight of the stigma. There is a sense that this stagnation is already happening - while Lisa, who is a whole two years younger than Bart, has numerous A-graded papers adorned across the Simpsons' refrigerator, the height of Bart's academic career was apparently a picture of a cat that he drew in the first grade. His theoretical reward for defying expectation will be permission to progress, and to grow beyond his current status as the troublesome underachiever of grade no. 4 - a departure that will not be happening, due to the series' dependency on maintaining the status quo and keeping all of the characters in their allotted places. Sorry Bart, but you may in fact be doomed to repeat the fourth grade for all eternity. The only thing that has changed is that, sadly, Marcia Wallace is no longer with us, necessitating Edna Krabappel's removal from the picture. But Bart himself certainly hasn't gone anywhere, making his struggle in this episode effectively all for naught. This is the ultimate cruel joke that the Simpsons universe has insisted on playing on Bart, long after forcing him to miss out on the revelries of Snow Day. It's a cruelty that took some years to become truly apparent, and it grows more salient with each passing year.

The metaphysical futilities of the matter notwithstanding, Bart is a bright kid, but for some reason he can't knuckle down and memorise the information he needs to tick all the right boxes, even when his academic credibility depends on it. Colonial history just isn't as interesting to him as playing Escape From Grandma's House down at the Noiseland Arcade, and before he knows it the whole evening is gone. Part of the problem is that he clearly sucks at time management, which isn't so uncommon for a child of his age. We could certainly say a few things about how the school, while keen to chastise and stigmatise Bart for his repeated failures, doesn't seem to making much of an effort to otherwise engage him. But it seems to me that a great chunk of the blame rests with Homer and Marge, who could be doing a better job of overseeing all of this and ensuring that Bart is setting aside adequate time in which to study - or, heaven forbid, sitting down and attempting to go through a few of the details with him. Instead, Homer physically drags him away from an intended cram session to watch Big Gorilla Week on the Million Dollar Movie channel, while Marge's knee-jerk response is to optimistically insist that Bart is just a late bloomer (she does not actually believe this, judging by her openness to the possibility of holding Bart back a grade). It's not something that the episode makes an explicit deal out of, or even implicitly alludes to much, outside of a scene where Homer and Marge find Bart asleep atop his textbook and wonder why he keeps on failing, in spite of his good intentions. But why indeed.

The next morning, Bart wakes up ill-prepared for his test, but manages to feign a convincing enough case of amoria phlebitis for the school nurse to send him home. After a day of ill-gotten ice cream and television, his next step is to telephone Milhouse and quiz him for the answers - a fatal miscalculation, as we discover the following day that Milhouse himself did very poorly, although still well enough to put Bart in the shade. (Note: some viewers find it confusing that Bart manages to score worse than Milhouse by supposedly replicating Milhouse's answers - the current summary on Wikipedia puts it down to Ms Krabappel giving him a different set of questions, but this much is never stated in the episode itself. Personally, I would take Bart's poorer result as indication that he even managed to do a half-assed job of committing that ill-advised cheat sheet to memory.) This latest failure ends up being the straw that breaks the loaded camel's back, with Pryor being brought in to give his grim recommendation (surprisingly, for an episode so heavily centred around the school, we see little of Skinner throughout). Bart manages to convince the higher powers to give him one last chance to prove that he is capable of doing better, but has ample doubts himself and looks to guidance from an outside source. He starts by reaching out to Otto, the school employee who acts the least like an authority figure, and thus the one to whom Bart finds it easiest to relate. All the same, Bart is sharp enough to recognise that Otto's response, which is to assure him that being held back a grade is no big deal, is not one he should be swallowing - his proclamation that, "I got held back in the fourth grade myself, twice. And look at me! Now I DRIVE the school bus!", merely feeds into Bart's concerns about never escaping the cycle. Instead, he turns to self-professed "natural enemy" Martin Prince, in the hopes that he can teach him a thing or two about academic prowess in return for a few pointers in improving his schoolyard reputation.

When Martin was introduced in "Bart The Genius", he was effectively the anti-Bart - whereas Bart was the perpetual rebel who lived to upset the apple cart, Martin was the kind of impeccably well-behaved child that authority figures can only dream of. Appealing to the higher-ups came as naturally to him as undermining them did to Bart. In "Genius" Martin's own outlook on the rivalry seemed to vacillate from sincere obliviousness (imploring Bart not to bear some simple-minded grudge against him for wanting to protect the school from vandalism) to knowingly relishing any opportunity to get one up on Bart (reminding Ms Krabappel that Bart is supposed to face the window during exams so that he cannot copy his neighbour's paper). The two of them were set up as so diametrically opposed that Bart forming an alliance with Martin and bringing out his latent rebel feels like it could have been used as the basis of a entire episode in itself. Here, it makes up only a small portion of the story, yet the episode still cranks a delectable amount of mileage from it, delving into Martin's character and illuminating a few hidden depths and vulnerabilities in just a handful of minutes. Bart wins the attentions of Prince by latching onto his Achilles heel, which is to say his flagrant lack of popularity among his peers. Martin has no social rapport with the other children, but has always assumed that they admire him from afar, and seems genuinely dismayed to discover that his prize-winning dioramas and years of service as a hall monitor in fact mean nothing to them. But even before then, there's a moment where he finds himself standing on the sidelines of a schoolyard ball game and seems to register how out of his depth he is amid the rituals of his fellow students, returning to Herman Melville's Moby Dick with the sad resignation, "Well, back to the forecastle of the Pequod." It's a great line, evocative of a sinking ship, suggesting that Bart and Martin, in spite of their polarities, are each mutually doomed for their respective deficiencies. It also calls attention to how many references there are throughout the episode to monstrous animals and their attempted conquest - the episode opens with Martin giving an impassioned analysis of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea, a text The Simpsons would homage more extensively at the tail-end of the season with "The War of The Simpsons". Ahab's hunt for the white whale and Santiago's battle with the giant marlin might be seen as indicative of Bart's own quest to reassert his pride and proficiency atop an ocean of despondency that's all set to drag him down into its depths. He is at war with the wayward part of himself that he just can't seem to tame into submission. Conversely, Homer's sympathy for the plight of King Kong knock-off Gorilla The Conqueror - "It's so unfair! Just because he's different!" (and speaking as one who always roots for the monsters in these things, his sentiment is greatly appreciated) - would appear to align Bart's struggle with that of the beastly entities themselves. He is the aberrant outcast the school authorities are intent on vanquishing for not conforming to their pre-determined standards, and he's headed for a metaphorical harpooning if he cannot change his course. His bargain with Martin is rooted in the assumption that the influence of the teacher's pet might lessen his own feral tendencies; instead, he ends up creating a monster out of Martin. After being coaxed into pushing a boy into the girls' lavatory, Martin develops a taste for schadenfreude and decides that what his life needs is more adrenalin and less academia. He runs off to the arcade with Milhouse, Richard and Lewis (those last two were still desperately clinging on to relevancy, but it wouldn't be long now), leaving Bart in the lurch on the night before the test. Bart's influence rubbing off a little too successfully on Martin is another plot development that feels as though it could have occupied an entire third-act conflict, but the episode cheekily allows it to settle itself - Martin is still a rebel by the end, apparently going so far as to emulate the behaviour he abhorred Bart for in "Genius", only for everything to have been conveniently restored to factory settings by his next appearance. We are living in a time loop here, after all.

The one tactic that it seemingly never occurs to Bart to do, but feels like it should have been obvious, would be to have asked Lisa to help with his studies. I mean, she's right there in the next room and I suspect she'd be far less likely to rescind on any agreement than Martin. From a narrative perspective she serves a different purpose, which is to provide an outlet for Bart's conscience - more specifically his underlying recognition that his efforts to bluff his way through life, while protractedly avoiding facing up to the real nitty gritty, are ultimately going to get him nowhere. Lisa is the only character who calls Bart out on his feigned case of amoria phlebitis; her exact words, "Everyone knows you're faking it, Bart", would appear flagrantly untrue, given that he has clearly fooled Marge, Homer and the school nurse, but they get at a deeper reality - one that, judging by his response ("Well, everyone had better keep their mouth shut"), Bart is all-too wary of. Lisa's astuteness comes up again toward the end of the episode, when, having been abandoned by Martin, Bart falls back on his very last resort, which is to put his hands together and beg for divine intervention - he asks the highest authority of them all to find a way of cancelling school so that he may have one more day in which to make the facts sink in. When he wakes up the following morning to find Springfield covered in a thick layer of snow and the school non-operational, Bart's first instinct is to rush outside and play with the other children, but he's stopped by his sister. She admits to having eavesdropped on his prayer session, and reminds him of why he asked for the day off in the first place. It's another classic Lisa moment in an episode where she otherwise barely features; she seems both perturbed that God has apparently deigned to answer Bart's lowly request, and indignant that he was all poised to squander the miracle on a day of sledding. Bart can see Lisa's point, so he retreats to his desk and attempts to get down to some studying. It doesn't go smoothly, because as would become rapidly obvious as the series went on, whatever higher power sits atop of The Simpsons universe is an absolute bastard. It hears Bart's pleas and appears to sympathise, but is, at best, insisting on testing him further, or at worst, looking to have a bit of spiteful sport at his expense. Bart gets his wish for an extra day's revision, all while the rest of Springfield gets to enjoy what is formally declared (by Mayor Quimby, making his debut appearance) as Snow Day, the funnest day in the town's history. All of our friends are there - Jacques, Kashmir, Bleeding Gums Murphy. Even Sideshow Bob is able to make the occasion. (The one character who is mysteriously absent is Herman; they actually flag this up on the DVD commentary, noting the skipped opportunity for a sight gag with Herman's missing arm disrupting the circle of townspeople linking hands.) The sequence where all these assorted Springfieldians unleash their inner children in the frozen wonderland is a beautiful one indeed, illustrating how rich and developed the supporting cast was already coming this early on in the series' lifespan. But it comes as an absolute punch in the gut to Bart, who does his best to shut it all out but is barely able to focus. There's no such thing as a free lunch, but did the Powers That Be not appreciate that Bart already has a serious problem with keeping his attention span in check? It leads to a genuinely harrowing moment, where Bart takes to repeatedly slapping his face, admonishing himself with the threat, "You wanna be held back a grade?"

The resolution to the episode has that characteristic Simpsons back-handedness. A more conventional sitcom might have ended with Bart not only passing his test, but passing with flying colours, thus upholding that trite assumption that you can do anything if you put your mind to it. "Bart Gets an F" insists on a harsher but far more honest answer, that it is entirely possible to try your hardest and still not succeed. The following day when Bart turns in his paper, he asks Ms Krabappel to mark it on the spot and spare him the uncertainty. She complies, and hands Bart back a score of 59, just one point short of a D-. Bart is so crestfallen that he immediately bursts into tears; we the people had seen precedent for Bart crying in "Bart The General", but it comes as a shock to Edna, who clearly isn't used to such unbridled displays of emotion from her least favourite student. Even when she tries to be sympathetic she can't help but come off as damning - "I'd have thought you'd be used to failing by now", she suggests, apparently amazed that Bart had ever expected he could do better. It's here that Bart's actual salvation arises, not from a triumphant display of academic mettle, but from his casual regurgitation of a random historical factoid - Bart professes to feeling empathy for George Washington for surrendering Fort Necessity to the French Empire in 1754, knowledge unwittingly absorbed during his ostensibly futile study efforts. Edna is impressed by his demonstration of independent learning and agrees to give him that urgently-needed extra point. She does of course have her own motives for wanting to bump Bart's grade up to a D-, since she wasn't exactly relishing the prospect of another year as his teacher. But we sense that she is genuinely happy to cut him some slack and will take whatever excuse she can get to do so, putting Bart in the clear and and incurring his spur-of-the-moment gratitude.

The punchline of the episode takes a similarly backhanded tone, with the family gathered around Bart as his by-a-whisker D- (and barely obliterated F) earns pride of place on the refrigerator door. Not only is his achievement framed, half-tenderly and half-facetiously, as no less monumental than any of the Lisa-procured A's with which it presently rubs shoulders, his admission that "Part of this D- belongs to God" would appear to posit this meagre accomplishment as being of enormous cosmic significance. Which it is. Earlier on, Lisa had offered this observation about Bart's supposed friends in high places: "I'm no theologian. I don't know who or what God is exactly. All I know is that he's a force more powerful than Mum and Dad put together, and you owe him big." For the purposes of this particular episode, I think we can answer Lisa's musing, which is to say that "God" is a higher being named David M. Stern, and he is indeed more powerful than Homer and Marge combined. It's important to keep in mind that whenever characters in fictional shows pray to God to intervene in their mortal affairs and change the impending outcome, they are in effect asking the writers to grant them a deus ex machina. Bart's closing words are an acknowledgement that, in spite of how heavily the odds seemed to be stacked against him, the universe was always fundamentally on his side - he and his family are its very nexus, and the Powers That Be are inevitably going to offer him a way out of whatever predicaments they thrust him into, even if they'll insist on wringing twenty-odd minutes' worth of laughs from his suffering in between. Having glimpsed the inherent cruelties of his universe, Bart feels at peace with it and assured of his place within. Just as well, because it's a relationship that could continue for some decades yet to come.

The First Snow of Winter (aka Blame It On The Weatherman)

When I think back on all the celebrity deaths that have occurred within my lifetime, there are few that left me quite so shell-shocked as that of Dermot Morgan. The Irish actor, who was best-known for playing the eponymous character in the sitcom Father Ted, died of a heart attack on 28th February 1998, just days before the eagerly-anticipated third series of Father Ted was set to debut on Channel 4. He was 45 years old. It didn't make sense to the pre-teen me. Back then, I didn't understand how anybody could die of a heart attack at age 45, unless they had some pre-existing condition or smoked twenty packs of cigarettes a day for years (which by all accounts Morgan didn't). It left me a little wiser as to the fragility of life, but it really ate a hole in me. As a result of Morgan's death, the broadcast of the third series of Father Ted was delayed by a week. Then when it did make it to air it ended up being the funniest chapter in the show's truncated* lifespan. I laughed so hard at Ted's "not a racist" gambit, at Pat Mustard's telephone dialogue and, of course, the kicking of Bishop Brennan up the arse. All the same, the knowledge of Morgan's passing cast a long grey shadow over the entire experience - Ted might have been funnier than it had ever been, but the world in general seemed a little less mirthful, and like a harsher, crueller place. When the closing episode, "Going To America", aired on 1st May, it brought with it a heavy sense of finality, not merely for marking the end of the series, but for the way it appeared to be putting a cap on a man's entire legacy (that montage they included at the end, it completely broke me). It's something I ruminate on regularly, and of which I feel particularly conscious now, in 2023, as we approach the 25th anniversary of Morgan's death.

Taking the sting off just a little was the news that the third series of Father Ted wasn't actually the last that Morgan had to offer. He did have one final hurrah on the horizon, coming up right at the end of the year - before his passing, he'd lent his vocal talents to a 28-minute animated film, The First Snow of Winter, produced by Hibbert Ralph and Link Entertainment, and directed by Graham Ralph. On Christmas Day of 1998, the BBC's gift to the nation (aside from the UK terrestrial premiere of Babe) was the chance to see Morgan's last ever role, in which he played a talking vole named Voley. And that's fantastic. Every actor should voice a cartoon rodent at some point in their career, and I'm glad that Morgan had his opportunity.

It goes without saying that Morgan's turn as Voley isn't half as well remembered as his tenure as Ted. But it's still a charming vocal performance that really highlights the breadth of the talent that we lost too soon. In Father Ted, Morgan played the eternal straight man cast away on an island of eccentrics, but here he gets to be the comic relief in an otherwise sombre story about lost children in an impassive world. Voley is that most likeable of figures, the neighbourhood kook whose quirky bearings conceal a barrel of wisdom, and Morgan plays him with a liveliness, warmth and charisma that provides our genial anchor throughout much of the narrative. (Note: when The First Snow of Winter was imported to the US, the cast was largely redubbed, and the role of Voley was played by Tim Curry; I've never seen the US version so I can't comment on how his performance compares. And with all due respect to Curry, I think I have way too much emotional attachment to Morgan's performance to even want to think about it being swapped out for anybody else.)

The First Snow of Winter tells the story of Sean (Miriam Margoyles), a young mallard duck living on the west coast of Ireland who is accidentally left behind when his family migrates for the winter. Sean, ever the rapscallion, flies too close to an aeroplane and is knocked out of the sky by the downdraft, causing him to break his wing and leaving him stranded at the mallards' summer nesting grounds. His mother (Sorcha Cusack) attempts to locate him, but sees a couple of fox cubs playing with Sean's feathers and leaves him for dead. Unable to follow and rejoin his family, Sean is faced with having to stay put and weather the wintery menace that a duck should ideally eschew altogether. The odds aren't exactly stacked in his favour, but he finds an unexpected ally in the form of Voley, who teaches him a few tricks in making the most of the remaining resources. With his new friend at his side, Sean assumes he's in with a chance, but then Voley goes and drops a bomb on him, in that he doesn't actually intend to stay with Sean for the duration; come the titular change in the weather, he's going to retreat into his burrow to sleep out the coldest months (questionable, but we'll get to that). Sean really is on his own in making it through to spring, and not helping matters is that he has an additional adversary in the form of the parent fox, who stalks him repeatedly throughout the film. What we have here is essentially an anatine version of Home Alone, only minus the sociopathy - it uses animal characters to play out that most perennial of childhood nightmares about being abandoned by the ones we love. One of the most difficult moments emotionally occurs when Sean asks Voley, "Am I a bad duck?", and Voley, misunderstanding the point being made, assures him that, "You do the duck thing very well". Sean specifies that he doesn't understand why his family haven't come looking for him, a question that Voley is spared from having to answer by the sudden appearance of the fox. Naturally, the viewer has access to knowledge that Sean doesn't - we know that Sean's mother did, in fact, go back for him but left because she had reason to believe that her son had been killed. But this doesn't quite allay the gloomy despair articulated by Sean - the realisation that his displacement doesn't much matter to the world at large, which continues to go about its business regardless. What Sean is inclined to interpret as karmic retribution for his childish misbehaviours (before the migration, one of his favourite hobbies was harassing the local flock of seagulls, and he was certainly never inclined to listen to his mother) is nothing more than the relentless flow of time marching on, indifferent to the plight of the individual, and it's inevitable that some of us are destined to wind up as debris along the way. It's a straightforward narrative, and ultimately all ends well, but it offers what I would deem to be two really harsh twists in the getting there, the first being Voley's aforementioned abandonment of Sean. The second is when Sean discovers that he wasn't the only youngster left behind - during the winter, he acquires the surprise companionship of Puffy (Kate Sachs), a young puffin who was also separated from his family early in the migration and forced to turn back. (I'll profess that I thought Puffy was a girl for most of the story, until Voley addresses the two birds collectively as "boys" near the end.)

If The First Snow of Winter has one major sticking point, it's that a number of the story's biggest plot points rest on some fairly wild inaccuracies regarding the behaviours of the species in question - the big one being that mallard ducks don't migrate away from Ireland during the winter, when the local mallard population actually increases due to the number of ducks migrating from Iceland to the British Isles. There's also the reason given for Voley's absence during the latter half of the narrative, when he claims to be going into his winter sleep; I reckon he may be pulling a fast one on Sean, considering that voles don't actually hibernate. There are very few mammal species within the British Isles that do - just bats, hedgehogs and dormice (although that last one isn't native to Ireland specifically). On a more minor note, Sean is wrong when he tells Voley that ducks don't eat acorns and berries - I don't know what The First Snow of Winter supposes mallards do eat, since we never see Sean feeding with his family, but they're resourceful birds that can eat a wide variety of plant matter, including acorns and berries (which does at least make it plausible that Sean is able to survive on a diet of pilfered squirrel food - his puffin friend, less so). Look, it's a cartoon, not a nature documentary, so I'm happy to give it some leeway on all of these issues, but it does mark the story out as being based on vague stereotypes and assumptions about animal behaviour (ducks fly south, furry things hibernate) rather than any genuine fascination for the critters in question, and that's the kind of thing that could so easily sink a picture of this nature, if we sense that its makers didn't care about the subject at their fingertips. Fortunately, The First Snow of Winter soars on the back of another passion, that being for the Irish landscape, which is rendered beautifully. The backgrounds have the kind of disarming painterly quality that could hang comfortably in any tearoom, but a particularly sizeable portion of the film's character is conveyed by the skies, which are soft, yet perpetually darkened, in a way that speaks to the sorrow hanging over the characters, whilst hinting at the hardship omnipresent amidst the ostensible serenity. Adding to the Irish flavour is the folk soundtrack by Mark Sayer-Wade and Tolga Kashif, and this seems like as good an opportunity as any to highlight by far the film's strangest sequence, when Sean and Voley engage in a stepdance routine that doesn't serve much of a purpose other than to further accentuate the Irishness of the setting, and to ensure that we go away with at least one really freakish visual etched into our skulls, when an entire flock of sheep gets in, seemingly involuntarily, on the action.

Given that Voley's vole-ishness serves no specific function within the plot, you could argue that his arc would have made a lick more sense if he'd been a hedgehog named Hedgy or Hoggy. But perhaps that would have telegraphed that the character would, inevitably, have to go into hibernation sooner or later. It hurts more if it's heaped on us from nowhere and we're left just as flabbergasted as Sean by the revelation.

There are no onscreen humans in The First Snow of Winter - they are mentioned by Voley when he talks about the importance of choosing a boat for shelter that won't be taken out to sea, but otherwise the only real sign of human encroachment on the characters' world is in the jet that sabotages Sean's flight. (There is a sequence that relies on extensive intercutting between the mallard family preparing for flight and the aircraft's take-off that not only lays the stage for the fateful collision but suggests a parallel between the species that underscores our kinship with the natural world, whether we're alert to it or not.) The jet has been rendered using computer animation, and while the mixture of 3D graphics and traditional animation inevitably seems a little crude now, it does help to mark the plane out as an alien force among the birds (as a fan of traditional animation, I also can't help but read into it an accidental allegory for the effect the rise of 3D animation was about to have on the industry as a whole). For the most part, the film's antagonism arises from the basic cycles of nature, the inevitability of change and the necessity of adapting and moving on, and this is something that Sean can only make peace with. Although his separation from his parents has come prematurely, Voley indicates that this is a rite passage to which all children have to face up eventually - when Sean states that he misses his mother, the vole responds, "We all miss our mothers." No season within our life is going to last forever, and the ability to roll with these changes and tap into our latent survival mechanisms is an invaluable one. When Voley tells Sean that he has to leave him, it's a difficult exchange, but there's no sense of betrayal about it - it's simply another part of that process that must be observed. It's when Sean's alone that he discovers his metaphorical wings and all that he's capable of, displaying initiative in seeking out alternative shelter inside a discarded boot when the boat Voley had chosen for him is destroyed in a storm. The telling sign of Sean's blossoming maturity is when he assumes the role of mentor and nurturer, in imparting all the lessons that he learned from Voley to Puffy. Sean may be doomed to remain physically stunted as a duckling over the course of the film, but by winter's end we can see the adult duck that's taken root inside of him. This doesn't preclude the obligatory happy ending in which he is ultimately reunited with his returning family, but from a narrative perspective there's a degree to which that's all gravy. What's important is that Sean has proven that he can survive on his own, and obviously things are never quite going to be the same again.

Adding a more traditional, tangible threat is the character of the fox, the silent menace that intermittently resurfaces in an effort to bring Sean's quest to ride out the winter to a premature close. To an extent, the fox's predatory leanings are just another part of this natural panorama, and our brief glimpse of the fox's own family comes as a reminder that there is more than one side to this story. All the same, they do manage to make the fox seem really, purposely mean; it's less anthropomorphised than the other characters, in that it doesn't talk, but there's still a sense of knowing cruelty to its predation, making its constant targeting of Sean seem less about biological need than something altogether more personal. This is particularly evident during the climactic confrontation, when Sean and Puffy are so overjoyed to have survived the winter that they momentarily forget about the fox and enable it to get dangerously close to them. If the fox were a truly efficient killer, it could have easily snuck in on both birds and taken them before they ever knew what hit them. The fact that it waits for them to turn around and notice it first rather implies that it wants them to know what hit them. But I suppose this leads me into my slight quibble with the fox character, which is to say that it is emphatically not an efficient killer. There are numerous instances in the story when it seems like the heroes only survive because the fox is painfully slow in going in for the kill, and that leaves me with somewhat mixed feelings about its overall effectiveness as an antagonist. On the one hand, the fox boasts my favourite character animation (courtesy of Odile Comon) of all the cast, yet it always seems to be deliberately holding back on its full rapacious energies; it never quite emerges as the all-out threat that it could be, and it's in the fox's bungling attempts to catch Sean that I'm most conscious of the fact that this is, when all is said and done, a family-friendly cartoon. But that's all minor carping.

The closest the fox comes to doing genuine harm is when it seizes and savages Voley, who has recently emerged from his winter sleep and intervenes in that final confrontation in a bid to save the young birds. The fox swiftly abandons him to chase after Sean, who discovers that his broken wing has healed, allowing him to fly safely out of the reach of his pursuer. There may, however, have been a cost to Sean's survival - he returns to the site where Voley fell to find him limp and unresponsive, and the film milks a few forlorn moments out of Sean's attempts to revive him, seemingly in vain, before revealing that it's all a great fake-out, and that of course Voley is still alive. A bit of a hoary old standard for getting half the audience in tears before giving us our desired happy ending anyway? Definitely. But that momentary gap where Voley doesn't respond to Sean genuinely hurt back in 1998, due to the knowledge that Morgan had already left us in real life. The First Snow of Winter might not go so far as to impart any direct lessons on the nature of death (a la The Snowman) but the subtext was there nevertheless thanks to that unfortunate occurrence from earlier that year. For those affected by Morgan's death, it remains an upsetting sequence to watch to this day.

Something I will forever appreciate about The First Snow of Winter, above all else, is that the very last diegetic sounds we hear as the credits begin rolling is that of Voley laughing. That Morgan got to round out his legacy on a note of such buoyancy is certainly heartening. And it reminds me that the laughter he left behind him has proven greatly enduring - Father Ted is one of those miraculous comedies that can be watched over and over with the gags and the performances never seeming to lose any of their freshness. Morgan might have left us too soon, but within the past quarter-century his ability to keep on giving has gone unabated. As ties in with the central message of The First Snow of Winter - things change, and there's little that can be done about that. But it's remarkable how life itself abides.

* Backstage whisper has been pretty firm that the third series of Father Ted was always intended to be the last, and that Morgan himself wanted to move on from playing Ted. But really, who knows how it might have panned out? Rowan Atkinson has repeatedly announced his intention to retire Mr Bean, only to decide that there's still more he wants to do with the character. Actors do end up changing their minds about this sort of thing.