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.

Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Mates (aka ER)

"Mates" is another addition to the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" canon that, like "Arrest" before it, makes clever use of perspective to deliver a hard-hitting message about how a flippant decision can wreak terrible consequences. The grisliness of the featured scenario is again expounded by putting the viewer in the shoes of one of its participants - in this case, the passenger of a crashed vehicle undergoing emergency treatment, while his self-proclaimed "mate" (the drink driver, who has apparently gotten off with a scuff to the head) hovers on the sidelines, repeatedly interjecting in a futile effort to keep the finger of blame from settling squarely on him. Technically, this might qualify as yet another D&DWL monologue, since the driver is the only one who gets any discernible dialogue, although the arrangement still functions as a two-way conversation of sorts - throughout the film, the victim is heard breathing in what is, on the surface, an impassive bid to remain alive. As the ad progresses, the breathing itself seems to suffice as a response, imparting everything the victim needs to rebuke the driver's attempts at reconciliation.

I have a particular soft spot for "Mates", as it was the D&DWL installment that caused me the most discomfort at the time of the campaign's run - albeit through its print counterpart, not the TV ad itself. As a child, I attended weekly trampoline lessons at a local sports centre, and the trampoline was positioned so that every bounce gave me a tantalising glimpse of the upper level of the centre, which for a stretch had a noticeboard display dedicated to the evils of drink driving. Among the featured items was a poster showing a young man leaning over a disfigured body upon a hospital bed, while advancing the question "At least we can still be mates...can't we?" Behind him was the accusatory glare of a nurse, making it clear where our moral judgements were intended to lie. The face of that nurse, on which I fixated for many a trampolining session, still haunts me to this day. Back then, I interpreted that ominous "...can't we?" to mean that the victim's prospects of survival were grim, despite his mate's unsolicited buoyancy, although the outcome suggested by the TV ad is somewhat different. There, we learn that the victim is expected to pull through, but will lose the use of his legs, and this may not be the only irreparable thing about the situation.

I also give "Mates" props for being the most singularly terrifying PIF of the bunch - in terms of pure fear factor, the only one that gets anywhere close would be the film centred on Denise van Outen's lifeless eyes. I've already credited "Mark" with being the most visually arresting of the D&DWL films, but I'd rate a lot of the images we see throughout "Mates", while less overtly showy in their surrealism, as just as disturbingly weird in their own way. It is one heck of a freaky spot to watch, due to the high level of visual and audio distortion used to depict the victim's wavering grip on consciousness. The medical professionals tending to the victim fade in and out focus, their forms becoming vague and frequently inhuman. We understand that they are performing vital life-saving surgery upon our subject, yet their presence is of little comfort, their air being more of demonic torturers than of carers. There are repeated flashes of red throughout. As the film opens, the sounds of disembodied laughter are heard, inexplicably. At 0:13, the nurse to the right side of the screen has her face stretched into an uncanny smile (the accusatory glare she shoots the driver in the print ad doesn't feature, but this is just as sufficient for late night scares), and I don't know what's even going on at 0:14. The result is quite the distilled 30-second nightmare, in which our protagonist has awoken to a hellish reality - where, on top of everything else, their supposed best friend registers as little more than a loathsome intrusion, an imposing, overly-protesting blot upon their fleeting moments of semi-alertness. He becomes the Devil of own our private Hell - we'd seen a similar device used to illustrate the raw horror of the situation in "Christmas Pudding", in which the protagonist's entrapment in shock and grief was underscored by having her family cackle like demons as she received news of her boyfriend's demise, but it's played here with a greater sense of underlying bitterness.

Both "Arrest" and "Mates" are structured heavily around the abasement of the driver, but whereas "Arrest" invited the viewer to experience that abasement first-hand, by playing out its narrative from the driver's perspective and having every other participant get uncomfortably in their face, in this case the driver (who is unusually corporeal for a D&DWL film) is the impinging figure, albeit one with a crippling lack of authority. The effect of putting us in the victim's shoes, besides showing us what a terribly unpleasant experience it is to end up injured and in intensive care, is to have us ruminate on whether we would be inclined to accept his gestures of contrition, with the engineered gut response being that of course we wouldn't. He casts too pathetic and repellent figure, with his snivelling expressions of two-faced remorse, and he seems too unwilling to accept responsibility for what has happened. Of course, in that regard it's hard not to also think of the successive PIF "Mirror", in that both scenarios involve wounded passengers left with some form of lifelong injury brought about by the driver's drinking, and in both cases an element of victim-blaming creeps its way in, with the insinuation that the passenger is as much at fault for accepting the ride in the first place. In "Mates", it's noteworthy that part of the driver's defence is the assertion that "One of us had to drive". The implication there is that both of them had been drinking, so does that put them both at fault for failing to designate a non-drinking driver before embarking on their boys' nights out? That certainly seems to be the case that the driver is forwarding, but compared to "Mirror", which could be perceived as legitimising this stance, "Mates" has very little tolerance for the his attempts at shifting the blame. Here, the onus is bestowed firmly upon the driver, with the unsettling depiction of the surrounding medics arguably holding up its own mirror to the slack duty of care he provided his companion in attempting to drive him home whilst over the limit. Any possible ambiguity on the matter is roundly removed with the punchline of the film, where the driver, at distasteful proximity, asks the camera, "Still mates, aren't we?" The implied answer is "no". Drink drivers are nobody's mates.

Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Arrest (aka Police Station)

Let's start 2023 on a high note, by looking at the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" installment that I personally rate as the campaign's strongest - "Arrest" (aka "Police Station"), which made the television rounds somewhere at the dawn of the 1990s. Intense, compellingly disconcerting and with not a single wasted moment, "Arrest" is a fine example of the creative muscles the once-austere campaign was rapidly building, and its ability to hammer home an impactful message without resorting to the more obvious shock tactics suggested by the collision itself. In this case, we're taken on a tour of the inner passageways of a police station, in a manner that recalls the punchy immediacy of the opening of "Fireman's Story", only instead of sharing an emotionally intimate tea break with Ken Stott we're greeted by an endless parade of accusatory eyes, practically burning holes in our jackets with their ill-disguised contempt. The promise of a tea break does eventually arrive, once we've been sufficiently basted in the relentless spilling over of scorn, but odds are that you'll be left with very little stomach for it.

I noted when I covered "Jenny" that the earliest films in the D&DWL canon were less interested in exploring the direct consequences to the drink driver than they were in the suffering of the friends and family of the people they crashed into (and, where enough of them was left intact, the victims themselves). The drink driver remained a perpetual blank, an invisible phantom whose thoughtless deeds have left long and baleful shadows across all of the featured individuals, the implicit suggestion being that this loathsome boogeyman could well be you, if you did not keep your drinking habits in check. "Arrest" both turns the table on that and follows it through to its logical conclusion, centring specifically on the perspective of a drink driver undergoing questioning by police after causing an accident and leaving a young woman in critical condition. The drink driver is still given next to no corporeality (we get a fleeting glimpse of their hand and arm, but that's it), and that's because on this occasion the phantom perpetrator is very pointedly supposed to be you. "Arrest" puts you in the shoes of the driver and depicts their eye-view as they're ushered from one stony-faced official to the next, journeying ever more critically down the fast track to incrimination. We're given a bitter taster of the invasive discomfort the procedure, which sees us abandoning our personal possessions at the front desk, having our bodily fluids extracted by a laboratory technician (she's probably the nicest of the officials we encounter, in that she actually says "please", but no more familiar in tone than those police officers), and finally being read our rights when it becomes apparent that we aren't going to be awakening from this nightmare any time soon. 

Superficially, "Arrest" might strike you as the D&DWL equivalent of a parent forcing his wayward teenage son to visit a police station in the hopes that the mere sight of a holding cell is going scare him straight - it purports to show you what a frightfully intimidating experience it would be to be arrested for causing grievous harm (and ultimately death) by driving under the influence of alcohol, but I suspect that much won't come as a massive bombshell to most viewers. There is a frantic claustrophobia to the piece that deftly gets across the horror of the situation, but what makes the film so effective, I think, is the wall-to-wall disdain that it radiates - making it clear that, despite your passivity for the entire duration, you are never anything less than the villain of the equation. Like "Fireman's Story", it shows us that the professionals who deal with this type of trauma on a daily basis are human too, and how their familiarity with such matters does not preclude their ability to feel the emotional impact. Its greatest strength, though, is in how convincingly the anger of those police authorities translates into self-loathing on our part; by the end of the film, despite identifying with the driver's abasement for the preceding forty seconds, we emerge sharing the officials' infuriation for the devastation they have caused.

"Arrest" opens in the aftermath of the accident, the closest we get to the grisly incident being a momentary glimpse of the unconscious victim as she's carted away by paramedics. Like most of the D&DWL films, "Arrest" is light on gore (unless the sight of a needle in action makes you squeamish) and, while the ad does climax with us hearing second-hand that the injured woman unfortunately did not survive, it bucks the more common D&DWL trend of focussing extensively on the issue of bereavement. Who was the woman in question and who does she leave behind her? We get no insight into either. Rather, news of her death is slipped in to illuminate the exact point at which we've personally slipped over the barrier of no return. This moment is marked by a startling halt to the barrage of formalities, giving way to a few seconds of dead, empty space in which the entire world seems to hang in the balance. A particularly nice touch is the reluctant spectatorship in the form of those extras lingering about in the backdrop, close-up footage of whom is intercut with the unfurling of the slip of paper containing details of the woman's fate, and by extension our own. What is running through their heads at this stage is painfully obvious - whatever business has brought them to the police station at this time of night, they're just relieved that they're not in your situation.

The punchline occurs when the last of the police officers offers us a cup of tea, a gesture of civility which, coupled with his flagrant sardonicism in addressing us as "Sir", barely conceals the repressed primal urge to sock us in the jaw. Coming out of the grave series of rituals with which we've just been bombarded, it seems an almost glibly mundane proposition, the taunting token of a return to a normalcy that now seems entirely beyond our reach. But of course it's also a beverage, and in that regard it provides an ironic echo to a presumed moment from earlier on in our narrative, when we were first served liquor by an off-screen bartender. It was our craving for liquids and the reckless consumption of which that got us into this whole catastrophe; perhaps it's only fitting that we bow out with a nod to its voracity.

Miracle on Evergreen Terrace (aka There's No Shame In Being A Pariah)

"Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" (aka 5F07) is yet another example of a Simpsons episode where the title is basically a lie. There is no miracle therein, on Evergreen Terrace or anywhere else. Marge thinks there's been a miracle a couple of times, but she's proven wrong on both occasions. The lack of miracles is precisely the intent - they aren't going to happen in a burg as rotten as Springfield, Christmas be damned. Miracles are so banal anyway, a point made when Marge first insists that one has occurred, and Homer assumes she's talking about a particularly effective brand of silver polish.

"Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" aired on December 21st 1997 as part of the series' ninth season, yet it constituted only its third foray into festive storytelling. For years, The Simpsons had purposely steered clear of going back to the Christmas well - such was the reverence with which "Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire", the episode that had kick-started an entire cartoon empire, was regarded. When "Marge Be Not Proud" finally dared to breach that barrier in 1995, the floodgates were opened, and seasonal Simpsons outings would become a far more common feature of the series going forward. Of course, the show was already a markedly different beast to what it was in the days of "Marge Be Not Proud", let alone "Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire"; by the time "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" showed up, we were in the early stages of Mike Scully's reign as showrunner, and for those viewers who weren't exactly wild about the direction he was about to take things (yours truly included), this episode came as quite the bucket of ice water. "The Principal and The Pauper" had created its share of controversy earlier that season, but since it was technically a holdover from Season 8, you could blame that one on the outgoing showrunners (and on writer Ken Keeler, who stands resolutely by his vision to this day). "Miracle" would, in its own lower-key way, prove just as divisive, and while you could say that about a lot of Season 9, considered by some to be the last truly classic season, and by others the beginning of the end, I find that this episode seems to bring out particularly strong feelings in people. Either it's an ingenious slice of seasonal black comedy or an ill-judged spite-fest and our first uneasy indicator of what was to come under Scully's tenure. Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood of I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide seemed mostly bored by it, calling it "a deliberately mawkish Christmas episode that is low on good jokes...and a retread of any number of episodes where Bart does wrong, feels guilty and eventually has to fess up." At the same time, "Miracle" is undoubtedly old enough to be a beneficiary of nostalgia (25 years old, to be precise!); I was still a kid when it debuted, and while I never much cared for it even then (particularly that downer of an ending), it apparently made enough of an impression for the sounds of "Santa's On His Way" by Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys to give present-day me a case of the melancholic fuzzies.

I get, and to an extent can even respect, what "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" is attempting to do, which is to be the anti-It's a Wonderful Life. Strife on Earth and ill-will to all men is what it swears by - or, to borrow a quote from Phoebe from Friends, "It's a sucky life and just when you think it can't suck any more, it does". "Miracle" contains numerous jabs at the commercialisation of Christmas, for which the family's plastic tree and its flame-broiled fate provide the perfect metaphor. There's a joke about aluminium Christmas trees, and how people once sneered at those for being artificial, while batting not an eyelid at the prospect of a Yuletide smothered in plastic. "Miracle" is deeply distrustful of plastic, which it shows to be cheap, disposable and ultimately not destined to return your emotional investment. But "Miracle" is no redemptive tale of seeing past the materialistic trappings of the holiday and discovering what really matters - if anything, it's doubly suspicious of the notion of seasonal goodwill and of Christmas as a time that brings out the best in humanity, a notion it gleefully eviscerates as being as artificial as any factory-made Christmas tree, plastic or aluminium. Humans, "Miracle" has it, are fundamentally scumbags, at least the ones who reside in Springfield. Which honestly isn't that much of a revelation - it's been a pretty consistent component of the show's DNA since as far back as Season 1's "The Telltale Head" that Springfield is a deeply unpleasant community that jumps upon any excuse to get its pitchforks out and do evil in the name of the mob. "Miracle" pushes it to a particularly pointed degree, however. When Bart first sells his ridiculous lie about the family falling victim to a burglary at the crack of Christmas dawn, Marge's immediate reaction is to wonder how anybody could do something so unconscionable. And the obvious answer, from the viewer's perspective, is that nobody did; narrative tension is, for a short while, driven by the knowledge that there was no such burglar and that the family's crisis of faith in humanity is over nothing more than a really dumb accident. And yet, when Homer later says of Bart's phantom burglar, "You do exist," he's more correct than he possibly realises. The specific burglar described by Bart (with hooks for hands, a striped convict shirt and a bag with a dollar sign) is pure fiction, but that burglar is manifest, on a figurative basis, in the hearts of every friend and neighbour who had only yesterday dug deep into their pockets in order to replenish the family's loss. In the episode's cleverest moment, Homer delivers his statement to the burglar via Kent Brockman's newscast, addressing the camera and by extension the viewer, thus implicating them, pre-emptively, in the mean-spirited twist ending, which sees the entire town unleashing their inner burglar and looting whatever they can from the family's house. To answer Marge's original question, stealing from a family at Christmas is apparently something we ALL would partake in, given the right provocation. For it is within our basic nature to be as petty and vindictive as we are greedy and grasping.

And all credit to "Miracle" for being so thoroughly committed to its cynicism. Unfortunately, I think the episode ultimately suffers because the story just isn't very good; the central conflict is weakly constructed and runs out of narrative momentum well before we've even reached the third act. And its unrelenting cynicism ultimately comes across as rather forced and hollow, a feel-bad ending for the sake of a feel-bad, as opposed to having anything truly honest or meaningful to say about our Yuletide hypocrisies.

The first thing that "Miracle" has riding against it is that it falls back extensively on plot points borrowed from the Christmas shows before it - and, given that there were so very few Christmas shows before it, it can't help but seem a little galling that they were already having to repeat themselves. In that regard it feels like the Simpsons' festive equivalent of one of those Greatest Hits compilations from a band that only ever did two albums. Like "Roasting", it's about the family having to deal with a Christmas stripped bare of material luxury. It's also about Bart doing something very bad, struggling to conceal his very bad action from his family, and then spending much of the episode in a depressive funk while grappling with that ugly little feeling called remorse - sound familiar? I acknowledged when I covered "Marge Be Not Proud" that there are some viewers who find that episode to be overbearing its treatment of Bart's transgression, but at least it had the sting of emotional authenticity - it was based on an incident from Scully's childhood and was, for all intents and purposes, his belated apology to his late mother in recognition of the hurt he realises he could have caused her with his own misadventure in shoplifting (Scully was clearly capable of bringing real sensitivity to the table as a writer, so it's surprising that he favoured such a crass approach as showrunner). It also works as a thoughtfully-constructed character study, focussing on one of the lesser-explored relationships of the Simpsons household. "Miracle" can't really hold claim to any such credentials - it is, on some level, an episode about how the Simpsons are intrinsically a unit and destined to all go down together if just one of them royally screws things up. But in the end its real interests lie less in the usual Simpson solidarity than in the meanness of the townsfolk, and how their ostensibly compassionate hearts will turn cold as stone if the narrative changes and their egos take a bruising. But even then The Simpsons already did a story of this very nature, with heaps more wit and precision and much less of a heavy hand, in Season 3's "Radio Bart" (not a Christmas episode, but in my coverage I made the case that it makes for appropriate festive viewing), which makes more-or-less the same point and follows a lot of very similar narrative beats. Where the two episodes diverge is in their respective outcomes - one is redemptive, the other unapologetically cruel - but then I wouldn't say that they radically contradict one another either. The people of Springfield inevitably bend to the will of the mob, seemingly indifferent to whether it's bent on being helpful or malicious, and the strength of that mob is always a thing to behold.

For all of my issues with "Miracle", the first act is basically fine. The parts that land the best tend to be parts that have little to do with the plot itself and are mostly scene-setters dealing with what a typical Christmas looks like inside the Simpsons house, and most of those occur within the first few minutes. One particularly good gag involves Marge serving the children two different kinds of Christmas cookies - tree-shaped cookies for Lisa and Maggie, and bloody spear-shaped cookies for Bart. Bart thanks Marge with such loving reverence before pretending to brutally skewer himself with his cookie, and the contrast is irresistible. This is preceded by another, neatly understated sight gag in which the children are seen watching a fireplace on television, obscuring the real fireplace right behind them. We don't get a whole lot of focus on Lisa in this episode (that makes three Christmas shows in a row where they've given her next to nothing to do) but her revulsion at the thought of unwrapping yet another yellow sweater always raises a smile. I like Bart's dedication to his absent aunt: "Oh, Aunt Selma. Always good for a fin." Bart's bathroom-fixated dream sequence probably goes on a mite too long, but you've got to admire how amazingly risqué it is, filled with various phallic objects squirting water. I also enjoy the moment with Marge mistaking the sounds of Maggie's expiring moo box for the weird noises Homer makes in his sleep, followed by Homer jabbing Marge for her comparatively inoffensive snoring. And of course, Homer's toddler-like incomprehension upon finding the tree and presents gone: "Lisa, where's Christmas?!" All of which comes together for a fairly solid set-up. It's just too bad that it doesn't go anywhere; past the first act, there's nowhere for this story to go, except through fourteen dragged-out minutes of largely humorless misdirection. You can practically feel the narrative wrong-footing itself when the word "burglar" slips out of Bart's mouth, and the family rallies around him with no further questioning. Like Bart, it's bitten off more than it can conceivably chew.

The second thing "Miracle" has riding against it is that, unlike "Marge Be Not Proud", Bart's very bad action has no basis whatsoever in plausibility. He wakes up early, gets a forbidden head-start in unwrapping presents, and ends up accidentally burning down the tree and the family's entire haul; having hastily concealed the evidence beneath the snow in the family's front yard, he then proceeds to blame the absent festive paraphernalia on a fictitious home intruder. Some suspension of disbelief is obviously required here - first and foremost, the one thing Bart wouldn't have been able to cover with his pure, white snow would be the smell of things following his little calamity; the family really should have been able to tell, just using their nostrils, that there'd been this big plastic bonfire inside their living room. Also, ignoring the convenience of the fire engulfing only the tree and the presents and not spreading to anything else, wouldn't there at least be a massive scorch mark on the carpet directly under the tree? Cartoon logic has to factor in somewhere, I suppose, but it still strikes me as a stretch for the family to accept Bart's story as readily as they do, when presumably he can't point to any actual evidence of there having been a break-in? Compare it to Marge's reluctance to accept that Bart was guilty of shoplifting in "Marge Be Not Proud" - her rushing to the defence of her son when a stranger points an accusatory finger his way is completely understandable, as is her insistence that she knows her son and what he is and isn't capable of. She's so passionate and so sincere in her defence that it is genuinely heartbreaking when she's shown evidence to the contrary. (Kavner's performance is so moving too - in particular, I'm always hit by that unmistakable undercurrent of panic in her voice when she challenges Tierney's security guard to play the tape so that everyone can see that he's wrong; Marge still wants to believe the best in her son, but she's clearly already rattled by how far her opponent is willing to take his case.) Here, there's no such payoff when Bart belatedly but inevitably confesses to his destruction of the tree - the family's toe-curling obtuseness, in swallowing Bart's preposterous lie to begin with, makes it difficult to feel much in the way of sympathy for them. The situation is frankly far too overblown to feel much in the way of sympathy for Bart, either, although we do share his sense of what an insufferable bummer it is. And this is, I feel, where the episode makes its most fatal mistake. It takes Bart's misery awfully seriously for such a labored conflict, and appears to be attempting to recreate something of the drama of "Marge Be Not Proud". Since the rest of the episode is low on emotional sincerity - the peak of its willful insensitivity is reached when those two ghastly Dickensian urchins are trotted out to rub Bart's face in his misdeed (they're identified as Patches and Poor Violet, but Ignorance and Want would be about as on the nose) - what we're left with is an ungainly tonal mishmash.  Not so with "Radio Bart", which had the wisdom to play its own silly scenario as a straight farce right up until the climax.

Where "Miracle" does offer something resembling authenticity is in its exploration of Bart as a child, and not Bart as a criminal mastermind. Again, it suffers from comparisons to "Marge Be Not Proud" in that regard, but it's a nice enough plot detail that Bart's mind is recognisably working in the way that a child's mind would be - geared entirely toward the present, and toward delaying repercussions for as long as possible, rather than clearly thinking through how this might play out in the longer-term. His cover-up is doomed to failure - for one, he doesn't seem to have any kind of contingency plan in place for a sudden thaw, or have given any consideration toward relocating the evidence to a more secure hiding place, period - but when you're a child, knowing that you might be in the clear for now is often relief enough. Maybe he's played like too much of a little kid - in this episode Bart's pretty forthright in his belief in Santa, but I happen to think that what he had to say on the matter in "Roasting" ("There's only one fat guy who brings us presents, and his name ain't Santa!") was a lot more authentic to his character, and to a 10 year old child, period. Still, there is a neat gag suggesting that, despite the religious reverence with which he appears to regard Santa, he is ultimately in Bart's eyes yet another authority figure to be undermined - his triumphant cackle that, contra the song lyrics, Santa obviously doesn't have time to check that list twice.

It's this predilection for circumventing authority that gets us into our pivotal jam. At the beginning of the episode, Bart is totally cavalier, shamelessly disobeying Marge's instructions that nobody will be opening any of their presents before 7:00am, with seemingly no regard for how she's is going to feel when she discovers that she's not getting the full family Christmas experience she so desperately wanted - rather, he seems to take it as a challenge when she goes so far as to confiscate the family's alarm clocks in a bid to prevent them from getting up before her. That fearlessness obviously goes out the window when the tree goes up in smoke; as with "Marge Be Not Proud", his immediate concern is doing whatever he can to avoid the wrath of parental authority, but as the day wears on and he sees the chain reaction that his self-serving lie inspires, he gains a deeper understanding of the nature of consequence and of what it might also entail. All the same, when he finally confesses to the family that he burned the tree, it seems to come less from a place of guilt and a desire to put things right than from a more general emotional exhaustion at how ridiculously far the situation has managed to drag itself out. Bart, like "Miracle" itself, gets fed up with the current plot trajectory and figures that a change of course is in order. Which takes us into the the third thing "Miracle" has riding against it - for all the heavy-handed posturing of the second act, it doesn't actually give a toss about Bart and how he faces up to the problem of remorse, to the extent that it all but loses interest in him in the third act. Here, it ceases to be Bart's story and instead focusses on how the family as a whole are collectively shunned and harassed by the angry townspeople. They're mad because they donated $15,000 to the Simpsons' phony cause (in the first of Marge's alleged miracles) and encouraged them to blow it all on an extravagant impulse purchase - which, in another instance of fate having its own ridiculous vendetta against the family this Christmas, went badly wrong and only served to set them back to square one. When the rest of Springfield gets wind of the fact that there was no burglar (by way of an inopportune appearance from Kent Brockman), they want their money back and insist on making the Simpsons' lives miserable until they're able to make good. Thus, the rest of the episode consists almost entirely of Springfield being unbelievably rotten to the family, with a brief interlude where Marge becomes a contestant on Jeopardy so that we can squeeze in our obligatory guest celebrity appearance (from Alex Trebek).

As with "Radio Bart" you could argue that the basic narrative hasn't really changed - we still have a family who lost everything at Christmas and could have benefited from the support of a generous community, but I guess there's less satisfaction to be had in helping the victims of a really dumb accident as opposed to those who have a nice big sob story to accompany their loss. All the same, the wrath of the townspeople feels so disproportionate and arbitrary, given the total lack of malicious intention on the family's part. Four of the five family members were unaware of the truth of the matter until too late, and the other's just a 10 year old child. There's only so far you can reasonably go with your anger. It's not as though there's any obvious misunderstanding on the town's part either; Bart makes it clear during Kent's second newscast that the deception was all his doing (which "Miracle" seems to consider closure enough for his individual arc), and there's nothing to suggest that anybody disputes this, but it all makes little difference in practice - the town donated their money to the Simpsons as a unit, so as far as they're concerned they're equally culpable. Kent's own outrage on the matter is entirely false, as is made clear when the camera stops filming and he turns to the family to thank them for providing such a juicy local story, and we suspect that the rage of every other Springfieldian is every bit as contrived. Mostly (and very much like their infatuation with the non-existent orphan Timmy O'Toole) they're sore because they didn't get the pre-determined feel-good story they wanted from the deal, something to satisfy their own egos and have them feeling good about their generosity. Instead, the Simpsons caused them to feel like total chumps, and that battering to their pride far outweighs whatever mitigating circumstances might have lurked behind that bogus burglar yarn. Now Marge gets to experience the dark reality of her alleged miracle - far from yielding their deliverance, the family's dependence on the goodwill of others has left them at the mercy of a community with little clemency to spare.

That takes us to the episode's shock ending, where the townspeople resolve to launch a communal burglary on the Simpsons' house in the interests of getting even. One suspects that, like Bart before them, they just grew weary of how tediously drawn-out the matter was getting and decided to supply their own escape clause. I've already indicated that this climax just plain rubs me the wrong way, yet conversely it also contains my personal pick for the episode's stand-out moment - Krusty to Otto: "If you're heading for the medicine cabinet, I've already been there." And, to be fair, there is something amusingly perverse about that final arrangement, which lies less in the townspeople's theft of the Simpsons' property than in them being so cordial to the family as they proceed to rob them blind, about as much so as when they'd attended the home earlier to redeem their Christmas (this is the second of Marge's alleged miracles, as she mistakenly interprets the people's good cheer as indication that they've gotten over their grudge). They act as though they are once again doing the Simpsons a tremendous favour in choosing to settle things this way - they're so civil about being so flagrantly uncivilised. I can, however, point to what has, for me, always been the deal-breaking moment - when Apu walks away clutching Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II. How unfathomably mean do you have to be to steal a couple of family pets? That was a low blow, Apu. In a more tonally consistent episode, such an ending could have worked, but would still have benefited from showing a whisker more restraint. As it happens, the only restraint it does show is in not having any of the Springfieldians attempt to abduct Maggie (although, how much do you want to bet that something like that was included in the original script?).

It's after the townspeople have departed, leaving the Simpsons alone in their ransacked abode, that the episode plays its subtler and perhaps even more cynical card - Marge attempts to bolster the family's spirits with the reminder that "We still have each other", only to be churlishly rebuffed. They would have had each other anyway, Lisa points out. "Plus lots of other stuff", adds Bart. "Miracle" gets across the folly of materialism through the mutually dire fates of the plastic Christmas tree and the swanky new car the family foolishly purchases with their assumed $15,000 bonus, yet it concedes to the fact that, in spite of it all, people do like their creature comforts, and no moralistic lecture about the real meaning of Christmas is is going to change that. And yet, the episode isn't quite so cynical as to leave the Simpsons with no deliverance. Homer finds the one solitary item the Springfieldian mob neglected to take away - a wash cloth, an obvious symbol of cleansing - and the family begin to squabble mindlessly over its ownership. Marge intervenes, purporting to put a stop to their nonsense, only to claim the wash cloth for herself. The rest of the family chase her around the house, and it becomes a fun game for them all, giving us what Martyn and Wood describe as the episode's "only real ray of sunshine...the closing moments when the neighbours get their revenge but the Simpsons find the family spirit after all." "Miracle" is clearly banking on its final images of family togetherness being enough to wash away the bitter aftertaste of the preceding series of unfortunate events, and to convince you that its heart isn't in such a cynical place after all. Still, if I were in Bart and Lisa's shoes I think I'd be too distraught about my dog and cat being stolen to take much interest in a stupid cloth.

Anyway, between this and those two festive editions of D&DWL, I can't help but feel that I served you up rather a sour batch of Christmas cookies this year. Those stealthily-incorporated ads for McDonald's and New Coke in Santa Claus: The Movie wound up being the only fun part of it all. To compensate, I'll close with easily the most appealing image that "Miracle" has to offer - the little rat with reindeer antlers at Moe's bar. This merry murine always does his meagre bit to chase the seasonal blues away.

Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Mark (A Great Bloke?)

As the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" campaign entered the 1990s, the emotional sincerity of the earlier films began to peter out, with astringent snarkiness becoming the dominant flavour of the series going forward - and "Mark" would be a strong candidate for snarkiest of them all. It's certainly the campaign's most unbridled trip into the surreal. Compared to D&DWL's previous foray into Christmas-themed campaigning, "Christmas Pudding", it doesn't attempt to lure you into a false sense of security by approaching the pivotal accident from the sidelines of everyday banality - it places unusually direct emphasis upon the accident itself, distilled down to its purest, most nightmarish essence, and framed using the visual signifiers of an actual nightmare. The result is the most visually arresting of the D&DWL shorts, and the short that plays most overtly with the codes of horror storytelling. It's a monologue, like those earliest PIFs, but this ghoulish shape-shifter and his taunting sarcasm seem miles away from the faux-documentary approach of "Fireman's Story".

Our baleful narrator tells the cautionary tale of Mark, whose reputation for being a "great bloke", and always so kind and generous toward his friends, was undone one Christmas when he thought he was okay to drive after "a quick one" and his poor judgement wound up spelling tragedy for a family. The misery of the situation is presented bluntly enough, but the suffering of the family isn't really the focus of the short; in the end, those two bereaved children and their glaring, accusatory faces don't serve a much greater purpose than to further accentuate that tidal wave of horror (and to provide a conspicuous metaphor, in the form of a roundabout spinning out of control). The real focus is squarely on Mark, and how his being a nice guy didn't preclude his ability to do terrible damage by driving over the limit, however marginally. In that regard, it takes the opposite approach to the campaign's preliminary installments, in which the perpetrator was frequently presented as an invisible boogeyman, wrecking lives and walking away with nary a scratch. "Mark", by contrast, appears to humanise the drink driver, only to pinpoint that very humanity as the root of his failing - no matter how generous and trustworthy he might have been for 99.9% of the time, Mark had the same vulnerabilities as everybody else when driving with alcohol in his system. And after doing something as horrible as killing a couple and making orphans of their children, suddenly his history of good deeds couldn't help but seem like a bit of a duplicity. He went from being a great bloke to a "great bloke" (with heavy Scottish-accented sarcasm). The implication being that, no matter how comfortable and familiar we might feel with a person (or indeed, with ourselves), a simple moment of ill-judged complacency might be all it takes for us to discover what they're really capable of.

We get some sense of who the drink driver was in this equation - a question that does go unanswered, however, is just who the hell the narrator is intended to be. The campaign's Wikipedia page has him down as Mark's "best mate", but no such relationship is actually established in the PIF itself. To my mind, he seems to be deriving a perverse amount of pleasure from the scenario he describes, so I would presume that he is neither a friend to Mark or to the bereaved family - either way, he doesn't come across as much of a great bloke himself. Rather, I would propose that he is intended to embody those very boogeyman qualities with which the drink drivers of those earlier PIFs were inevitably ascribed, his perpetually-distorting facial features and uncanny radiance holding up a sort of fractured mirror to Mark's latent personality flaws. The narrator refers to Mark in the third person, implying that they are to be seen separate entities; nonetheless, I am inclined to see him as signifying that uglier side to Mark that was always waiting to be teased out with a little alcohol and one fatally unwise decision. He also disappears in a puff of smoke at the end, but there is a deeper reason for that than simply leaving the viewer with one final unsettling visual. "Mark" was also a tribute, to an obscure piece of short animation that you might remember if you'd tuned into Channel 4 during its artsier beginnings.

What's special about this D&DWL entry is that the animation was provided by none other than David Anderson (the film-maker behind the "Sweet Disaster" short, Dreamless Sleep), the style of the PIF being blatantly replicated from Anderson's 1989 film Deadsy (Deadtime Stories For Big Folk). Deadsy is described in the blurb of the VHS release David Anderson: Works On Film as "a graphic interpretation of Russell Hoban's narration of man's fascination with weaponry and the sexual power of military aggression. Using a combination of live action, xerography, hand-rendering, laser xerography and model animation, DEADSY is a powerful and disturbing piece." It is an allegory, of sorts, for the nuclear arms race, with the titular Deadsy developing "grate big sexo-thingys" and forcing the rest of the world to do the same in order to participate in his great cosmic orgy - a lust for domination that's linked to the rush he felt as a small child swatting flies and cockroaches. It is a glimpse, in other words, into the darker side of human nature, with Anderson's warped, uncanny visuals providing the perfect canvas for this twisted dive into our baser impulses. The D&DWL short "Mark" attempts something of the same - we've all got that destructive potential nestled deep down at our core, and if we're at all heedful we might avoid the abasement of exposing it to the world.

Santa Claus: The Movie (aka Guess Who's Coming To Capitalism)

Was there ever a more baffling and endearingly misguided attempt to create a holiday blockbuster than TriStar Pictures' 1985 offering Santa Claus: The Movie? My first Christmas on Earth, and this was what Hollywood had in store as its special festive treat for the families that year. This, and One Magic Christmas. What a jolly holly world I was born into.

Santa Claus: The Movie was realised by a lot of the same creative team who brought us Superman's initial wave of cinematic outings - among them, producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind, screenwriters David and Leslie Newman, and Supergirl director Jeannot Szwarc (apparently, John Carpenter was at one time in the running to direct, but he requested too much creative control). With the Superman movies losing their box office lustre, the idea was to kick-start a new franchise focussing on another superhuman figure who embodied the same kind of mythical virtue - and Santa has the additional virtue of being in the public domain (unlike Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, aka Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film). Unfortunately, the public themselves weren't hungry for a big budget Santa blockbuster, with Rocky IV knocking the stuffing out of the picture that holiday season, and if it's remembered at all nowadays it tends to be as this curio of 1980s Hollywood for which absolutely nothing went right - although John Lithgow, who plays the film's antagonist, B.Z., has noted with some bemusement that it appears to have acquired a bit of a cult following in the UK ("In England that's half what I'm known for...isn't that odd?"). I have to admit that I wasn't aware of Santa Claus: The Movie being quite as indispensable a part of the local festive zeitgeist as Lithgow describes, but then it is a film that I spent a good three decades of my existence going out of my way to avoid. Santa Claus: The Movie was one of those pictures that I saw very early in my childhood and utterly HATED at the time, although for the life of me I couldn't remember why. All I knew is that whenever I browsed through my parents' collection of home-recorded movies, looking for something to while away the afternoon, if I came across the tape housing Santa Claus: The Movie I'd get this weird, sickly vibe deep inside my gut and immediately pass it over. It wasn't until relatively recently that I started thinking about the movie again, and found my unease transmuting into morbid curiosity. What was it about this exceedingly innocuous-looking picture, from the outset, that could possibly have inspired such lingering horror in me as a small child? Surely the film was ripe for a rewatch after all these years? In December 2021 I finally took the trouble to sit down and watch it, hoping to stare one or two of my childhood demons in the face and to put this mystery to bed once and for all.

I thought I'd figured it out early on, during the film's prologue, which gives us a lengthy run-down of the origins of Santa. We open in the late 13th century, somewhere in northern Europe (the exact year and location are never specified), where a woodcutter named Claus (David Huddleston) and his wife Anya (Judy Cornwell) have become local legends for their annual practice of carving toys and delivering them to the children of nearby villages on the night before Christmas. On this particular winter their land has been hit by the mother of all blizzards, which threatens to disrupt the seasonal delivery. Claus can't bear the thought of all those disappointed children, so he makes the brave but foolhardy decision to venture out into the blizzard with the usual sled full of toys. He does not return, at least in mortal terms - Claus, Anya and their two beasts of burden, reindeer Donner and Blitzen, are implied to all freeze to death then and there, only to be mysteriously restored to life in an immortal state by the light of the North Star. They then find themselves in the vicinity of a community of elves ("vendegum" would be the more technical term, but they've rejected it), who invite Claus to continue his annual operations for all eternity, but on a global scale. Immediately, there is this inexplicably sinister aura about the elves, and if I didn't know better I might have hypothesised that this were all a Twilight Zone-type story in which the freezing Claus is ultimately revealed to be hallucinating with his last waning flickers of brain activity. "Mystery solved", I thought. "As a child, I must have been terrified of those elves." But no, it turns out, that wasn't it. Later in the story, there's this narrative development involving Patch (Dudley Moore), a misfit elf who's keen on technological efficiency but has no talent whatsoever for putting any of his grand ideas into practice. Long story short, he screws up a year's worth of toy manufacturing and blights the children of the world with a batch of defective toys that have all fallen apart by New Year's Eve. We cut to a scene where a boy is walking down the street dragging a wagon behind him, and the instant this kid appeared I suddenly felt that familiar weird, sickly vibe deep inside my gut, as if I knew, from some long-repressed memory, that something bad was going to happen. Sure enough, the wagon detaches from its pull and goes hurtling into the road, right into the path of a hulking great schoolbus, which makes swift work of it. And then it all came flooding back to me. THAT was why I hated Santa Claus: The Movie so much as a four-year-old - I had a very strong, very visceral reaction to seeing that child's Christmas present get brutally flattened. As an adult, I stand by that reaction. It is a surprisingly mean-spirited sequence that involves a lot of children suffering mishaps and crying over broken toys, and it still touches a raw nerve in me to this day, I'm afraid.

With that matter settled, here are a few of my assorted musings on Santa Claus: The Movie as a whole:

• The narrative is VERY episodic, to the extent that I can't help but feel that this would have worked a lot better broken up as a mini-series. That entire first act regarding Santa's origins honestly might as well not be there at all. The precise details behind his inception hold very little relevance for what he's having to contend with in Reagan's America.
  
• I was fully expecting Patch to get some kind of redemptive arc in which he demonstrates that he can be good at something. But no, he just sort of remains a screw-up to the end. Donner the reindeer had shown more personal growth by the closing credits.
  
• Lithgow is in full-on pantomime mode as B.Z., but his hammy-ass performance is by and far the best thing about this picture. When he's on screen, the action is certainly never dull.
• In his televised review with Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel complained that the movie lacked conflict, pointing out that there's never a direct face-off between Santa and B.Z.. He suggested his own alternative narrative direction, and inadvertently ended up pitching the plot of future seasonal classic The Nightmare Before Christmas.
• Another critic, Mark Kermode, claimed in one of his old "Kermode Uncut" videos that the reindeer animatronics in this film were made using the hides of actual reindeer (more accurately, he attributed such claims to a colleague of his, whom he did not identify, and then proceeded to back them up), but I'm not sure how serious he was being.
  
• Objectively, Santa Claus: The Movie is red hot mess of a film, but I could understand someone enjoying it as an annual guilty pleasure. If I were ever to watch it again, though, I think I'd be inclined to skip that entire first act and just go directly to when Lithgow appears. Did I mention that he is a hoot in this?
• The film has the most egregious product placement I've ever seen in ANYTHING. That FedEx scene that everybody complains about in Castaway? Mere French fry crumbs compared to what goes on here. And that's really what I wanted to focus on in this particular write-up.
  

In 1985, McDonald's ran a commercial tie-in with Santa Claus: The Movie. This kind of cross-promotional Happy Meal was still a relatively young concept back then (Star Trek: The Motion Picture being the first movie to advertise its existence through Happy Meal boxes, in 1979), and molded pieces of plastic had yet to become the standard incentive. Instead, you got one of four Santa Claus: The Movie-themed books - The Legend of Santa Claus, The Elves at The Top of The World, Workshop of Activities and Sleighful of Surprises. There was also a plush reindeer tree ornament, if you bought a $5 book of McDonald's gift certificates.

And as far as this promotion went, one hand washed the other. For its part, Santa Claus: The Movie straight-up stops the narrative (disjointed though it may be) to bring you a bona fide McDonald's commercial. I'm not exaggerating, once we get into the part of the story set in modern-day New York, we spend 30 gratuitous seconds inside a McDonald's eatery, watching close-up shots of families beaming at one another while shovelling burgers and milkshakes in between their jaws. Product placement this shamelessly heavy-handed really ought to get you onto the Naughty List.

I find the whole McDonald's sequence of Santa Claus: The Movie perversely entrancing for the way it perfectly replicates the visual language of your average 1980s McDonald's commercial, to the point that all that's missing is "It's A Good Time For The Great Taste" splashed across the bottom of the screen in bold white lettering beside the golden arches logo. The bulk of this footage could have been edited quite snugly into the concurrent McDonald's campaign. And yet it's all so hilariously offset by the presence of that homeless child with his face pressed up against the glass. So, the Reagan-era portion of the story involves this kid named Joe (Christian Fitzpatrick) or, as he was dubbed by a contemporary tie-in storybook, The Boy Who Didn't Believe In Christmas. Joe doesn't have masses of Christmas spirit because he's an orphan living on the streets, and to him the season is just a time for having corporate decadence rubbed aggressively in your face. His ethos runs contrary to Santa's own, which is rooted in the unabating assumption that the promise of Christmas brings "not a child alive who's not bursting with joy and happiness." (Tsk, Claus, you've been on this planet for seven centuries and you're still refusing to acknowledge the existence of Jewish children?) Naturally, he and Santa cross paths and the latter does a fine job of straightening him out over the course of the picture. Before then, though, Joe's favourite pastime is standing outside McDonald's restaurants and regarding, with envious desperation, the wonders within. It's not just the sustenance he craves, you understand, although naturally he'd have that too - McDonald's represents the spirit of family togetherness, warmth and security, values with which Santa himself is clearly interconnected, and which up until now have been denied to Joe. The in-universe explanation offered as to why Santa has passed the homeless Joe over year after year is that Joe has never written to him to ask for anything, but as far as subtext goes...well, any viewer over the age of 7 knows that Santa and your parents are really one and the same. The actual reason that Joe doesn't get to participate in the seasonal mythos is because he's an outsider to family life and all of its associated rituals - to which, as Santa Claus: The Movie would have it, regular outings to McDonald's are as indispensable a component as the giving of presents at Christmas. Joe is likewise an outsider to the consumerist forces that Santa also serves and puts the nicest possible face on - but boy oh boy, as that scene at McDonald's shows, does he ever want in.

Although what's really hysterical about the McDonald's sequence is that it does, inadvertently, make the restaurant's patrons look like complete and utter dickwads. This starving child observing them from the other side of the glass isn't being particularly subtle about his plight, yet they go about crassly stuffing their faces in front of him regardless. Worse still, one of them seems to acknowledge him and get a savage little kick out his suffering; following a close-up shot of Joe up against the window, we cut to a teenaged girl with a mouth full of burger meat, who turns her head and smiles triumphantly, and while it's not clear if she's meant to be smiling at Joe or another patron, the nature of the cut really does make it look like the former (whoever edited this sequence might have wanted to think more carefully about the Kuleshov effect). Clearly, we're being encouraged to see dining at McDonald's as both desirable and virtuous, as analogous to Santa's role in reinforcing family ties, but there is an aura of taunting insensitivity about it. All I see is McDonald's being part of a system that caters to those with cash while happily leaving the needy out in the cold, its patrons gleeful in their complicity.

Oh, but the egregious product placement doesn't stop there. Joe wanders off into the night and ends up outside the house of this rich kid named Cornelia (Carrie Kei Heim), who's more sympathetic toward him than those McDonald's patrons. While her nanny Ms Tucker (Dorothea Phillips) is off watching Masterpiece Theatre, Cornelia takes the opportunity to sneak Joe a plate of leftovers from her dining table, along with a can of New Coke. Joe takes a swig, grasping the can carefully so that the "Coke" lettering is directed legibly at the camera, and lets out a tremendous sigh of satisfaction. Yet another sequence that feels like a self-contained commercial in its own right; it's not at all hard to envision "Coke Is It!" materialising across the screen, these two puppy lovers and their fearless transcendence of social rank providing all the narrative you need for a holiday-themed promotion designed to tug on the heartstrings. It's probably not a coincidence that Santa enters Joe's life shortly after the refreshing taste of Coke does, his small moment of connection with Cornelia having provided a nascent induction into the familial sphere in which Santa (and Coca-Cola drinking) is so perfectly at home. A sip of Coke and it suddenly all becomes accessible to him. McDonald's and Coca-Cola are stealthily presented as extensions of the Santa magic, little bits of jolly old Saint Nick that are manifest all year round and on every street corner. Much like Santa, they are symbols of reassurance and of belonging, both to a family unit and to a broader culture. Santa Claus: The Movie doesn't go as far as suggesting that Santa would prefer it if you left him a Big Mac and Coke instead of the generic milk and cookies...but it might as well have done.

Which is odd, really, because it can't help but undermine what would appear to be the very point of the story - namely that commercialisation is a dangerous thing, and that's where Lithgow's evil, scenery-chewing toy mogul enters in. Following his self-imposed exile from the North Pole, Patch goes to work for B.Z. because he figures that he's the next best thing to Santa, only for their ideals to clash straight out of the gate. B.Z. is in the toy manufacturing business not because he likes making children happy, but because he wants to make money off of them, while Patch's seven hundred years of servitude to Santa have entrenched in him the mindset that toys are to be given away for free. Nevertheless, B.Z. gets the hopelessly naive elf into his pocket and enlisted in a nefarious scheme to drive Santa out of business by launching his own rival holiday, Christmas II (yep, this movie beat The Simpsons to that joke by twelve and a half years). The conflict of Santa Claus: The Movie, as muted as it was for Gene Siskel's tastes, has to do with old-fashioned family values versus corporate consumerism. On a broader level, it's about preserving tradition and resisting the temptations of modernity - Patch gets into his mess in the first place because he wants to revolutionise Santa's workshop into something more efficient and industrial, only to discover that industrialism results in lousy product. This lousiness is echoed in the output of B.Z., whose callous business model extends to such a flagrant lack of regard for the welfare of his young consumers that his toys are manufactured to ridiculously unsafe standards. Corporations, Santa Claus: The Movie teaches, are not to be trusted, with Santa and his operations being likened to that of a smaller family-run business, albeit one that's spiritually aligned itself with corporate giants McDonald's and Coca-Cola. Similar charges could potentially be levelled at them about a lack of regard for the well-being of young consumers, with business strategies that are dependent on encouraging children to adopt unhealthy eating habits. This is a film with mixed ideas about who's Naughty and who's Nice - leery of commercialism, while implicitly surrendering to its sovereignty.

What's telling is Joe's response when Santa asks him why he never wrote any letters to the North Pole. Joe gets halfway through admitting that he never believed in Santa, before backtracking and insisting that there was never anything that he wanted. We know that Joe is only covering here - obviously, he's too embarrassed to admit to Santa's face that he had doubts about his existence, and we've seen from earlier that actually there is something he really, really wants, which is to be stuffing his mouth with McDonald's and Coca-Cola (themselves shorthands for secretly craving a family). But that purported lack of material desire would be as much a threat to Santa as is B.Z. and his Christmas II - his existence is as dependent on this ongoing cycle of insatiability as those of the corporate forces with whom he's sleeping. And besides, to paraphrase Sideshow Bob, I'm aware of the irony of criticising a movie about Santa Claus for being an extended Coca-Cola commercial, so, erm, don't bother pointing that out. Santa himself, at least in his modern incarnation, does have a bit of that stitched into in his red-suited DNA - Coca-Cola, contrary to popular belief, did not invent the red-clad Santa, but they played their part in helping to solidify this particular depiction as the default one. So maybe a Santa-themed feature film that's actually a stealthy sales pitch for the virtues of drinking Coke is its own piece of ingenious meta commentary.

Or maybe Santa Claus: The Movie is just an inherently silly piece of work all over. B.Z. might make it worth the watch, however. I haven't even touched on how fantastically ridiculous his character arc gets (spoiler: it ends with him overdosing on magic lollipops and flying off into outer space).

  

 

PS: A surefire candidate for the Naughty List, if it applied to adults, would be that dad who disposes of his daughter's broken trike by just kicking it into the road. Who does he suppose is going to pick that up, the Broken Trike Fairy?

Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Christmas Pudding

I've not yet attempted to sit down and give my definitive ranking of the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" series from best to worst, but I've no doubt that this particular Christmas-themed PIF (circa 1993) would land somewhere within the top five. Of all the shorts in the series, this one does the grandest job at straddling that delicate line between the everyday and the catastrophic, depicting the precise moment in which a mundane situation crosses over into the stuff of full-blown nightmares. It achieves this through a hard-hitting blend of unassuming realism with just the slightest dash of uncanny excess; we get a fleeting glimpse of a busted vehicle going up in flames, a rarity for a campaign that generally aimed to steer clear of violent spectacle - although this, surprisingly, does not end up being the most disturbing element of the short. The horrors here are to be located in the hedonism of a family wolfing down their platter of Christmas indulgences, gleefully oblivious to the carnage unravelling in the streets outside. This is a PIF that deviously flips the Yuletide euphoria on its head, warping it into the basis of a good psychological scarring.

"Pudding" opens so innocuously that you would not, at first glance, be likely to distinguish it from the usual deluge of Christmas-themed advertising clustering up the airwaves all throughout December. We've joined a family at the tail-end of their seasonal feasting, where the only hint of impending trouble is in the acknowledgement of a vacant place at the table; our young and unsuspecting protagonist is asked by a relative (presumably her father) if her boyfriend David is still intending to make it. Her response - that David has "stopped for a quick drink at his sister's" - is our first really solid clue as to where this might be headed, although there is nothing as yet to explicitly implicate David as a drink driver (for all we know, he's getting there by foot, or someone else is driving him). The real giveaway that we're not watching some anodyne spot for anti-indigestion tablets is when the host wanders back from the kitchen, carrying a blazing Christmas pudding and wearing a facial expression that seems a little...over-animated? There is, immediately, something disconcerting about the wide-mouthed giddiness with which she regards the mass of smouldering suet and raisin at her fingertips, and that's going to pay off shortly. The telephone rings and, while everyone else is leering in the darkness at the flaming dessert, the protagonist goes to answer; we never hear the person speaking on the end, but whoever they are they clearly have unfortunate news to share about David's journey going awry. How awry? We cut to a close-up shot of the pudding, which momentarily morphs into the blazing wreckage of a crumpled vehicle wedged up against a streetlight, and then back to the protagonist's pallid face, as she struggles to process what she's hearing (and, we suspect, her Christmas lunch is at dire risk of making a sudden reappearance). It's at this point that the festive atmosphere takes a turn for the borderline demonic, as the laughter and merriment of her family in the backdrop becomes wildly inappropriate, appearing to mock the unspeakable tragedy with which she's just been blighted.

"Pudding" contains what's arguably the most conventionally dramatic shot of all the D&DWL series (no other entry, even of the few that showed us any visuals from the accident itself, went so far as to feature a vehicle being engulfed in a fiery eruption), but it still amounts to only a teaser of the adjacent calamity that's been slowly but surely creeping its way in to make mincemeat of this ingenuous young woman's Christmas. Much of the film's success is rooted in its restraint, and its willingness to stage its pivotal accident from what is still predominantly a distance. We start out, much like the protagonist, having already made it safely to our destination, only to discover that this does not, in fact, make us safe. The fleeting transformation of pudding into burning vehicle serves to obliterate the barrier between innocent domesticity and the omnipresent threat of death and destruction. But the most devious sleight of hand lies in the transformation of the party ambience into an air of cruelty and oppressiveness, as the protagonist's knowledge of what has happened to David sees her shut out abruptly from the celebrations. The sanctity of the occasion offers no refuge, becoming instead a reinforcement her entrapment, as her prospects of further inclusion in the joyfulness and triumph, along with whatever future she'd envisioned for herself and David, goes up messily in smoke, like both pudding and vehicle.

"Pudding", like "Summertime", offers a rare D&DWL scenario in which the drink driver themselves is shown to be the one who perishes as a result of their actions - although since David receives no corporeality, featured victim status, for all intents and purposes, ends up being delegated to our protagonist, the helpless receiver of bad news. The film's most chilling detail is in how this victimhood renders her the butt of a joke that the entirety of the world around her appears to be in on - far from offering her comfort in a time of despair, her family betray her with their continued merriment. The juxtaposition of pudding and wreckage, coupled with their diabolical laughter, makes it difficult to shake the interpretation that the family are in the process of sacrificing David at their festive alter, evoking the sense that they are, in some way, complicit in the disaster. While drinking and driving is clearly being posited as a corruptive force, poisoning the Yuletide cheer and transmuting it into something more sinister, I've no doubt that the film is, on another level, attempting to forge a link between the carefree revelry of the family's feasting and the heedless indulgences that have engineered David's ruination, reminding that us that, however innocuous our intentions, there comes a point where we risk tip-toeing over the line. Hence the significance of having the family cackle like hellspawn at the end - what's happening up the road with David is really just the darker underbelly of what we've seen playing out in their dining room.

A superior PIF, and I'm sure that, back in 1993, catching it amid a round of festive viewing was more than enough to ruin anybody's day.