Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: In The Summertime

 

Content warning: car wreck, dead bodies

Another summer is nearly behind us, but before it closes there's still time to pay tribute to one of the most emotionally-scarring presentations you were likely to encounter if you tuned into UK ad breaks in the early 1990s - the "In The Summertime" installment of the contemporary "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" campaign (courtesy of Safety On The Move), which took advantage of the dubious advice given in the titular pop track to bring you a nightmarish vision of what you might go out and find along the roadside on a balmy summer evening, should that advice be taken too literally.

On the whole, the 1990s aren't renowned for being a particularly prosperous era for traumatic public information films - you could still catch them before BBC closedowns if you fancied a few pre-bedtime jitters, but given how rampant they were throughout the two preceding decades, it was seemingly an art form on the wane. The first half of the 90s did, however, see the continuation of "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives", the banner given to a series of particularly hard-hitting government ads created to put the spotlight on the potentially grave consequences of drinking and driving, which ran between 1987 and 1996. Few of the films focussed on the immediate horrors of the crash itself (although "In The Summertime" is one of those exceptions), the emphasis being squarely on the longer-term emotional wreckage faced by those affected, be they the victims or the perpetrators, the families of either, or the first responders. The idea was to give some sense of the far-reaching web of devastation brought about by an act born entirely out of thoughtlessness. Earlier films were very austere in form and tone, consisting largely of monologues delivered by bereaved friends and family, but as the campaign progressed they became a fair bit more creative, making clever use of perspective, overtly nightmarish imagery and even, on occasion, allowing room for a little morbid humor (as this ad demonstrates). The campaign is credited with doing a significant amount to alter public attitudes toward drink driving, which was formerly regarded as none too serious an offence - as is reflected in "In The Summertime", a 1970 hit for British rock band Mungo Jerry, which includes the line: "Have a drink, have a drive, go out and see what you can find." In the wider context, the song's lax attitude toward getting behind the wheel whilst intoxicated is celebrated as indicative of a Carpe diem philosophy, with the suggestion that those inclined toward drink driving are simply misunderstood. Insist Mungo Jerry: "We're not dirty, we're not mean/We love everybody, but we do as we please." (It should be noted that, by 1995, such an attitude would definitely not fly on popular radio - when the track was covered by Jamaican reggae artist Shaggy, the lyrics were updated to the more politically correct "I'm gonna drive and ride and see now what I can find".) The success of D&DWL in helping to challenge such perceptions is really nothing to be sneezed at, given that, try as they might, I'm not sure any equivalent campaign was ever quite able to have the same effect upon public attitudes toward speeding.

By the time "In The Summertime" debuted (circa 1992), the campaign was well-established enough to be trading on its own familiarity. You'll notice that the tagline, in this instance, has been modified to "In the summertime, drinking and driving wrecks even more lives", which marks it out as a response to a broader discourse. My understanding here is that drinking and driving warnings had become so characteristic a part of the winter festivities that it had led to a bit of a misconception in itself that it was something you only had to worry about at Christmastime (despite summer too being a peak time for such accidents). And while the idea of an ill-judged drive ruining multiple parties' Christmases is an undeniably upsetting one, there is something just as disconcertingly incongruous in depicting this roadside carnage as occurring in the broad light of day, amid the vitality and prosperity of the warm summer glow. "In The Summertime", which shows the patrons of a pub's beer garden blithely downing alcohol, before a bunch of them go out and meet their gruesome demise, is a brutal little exercise in disparate horror. It may also be the most thoroughly, gleefully sardonic creation the campaign had to offer.

 

 

"In The Summertime" is a fairly atypical addition to the D&DWL campaign, in that it's structured around the build-up to the devastating occurrence, with no focus whatsoever on the emotional aftermath (most D&DWL films would do precisely the reverse). It's also one of the few films in the line-up in which the drink driver themselves is shown to perish as a result of their actions - the more common approach was to have the perpetrator survive relatively unscathed so that they would have the privilege of getting to live with what they had done. In this case, the driver takes two passengers with him (or maybe just one - I'm not 100% sure if the long-haired blonde woman who waves farewell is meant to be riding along with them), but those passengers are implied to be somewhat complicit in the mindless indulgence that leads to their doom, judging by the collection of emptied beer glasses they leave behind them. Even the survivors who remain at the beer garden don't seem entirely innocent in this equation, being participants in the hedonistic culture that apparently sees no issue with the actions suggested by the accompanying track. Rather, the vibrant, outdoor atmosphere of that pub garden is presented as a kind of fool's paradise, always teetering on the brink of ruination. It's this lack of any obviously innocent party that lends "In The Summertime" a somewhat more blackly comic tone than any of its brethren - the intention isn't exactly to illicit laughs, but the interplay between the imagery and soundtrack has the ad wrapped up in a bitterly taunting irony that almost seems to relish the characters getting what's coming to them. Also unusually for a D&DWL film, which were generally upfront about their subject matter, it enters in seeking to disguise its intentions, with an atmosphere so warm and vibrant that the opening moments could easily be mistaken for an endorsement of the characters' hedonistic consumption - possibly a promotion for a brand of beer - although those well-versed in public information films might spot what's wrong with this picture ahead of the grisly twist, what with the increasing juxtaposition of characters waving goodbye with close-up shots of the beer glasses from which they've been swigging. The effectiveness of the ad rests in how it manages to use the naivety of the featured lyrics to its advantage, transforming it from a celebration of the carefree, sun-soaked lifestyle into something altogether more sinister.

 

"In The Summertime" also boasts what could arguably be described as the single most confounding moment in any D&DWL installment - really, just what is going on during that moment, twenty-four seconds into the ad, when we get a close-up shot of the grinning pub patron whose smile suddenly dissolves, alongside the music grinding to a moribund crawl? It's the pivotal moment, signifying the ad's sharp tonal shift, but it's not entirely clear what we are meant to assume has happened, in-universe, to knock that smile off of his face. Oh sure, it's revealed immediately afterward that two or three of his drinking buddies' bodies are lying further up the road in an ugly smoking wreckage, but he isn't looking at that - notice that he'd turned his gaze away from the direction his friends had travelled, having waved them goodbye and watched them veer out of sight. If he's reacting to the sounds of an off-screen collision (inaudible to the viewer), then funny how the blurred figure of the patron right behind him doesn't seem in the least bit perturbed. An alternative option would be to suppose that he is having a premonition, and that the ad's horrifying epilogue should be interpreted as a foreboding vision on his part, as all of a sudden his more prudent instincts take over and he remembers that drinking and driving maybe isn't such a good idea. What makes the moment especially quirky is that his expression doesn't exactly convey shock or horror, but rather vague irritation. It's a strange scene - at this point in its lifespan, D&DWL was willing to go to evermore disconcerting and experimental territory, but this particular instance feels more like a product of faulty execution than anything else. I recall it being a popular joke in the PIF community that what he was actually reacting to was the pub's jukebox breaking down (hence the music getting all jammed and corrupted), and that may as well be what's going on, albeit in a way that handily jibes with what's happening just down the road. The fazed look on his face indicates that a disturbance has occurred, bringing about an abrupt end to the summer celebrations. The slowing of the soundtrack - unsettling in its own right - substitutes for the collision itself, confirming our mounting suspicions that this ostensibly upbeat song is heralding something very cursed and twisted, and leaving us with only a deathly silence and a haunting inertia.

 

"In The Summertime" isn't quite as dark as it could have been - at the very least, it stops short of having the couple with the baby get inside the car - but the ending still packs a lingering punch that's all the more impactful for omitting the violent spectacle of the crash and focussing instead on the stillness of the aftermath, which seems eerily removed from the scenes of vibrant carousing that precede it. The bravado of the accompanying anthem stripped away, all we have to chew on is the vulnerability of own fragile forms - an image of mortality that seems all the more troubling for the picturesque beauty of the surrounding greenery. As for the Mungo Jerry track, thanks to this PIF I inevitably associate it with a creeping sense of impending catastrophe. So D&DWL succeeded in not only rebutting a contrary piece of popular culture, but completely rewriting its meaning.

 

Anyway, if you liked this write-up then lucky you, as I still have fourteen more D&DWL shorts to get through. What else did you think I had in store for you this Christmastime?

Intersections (Don't Worry, Be Happy)

What makes comparing road safety shorts the world over particularly fascinating are the cultural discrepancies that will occasionally arise. Take the issue of intersection safety, which is not a subject I've seen brought up too often in campaigns from the UK or Australia, but has an entire subgenre dedicated to it in New Zealand. I don't know what it is about New Zealand that would necessarily make their intersections any more dangerous than anyone else's, but LTSA and their successors certainly cranked out an awful lot of classic televisual trauma from the premise. Among them was this cheeky compilation, circa mid-00s, which was really an exercise in just how deliriously you can abuse the gentle warmth of Bobby McFerrin by matching it with the most flagrantly incongruous material imaginable. McFerrin's 1988 hit "Don't Worry, Be Happy" plays over clips of motorists attempting to navigate various intersections in Wellington and beyond, which starts out relatively serenely, but it isn't long before McFerrin is having to compete with a cacophony of horns honking, tyres skidding and metal crunching (along with, presumably, a few bones). I find that I'm deeply worried for quite a number of the persons involved, particularly the pedestrian and the motorcyclist who had the misfortune of getting caught up in the insanity. The results are expectedly horrific, but the presence of the McFerrin track gives the mayhem an unusually comic edge; we would expect road safety ads to be miniature horror shows, gravely undermining as the razor-thin line between the mundane and the catastrophic, but this one seems to be positively revelling in the absurdity of these stupid humans and the avoidable chaos they insist on creating.

What I can't quite figure out is whether the ad should be seen as pro or anti "Don't Worry, Be Happy". Is the song's stoic philosophy being viciously sent up by the accompanying carnage, or can it be interpreted as being somehow in on the joke? Whose narrative voice is is the track intended to represent? A good starting point might be to compare it to the Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives PIF "In The Summertime", which was very conspicuously anti the titular Mungo Jerry ditty. The song was part of the trap, both for the subjects and the viewers, the anthem for the hedonistic appetites that brought about the former's ruin, and the duplicitous host that greeted the latter before abruptly pulling the rug out from under them at the end. "Summertime" was designed to trick the viewers into thinking they were watching a more benevolent ad, with the upbeat familiarity of the track lulling us into a false sense of security, and then becoming part of the mockery once its true intentions were exposed. The words "Go out and see what you can find", heralding the haunting final shot, are put into a much darker context than the song itself originally implied, and yet an explicit endorsement of drink driving was already right there in lyrics - the outcome of the PIF is presented as the logical extension of what was already lurking within the song's lotus-eating soul. "Don't Worry", by contrast, doesn't use McFerrin to deceive the viewer, since the nature of the ad is established early on. The initial incidents are fairly minor, with build-up to the nastier accidents, but the sense of unease is instilled almost instantly. The effect of the song is double-edged, adding an obvious sense of humor to the proceedings, but also exacerbating our discomfort by emphasising the wrongness of what we're seeing.

A possible clue might lurk in the campaign tagline, "Take Another Look At Intersections", which serves as both at literal command, urging drivers to look more thoroughly before pulling out into the path of an incoming vehicle, but also asks us to reconsider our perception of intersections in a broader sense, as dangerous venues where all manner of chaos could potentially go down. With that in mind, it seems logical to interpret the song as illustrating the disconnect between the nonchalant assumptions of the drivers, who do not worry about the risks at intersections, and the stark reality, in which hardly anyone is finding much in the way of happiness. The song becomes the anthem of those who do not live in the real world, an outlook doomed to sooner or later bring them crashing down messily to earth. But that almost seems a bit too easy to me. By my preferred reading, McFerrin's song is being posited as a hopeful (if sardonic) ode to the alternative, the ideal that nobody can possibly obtain because everyone is in such a terminal frenzy. The problem isn't a lack of worry, but the perpetual sense of hurry and urgency that has everyone zipping in all directions, to the point where they don't have the patience to wait a few lousy seconds for their fellow motorists to pass. The song still represents the breezy ideal clashing with the grim reality, but it now becomes the moral locus. If we took life at a more relaxed pace, as McFerrin suggests, we might avoid bumping into one another and taking a further toll on our blood pressure (or worse).

As per the campaign blurb on the old LTSA website that I dug out using the Wayback Machine, failure to give way was, at the time, the third largest cause of death and injury on New Zealand's roads, but it's noteworthy that the issue is cited as being a relatively new one for LTSA's advertising. I also note that New Zealand's current road safety authority, NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA), doesn't cover the issue in any of its contemporary campaigns. Does that mean that the problem was at its peak in the 2000s? If so, I wonder what the story was there?

West Country Tales '82: The Breakdown (aka Said The Spider To The Fly)

"The Breakdown" is often singled out as one of the oddities of West Country Tales, largely on account of its lack of any supernatural content. Written by Josephine Poole and based on a contribution by Janet Holt, it is a brooding little drama about the perils of getting caught in remote places with the wrong sort of company, with a gleefully macabre closing twist that wouldn't have seemed at all out of place in an episode of Tales of The Unexpected. That being said, you're not actually going to mistake it for Tales of The Unexpected, for it does that very West Country Tales thing of having a voice-over narrator do most of the talking, shouldering the burden of dropping all of the cumbersome exposition while the characters make more minor chitchat in the backdrop. It is the voice-over narration that I suspect tends to get stuck in some people's craws about West Country Tales, keeping it from becoming a classic in the league of Tales of The Unexpected.  But it's also the use of the voice-over narration in "The Breakdown" that makes it such an unsettling entry to the West Country archive.

I noted in my coverage of "The Beast" that the seeming purpose of the voice-over narration was to impose a degree of distance between the viewer and the action on screen, something that might initially frustrate us but that recreates the experience of hearing a story second-hand and only being able to get so close to the truth (an important aspect of the series' texture, given that these tales were supposedly based on real-life testimonies). "The Beast" was told in the first-person, from the perspective of a character who was grappling with the inexplicable and whose objectivity as a storyteller we would certainly question were he to share his account with us in the real world, however much we enjoyed hearing it. We don't get quite the same effect with "The Breakdown", where the voice-over takes on a very different form to that of "The Beast". For one, it is supplied by a third-person narrator (Keith Barron), with the story being rather short on internal characters who could have convincingly fulfilled this duty (the eventual outcome would make it extremely difficult for either of the principal players to be relating it first-hand, and while a third character does show up eventually, he's in the dark on a lot of the details). Likewise, no attempt is made to give Barron's narration any kind of context in terms of local lore - he isn't recounting this as something that happened to a friend of a friend, or as a legend attached to a nearby building (one wonders what Holt's own connection was to the story she submitted). He is simply an all-knowing (if not all-sharing) observer who seems eerily fascinated by the pivotal encounter. There are times where he comments on the characters' actions with a cool matter-of-factness, as if they were subjects in a nature documentary, and other times where he comments for them, his words providing a sinister inner monologue that contrasts with the mundaneness of their own muted dialogue. "The Breakdown" is a cautionary tale about the banality of evil, where Barron's narration articulates a taster of the less-than-savoury impulses lurking below a surface of overwhelming quietude. It is a slow-brewing story, with little in the way of overt drama until the very end, but the commentary ensures that we are always aware of that omnipresent menace, the silences and the relative ordinariness of the characters' interactions exuding an incongruity that becomes all the more chilling. Meanwhile, the action is punctuated by a succession of abrupt fade-outs, indicating the slightest passage of time, but also the blank, obscured spaces in which the viewer can never quite be certain what is transpiring.

The episode centres on an anonymous woman (Anita Harris) whose car, a green Ford Escort, comes to a sudden standstill in an isolated part of Devon, about an hour's trek from the village of Ipplepen, where the only other human in sight is Bill Foster (John Abineri), a devoted gardener who's lived a solitary existence ever since his wife Aileen died under circumstances that were deemed suspicious, but ultimately not suspicious enough to have Bill tried for her murder. The lingering uncertainty has rendered Bill a pariah amongst the local community, who nevertheless regard his story with a lurid fascination - Barron notes that if Bill were to open his garden to the public, he would have no shortage of gawkers stopping by, but not for how beautiful his flowerbeds look in the summertime. (Unfortunate characters named Bill seem to be something of a running theme in West Country Tales, for it was also the name of the husband from "The Beast" who bore the full brunt of the titular creature's fury). None of this means anything to his unexpected visitor, who is simply seeking help with restarting her car and, failing that, access to a telephone, and who is too good an opportunity to pass up for the companionship-starved Bill. He goes to inspect her car and sneakily dishes out further damage so that she'll be forced to stay put. He then invites her into his house while he pretends to call the garage in Ipplepen on her behalf, claiming at first that he cannot get through before deliberately waiting until past the garage's opening hours to try again and leave a message. When she politely requests that he ring her a taxi, he informs her that the only taxi service in the area is run by the garage, and offers to put her up until morning, which she accepts. All the while, Barron's narrator frames Bill's regard for his guest in distinctly predatory terms that are designed to get our alarm bells ringing. We hear a startling metaphor about a spider and a fly, and repeated emphasis on how much this woman's form and aura reminds him of Aileen, not least in her comparably attractive legs.

There's no question that Bill is a creep, but ample ambiguity as to just what level of creep we're dealing with. It could be that he was wrongly judged as a killer by the villagers and that he was in fact the victim of one of life's great tragedies through the loss of Aileen. Forced into solitude and pining for his wife, he's become sad and desperate enough to want to cling onto whatever scrap of warm human company might come his way. Alternatively, he could be sizing up another potential murder victim, the qualities that make her similar to Aileen being the very things that  might make her susceptible to his machinations. So many of Bill's behaviours are left open to interpretation - for example, when he first becomes aware of the woman's presence outside of his grounds, his immediate response is to study her through a pair of binoculars, an action that could be seen as voyeuristic but also, so the narrator informs us, represents his go-to means of maintaining any semblance of connection with other people. Even the act of gardening seems double-edged, with the observation that Bill is locked in a struggle to prevent his grounds "from reverting to the jungle it seems to determined to be". Does it point to an inner struggle, to keep his own feral tendencies in check, or does it evoke those same themes seen in "The Beast", where the wilderness becomes a symbol for the social isolation that threatens to consume those who cannot find their affinity with solitude? The narrator's description of the garden brims with violent imagery that appears, ostensibly, to paint the surrounding nature as a victim of Bill's attacks - a peacock wandering the grounds "screams like a woman", while the gardening tools are "honed to a razor edge" - but more likely reveals the extent to which he remains cornered and forever pushing back against a past that persists in haunting him. The screaming peacock effectively mocks him, and no matter how hard he hacks away at the undesirable shrubbery, it will simply return to its overgrown form.

The woman, for her part, seems all-too willing to accept the hospitality of this man in the middle of nowhere whom she doesn't know, something that might on the surface read as total naivety. She is an outsider of another kind, a tourist roaming the countryside and going wherever the road takes her, with no apparent purpose other than to enjoy herself, a sure-fire indicator of an innocent who doesn't anticipate what a dangerous place the world can be or what she might in fact be getting into. Or is she more canny than she lets on? The narrator articulates her inner thoughts a lot less than those of Bill, but does make it known that she is also a loner, her husband having left her for another woman. It is another titbit of information that seems to set her up as an easy victim, the kind of individual so desperate for company that she's less inclined to reject the advances of a stranger, but it could just as easily suggest that she has an axe to grind of her own. An additional, particularly curious revelation is made during a sequence where she attempts to prepare a sandwich in Bill's kitchen and accidentally cuts her finger, prompting the narrator to divulge that while she's unfazed by the sight of other people's blood, she can't stomach the sight of her own. Foreshadowing for the the further blood-spilling she's sure to endure if she continues to hang around with Bill? Or perhaps it's letting us in on something else entirely?

Indeed, "The Breakdown" amounts to a rather puckish exercise in confounded expectations and deceptive appearances, culminating a grisly visual punchline when the mechanic who runs the garage in Ipplepen (Brian Jennings) receives Bill's message the following morning and goes out to retrieve, repair and finally return the car. Piecing together the evidence that Bill has had a female visitor and being all-too aware of the man's reputation, he sneaks into the house to have a nose around, hoping to gain insight into what goes on behind the local pariah's closed doors. His salacious curiosity is rewarded with the shock of discovering Bill's corpse, brutally skewered, with the woman nowhere in sight. He escapes the scene in the newly-repaired car, and as he does so, we hear a radio broadcast advising that police are looking for a woman last seen at the wheel of a green Ford Escort. The nature of why they are looking for her is never disclosed (might it have anything to do with her husband and his lover?), but the public are cautioned not to approach her because she's dangerous. Poole's script has carefully engendered one set of expectations, only to have thing go in the opposite direction entirely. Bill's grasping desperation, the characteristic that appeared to make him so menacing, was in fact what made him vulnerable. As he conspired to keep the woman stranded at his abode, he was unwittingly laying out his own trap all along, beckoning in and isolating himself with a total stranger who turned out to be a psychopathic killer. Of all the rotten luck.

Still, what complicates our final assessment of "The Breakdown" is that it never definitively answers the question of whether or not Bill was guilty of Aileen's murder. We might assume that because he winds up the victim of this scenario then he was a misjudged innocent all along, but his meeting his match in a more insidious party doesn't automatically preclude the possibility that he might have been a killer himself. Both things could be true, and we leave the story not knowing what to make of Bill - was he a tragic figure or a villain who got outplayed? Ultimately, his backstory proves to be something of an elaborate red herring, Poole being less interested in delving into the psychology of these characters than in setting the audience up to have the rug pulled out from under them. But the shadow of the deceased Aileen nevertheless looms too large over the proceedings for her to be dismissed as a irrelevant misdirection. As noted, "The Breakdown" contains no supernatural elements, other than in a figurative sense - the narrator wonders if the woman, as she enters the garden, will "catch the ghost screams of Aileen losing her balance, and her life, on the garden path?" Aileen later appears as a static photograph, in ghostly black and white, once the woman gains entry to Bill's living room (his oddly upfront description of her as his "dead wife" is another little detail designed to keep us firmly on edge). As night sets in and the fateful seduction gets underway, the narrator assures us that Aileen's image stands forever vigilant. IF Bill was indeed her killer, then a tempting interpretation would be that she and the woman are somehow in cahoots - that the appearance of the mysterious woman represents a homecoming for Aileen, a reckoning carried out on her behalf by a figure who uncannily evokes her memory. That the woman specifically drives a green Ford likewise seems to align her with the unruly garden that Bill is constantly battling and unable to keep in check for long; she becomes an extension of that same wilderness, which for all we know represents the inexorableness of Bill's guilt and which, in spite of his resistance, was always fated to get the best of him. If Bill is in fact innocent, then Aileen's memory becomes a symbol for him at his most vulnerable; his seduction of the woman is framed as an act of allegorical infidelity in which the sacredness of his wife is affronted through his willingness to let the wilderness in, opening himself up to his inevitable misfortune. The woman is a final, deadly manifestation of the outside world that he worked so tirelessly to keep at bay and which had already driven him to the periphery of civilisation. Her cold-blooded murder of Bill becomes a shorthand for the means by which society has callously condemned him.

On that note, what are we to make of the episode's final sequence, in which the mechanic flees the scene of the crime using the same vehicle that had, only the day before, provided mobility for a homicidal fugitive on the run? If the woman no longer has her wheels, it might be more challenging for her to get about, but it might also be more difficult for anyone who's heard the police warning to identify her, if this is the key information they have to go on. The implication is that she's made a clean break and disappeared into the West Country, absorbed by the same treacherous wilderness from which she mysteriously materialised, and who knows where she'll end up next and strike again? In the meantime, there is something comically incriminating in having the mechanic drive away in the very car we hear described in the police alert, suggesting a degree of complicity on his part. Although he professes (or rather, the narrator professes on his behalf) not to believe the stories about Bill, it doesn't take him long to start entertaining the possibility that he might have been up to his alleged old tricks with this brand new blood. He goes snooping around in search of the lurid evidence, but gets a rather different shock to the one he had anticipated. He is a representative of the local community, with its gossips and gawkers who distrust Bill but also treat his miserable story as a curiosity to be savoured. More crucially still, his perspective aligns with that of the viewer, in being in the dark about what exactly has gone on the night before but having strong pre-conceived notions as to how the scenario is likely to have played out. We head back into the building expecting a properly nasty conclusion, edging ever closer toward it with the same morbid fascination. Our mutual craving is technically satisfied, but comes with the additionally disturbing reminder that danger could be lurking in just about any guise. And now, like the mechanic, we've no choice but to take our ride in that treacherous Ford Escort. The wilderness has gotten the best of us all. 

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.

Blinky Bill's White Christmas (2005)

Flashback to 1992, and there were major changes in the air for the Australian animation squad at Yoram Gross Film Studio. To date, their legacy had been largely founded on a series of films chronicling the adventures of Dot, a heroic young girl with the ability to converse with animals, but the studio were thinking about retiring Dot (who received her final feature outing in 1994) and were eagerly in search of a new signature character to lead them toward the modern age of the approaching millennium. They found it in a fresh interpretation of Blinky Bill, a much-loved literary character created by New Zealand children's author Dorothy Wall, and a lucrative new animated franchise was swiftly born. A feature film, Blinky Bill: The Mischievous Koala, debuted in 1992 and was followed by a spin-off-TV series in 1993, which proved a smash hit not only on its native Australian soil but also in several European territories. The Adventures of Blinky Bill initially ran for two seasons between 1993 and 1995 but was given a new lease of life in 2004, when Yoram Gross, through a recently-formed partnership with German media company EM.TV (the same media company who also had The Muppets at one point in time), brought the series back for an additional season (somewhere in between, there were also unsuccessful efforts to give Flap, Blinky's platypus sidekick, his own spin-off series, but we're not talking about those today). The culmination of this revival was a Christmas special in 2005, Blinky Bill's White Christmas, which was directed by Guy Gross (son of the studio's eponymous founder) and would prove the last hurrah for the 2D incarnation of Blinky, before Yoram Gross Film Studio put him back into cold storage for a further decade and eventually rebooted him as a CG animation franchise in 2015.

Clocking in at just under 80 minutes, Blinky Bill's White Christmas was technically our second Blinky feature film, albeit made specially for television. How does it compare to The Mischievous Koala? When I reviewed that film earlier this year, I rated it as being fairly chaotic on the narrative front, what with its reliance on extensive and digressive flashback sequences, its insanely dragged out climax and its curiously abrupt ending, although I gave it strong enough marks for atmosphere and emotion. Blinky Bill's White Christmas beats its predecessor hands-down in terms of narrative consistency (White Christmas doesn't have an amazingly fleshed out story, but there's at least coherent progression from Point A to Point B), but in all other areas the 1992 feature has it licked. For one, White Christmas is nothing to write home about visually speaking. The Mischievous Koala utilised Gross's signature aerial imaging technique of superimposing animated characters onto live action backdrops, resulting in an ostensibly primitive look that's surprisingly effective at emphasising the innocence and fragility of its protagonists when stacked up against the big and tumultuous world. This was not exported into the 1993 TV series, which went with a more traditional painted background approach. By the time of the 2004 revival, the animation industry had changed significantly and a digital ink makeover was in order; as a result, the third season has a significantly altered, more vibrant and less detailed look that's difficult for me to comment on without betraying my personal preference for hand-painted cel animation. I need only glance at a frame from Season 3 and I feel over-stimulated by the immense amount of colour saturation going on. Compared to the garish simplicity of Season 3, White Christmas boasts some fairly detailed background imagery that's easier on the eye, but the mood and character of Blinky's earlier adventures is very much missed. On the plus side, original voice actors Robyn Moore and Keith Scott are still on board (with the additional voice talents of Sarah Aubrey and Shane Withington) and do as fine a job as ever.

Blinky Bill's White Christmas functions as the grand finale to The Adventures of Blinky Bill, although long-term fans of Gross's Blinky should note that two major characters from the TV series, Marcia the marsupial mouse and Shifty the dingo, are conspicuously absent here, but for a handful of very brief blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos during the opening montage. This would be less galling if the special didn't also waste so much time with random incidental characters we've never met before and (this being the final bow for this incarnation of Blinky) won't ever see again. The main narrative arc sees Blinky and Flap travel to the fabled Wollemi forest in search of a rare pine tree, but there's also a superfluous subplot involving Miss Magpie's efforts to assemble a school choir from the talentless tykes she teaches, meaning we get lots of useless filler sequences with nobodies like Angela the possum, Johnny the weak-bladdered rabbit and Tim and Tom, bandicoot twins who trade identities on a daily basis. The purpose of this narrative thread, other than to pad White Christmas out to the full 80 minutes, feels as if it's to further impress the special's big musical centrepiece, "Christmas in Australia" by pop singer Christine Anu, onto the viewer. I can't find any evidence that the song received a proper commercial release, but the special's tendency to keep periodically emphasising its existence does have the air of an odious marketing ploy about it.

As Miss Magpie's shrill assembly of pint-sized choir animals are eager to inform us over and over, it's Christmas in Australia, and if you know nothing else about the Australian climate then know this - Australia is in the Southern Hemisphere, so over there Christmas occurs in peak summertime. The traditions and iconography of the Australian Christmas are still very heavily rooted in those of its European counterpart, however, so it is not at all uncommon for Aussies to exchange cards depicting wintry scenes and Santa Claus heavily clad in his Coca Cola-endorsed reds, right before they hit the beach for a glorious day of surfing and sunburn. Keeping in mind that Blinky had by now established a strong fanbase in Europe as well as Australia, I don't find it too far-fetched that the plot of the special was purposely designed with an eye toward bridging the gap between the sweltering Australian Christmas and the traditional European white one. Blinky picks up on the curiously discordant nature of the former when he asks Wombo, his elderly wombat mentor, why Santa would wear such a ridiculously bulky suit in the middle of summer. Wombo explains to Blinky that many of the holiday traditions with which they are familiar originate in the Northern Hemisphere, where Christmas is associated with cold and snow. Blinky finds the entire notion of a frosty Christmas to be very far-fetched at first, so Wombo shows him a home movie of a trip he made to Europe as a younger wombat, where he was able to experience one of their legendary white Christmases first-hand. During his visit, Wombo acquired a snowglobe, which he has cherished ever since, for looking upon it always reminds him of his glorious Christmas in the frozen North. The instant Wombo produced the snowglobe and explained very clearly what it meant to him, I had a sneaking suspicion that it was very unlikely to survive the special intact - the snowglobe looks extremely fragile, it's just received a wad of exposition and, let's face it, Blinky is a ticking time-bomb - and sure enough, it isn't long before Wombo's much-loved artifact is reduced to a shattered heap. Remorseful at having broken Wombo's snowglobe, Blinky decides that the only way he can possibly compensate is to recreate Wombo's white Christmas experience right there in Greenpatch. Blinky delegates the task of creating snowfall to Splodge the kangaroo and Nutsy the girl koala while he and Flap venture out into the wilderness in the hopes of bringing back another staple of the European Christmas, a decorated pine tree. Rumor has it that some rare specimens can be located in the distant Wollemi Forest, although said forest is also reputed to be home to a variety of fearsome prehistoric creatures, so most Greenpatch residents are smart enough give it a wide berth.

The antagonists of the special are a couple of professional "plant poachers" named Chopper and Sly, who also have their sights set on plundering the mysterious goodies of the Wollemi Forest. They might as well be Harry and Joe from the original film, and in fact they come across as versions of Harry and Joe that have been purposely watered down in order to appear less intimidating to younger viewers (not that Harry and Joe themselves made for particularly formidable foes during their climactic showdown with Blinky and his gang, but they were at least capable of dishing out destruction of truly cataclysmic proportions toward the start of the film). Chopper and Sly are easily my least favourite aspect of White Christmas, for their sequences are frankly even more of a chore to sit through than the aforementioned filler with Miss Magpie and her choir. If you read my review of The Mischievous Koala, you might recall me noting that Yoram Gross's take on Blinky Bill attracted some controversy for its negative portrayal of the woodchipping industry. The original feature was careful to cover itself with a disclaimer emphasising that its villains were into illegal woodchipping practices only, but I've found at least one source claiming that the Australian forest industry took offense when the lyrics "Save us from that woodchip mill!" were incorporated into the TV series' theme song. White Christmas plays things as safe as humanly possible, by giving Chopper and Sly an extensive amount of dialogue in which they plainly discuss the criminality of their own plant-harvesting actions, just so there's no confusion as to which subcategory of woodchipper Yoram Gross are condemning. Needless to say, Chopper and Sly's villainy is painted in very broad strokes, and they make for fairly unengaging antagonists, too on the nose in their misdeeds to have any kind of authenticity but also too dense and ineffectual to seem capable of causing any real harm. It doesn't help that they're a variation on the same stupid-little-skinny-guy-and-slighty-less-stupid-but-still-pretty-stupid-fat-guy schtick we've seen replicated hundreds of times in the wake of Laurel and Hardy.

Despite the 80 minute run time, there's not a whole lot actually happens in White Christmas. Blinky and Flap have various run-ins with Chopper and Sly and are eventually cornered in a cave, where they befriend a large wombat-like creature they name "Wol" (on the basis that that's the only thing he can seemingly say). Wol's species is never formally given, but he's a Diprotodon, a type of extinct giant burrowing marsupial related to the wombat (I know this, not because I'm amazing proficient in marsupial paleontology, but because Lobe once referenced the species in an episode of Freakazoid!). Wol, of course, is one of the prehistoric residents of the Wollemi Forest, but Blinky and Flap don't twig this right away. The most curious thing about Wol is that he wears a diaper, presumably as an easy shorthand to clue us in that he's only a baby, although later on when we actually get to the Wollemi Forest and meet the rest of its oddball menagerie they turn out to be largely non-anthropomorphic and are quite content to strut around in the nude, so...who among them forces Wol to wear a diaper for his modesty/convenience? Then again, we don't really get to spend a lot of time in the Wollemi itself. The obvious dilemma Blinky faces, as he finally reaches the forest, is whether or not it's ethical for him to cut down and make off with an endangered tree, even for something as ostensibly unselfish as a friend's Christmas celebrations. This is where the bulk of the special's drama lies, for we never sense that Chopper and Sly pose much of a threat to the forest (and indeed, Wol's father is quite capable of seeing unwanted encroachers off himself, without the aid of Blinky or Flap). It's here that White Christmas would really have benefited from a sprinkling of the trademark melancholia that ran rife throughout the Dot features and The Mischievous Koala, in order to convey a sense of the Wollemi Forest being something very special and vulnerable. As it is, the Wollemi is really just a bland forest populated by slightly odd-looking creatures who don't talk or wear clothes (Wol's mysterious diaper notwithstanding). Evidently, it's meant to be a place that time forgot, but not enough is done to instill it with its own unique atmosphere or mystique. In the end, Blinky decides that he cannot cut down one of the wollemi pines and risk destroying the homes of any of the forest's residents, but regrets not having anything to show for his troubles to Wombo...whereupon Wol gets him out of his spot by gifting him with a small potted wollemi seedling. A sweet gesture, although it does raise further questions, such as where did Wol even manage to get hold of that pot in the first place? Like his diaper, it somewhat undermines the implicit idea that that these creatures are meant to be untouched by civilisation, be it that of humans or anthropmorphic bush critters.

Overall, most of what I've had to say about White Christmas has probably sounded overwhelmingly negative, so I should emphasise that I don't dislike the special, I just don't think that it benefited in any shape or form from being dragged out to feature length. There's probably just enough plot here to fill out a standard 22 minute episode of the regular TV series. Trim off the subplot fat involving the choir animals and Splodge and Nutsy (whom we keep checking in on intermittently), along with any conversation between Sly and Chopper that goes on for more than five seconds, and you'd be left with a much slicker (although still unremarkable) product. At 80 minutes, White Christmas is a pleasant but soporific experience, one that will likely struggle to retain the interests of older viewers.

The juiciest aspect of Blinky Bill's White Christmas occurs in the last few seconds of the special, when it decides, quite out of the blue, to throw a genuine curiosity at us. Blinky and Flap return to Greenpatch with an additional souvenir in the form of Sly and Chopper's woodchipper (possibly a deliberate callback to Blinky and his gang hijacking Harry and Joe's vehicle at the end of the original film), to discover that Splodge and Nutsy's efforts to create genuine snowfall have all ended in failure. That's when Blinky hits upon the idea of creating a kind of faux snowfall by feeding the woodchipper old newspapers and sprinkling the cut up shreds of paper over Greenpatch like confetti (I was somewhat surprised that a special with such an explicitly eco-friendly story would go with a solution that's basically tantamount to littering, but so long as the residents of Greenpatch are prepared to chip in to clean it up afterward...). The outcome seems to satisfy Wombo, and the special ends with all of the animals gathered together beneath Blinky's paper storm, singing one last rendition of that infernal "Christmas in Australia" song. That's when we pan away to reveal that the entire scene is actually just something Blinky is observing inside a snowglobe, just before he turns to wish the viewer a merry Christmas. And that's how the 2D version of Yoram Gross's Blinky permanently signs off. I...have no idea what to make of that ending, but I instantly get flashbacks to another TV show that infamously opted to end with the inexplicable implication that the entire series was nothing more than an idle daydream going on inside the head of a child with a snowglobe fixation. Are we supposed to draw similar conclusions about Blinky Bill's entire canon? I don't know, but I'm happy to step back and let the fan theories commence.

TACtics: Bush Telegraph (He Was Just Here...)

 

"Bush Telegraph" from 1996 might be one of the best and most hard-hitting films ever produced by the Transport Accident Commission, but anyone venturing into it should know that it commits an egregious and practically unheard-of sin in the sphere of road safety campaigning - it incorporates an implied dog death. Seriously, how many times can we say we've seen that happen? When it comes to public information films and public service announcements, the ones that entail animal misfortune tend to be those PIFs and PSAs pertaining specifically to animal issues. Warnings on the perils of drink driving and speeding seldom cast our four-legged friends as incidental victims, as it would likely be seen as a step too far. Under the right circumstances, you might be able to justify killing a child for emotive impact, but it's hard to imagine the death of a dog being perceived as anything other than totally gratuitous. When dogs do show up in road safety films, they tend to play one of two roles. Often they're the catalysts for disaster, the element of unpredictability that throws everything else off - a loose dog might run in front of a speeding vehicle, causing the driver to swerve and lose control, or a child might run into the road in pursuit of their dog. Or else they're representative of the bereaved. A dog sniffing forlornly at the body of its lifeless master can make an effective shorthand for our unhappy aftermath, and is usually a less heavy-handed visual than a crying child. The dog in "Bush Telegraph" is one of the rare canine participants who's forced to share in the fate of its human owners, who think unfortunately little about getting behind the wheel after one too many. Is it gratuitous? In a narrative sense, yes. The dog doesn't add anything in terms of plot progression and could very easily have been jettisoned. What the dog does allow for is a small touch of atmospheric uncanniness; if you listen closely, just moments before things take their inevitable turn for the catastrophic, you can hear it barking. It knew what was going to happen and was trying to warn them, but to no avail. A good boy let down by bloody idiot owners.

The dog isn't the only passenger to tragically perish along with the driver. He also takes his teenaged son with him, a development that's less gratuitous and more the logical outcome of his having inducted his son into a culture with an explicitly lax attitude toward drink driving. "Bush Telegraph" pivots on a similar theme to that of TAC's earlier "Tracy", and the UK PIF "Mates", in underscoring the damning contradictions of a professed friendship where one party so wilfully endangers the other with their reckless driving, but broadens it to be not merely a problem stemming from the choices of the individual, but the mindset of the wider community. Here, there are multiple failures of responsibility. The title of the short alludes to the way in which this particular group of associates communicates and looks out for one another, calling to advise when there are "booze buses" (sobriety checkpoints) in the vicinity, but actively encouraging each other to crack open that extra can of beer before hitting the road. The camaraderie that offers ostensible protection against meddling authorities is shown to be deeply treacherous, its solidarity extending in the wrong direction. "Bush" goes a step further than either "Tracy" or "Mates", so that the irresponsible friend doesn't even have to get behind the wheel with his chum to seal his fate - the fallacious assertion that he's been drink driving for years and nothing's ever happened to him, therefore it's no big deal, is more than enough. Meanwhile, the doomed driver's teenaged son is not yet old enough to participate in the drinking itself, but he is already complicit in the surrounding culture. He's the one who receives the call from Billy warning them of the booze bus on patrol and helps in passing the message on to his father. Later, as he and his father pass the checkpoint and observe that Billy, of all people, looks to have been pulled over, they share a hearty giggle at the irony. Although the son conveys some misgivings about his father's condition as they set out on their drive, he's absorbed the group's core value that the humiliation and inconvenience of getting caught out by a checkpoint is your biggest concerns when it comes to drink driving, and that so long as you can bypass those pesky booze buses then it's all hunky-dory. So when his father's impaired judgement causes them to advance into the path of a hulking great tanker and get jointly flattened (along with that poor dog who saw it coming), it's the terrible culmination of the multiple ways in which he's failed in his duties as a parent - firstly by putting his son in the immediate danger of being the passenger of a drink driver, and secondly by instilling in him the sense of communal negligence that's led him so lethally astray. The shared demise of father and son illustrates how the fate of one generation is bound to the choices of the generation before it, with both being steered in the same perilous direction.

The crash in "Bush Telegraph" is one of TAC's most impressive, right up there with that seen at the end of "Nightshift" - it's abrupt, it's brutal and it makes it painfully clear, without showing any actual gore, that the occupants of the crumpled vehicle would in all likelihood not have survived. The short is, in general, a textbook example of TAC's three-act formula at work - we have the nondescript build-up representing the calm before the storm, the eye-popping incident that causes everything to change, and finally the bleak aftermath in which those still standing struggle to come to terms with this cruel twist of fate. In this case, the lull immediately preceding the collision seems almost eerily tranquil, a vacant space filled by only the muted sounds of the dog barking and a couple of kids crossing with a bike in the foreground. It's an uncomfortable stillness, accentuating our anticipation of the impending calamity. We (like that unfortunate dog) know exactly what kind of situation we're headed for - that much has been thoroughly telegraphed by the preceding dialogue - but the questions of when, where and what form that destruction will take hang queasily in the balance. Even with our level of foresight, odds are that we (like the driver) didn't see that tanker coming until it was directly upon them.

The post-accident denouements are where TAC campaigns tend to be most prone to excesses, although "Bush Telegraph" is one of their more restrained specimens, and very much to its credit. There are even traces of the sardonicism that characterised some of the later Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives installments, notably "Pudding" and "In The Summertime", in how the culture of heedless consumption depicted is ironically juxtaposed with its devastating consequences. The short ends with a return to the two friends who'd sent the driver on his way with that fateful one for the road, and a second telephone call, this one carrying news of a very different nature. The friend who answers initially responds with disbelief, before dissolving into a sober silence. Over his shoulder we see the alcoholic indulgence continue, with the other friend casually swigging at his own can, finally lowering it when it becomes apparent that something is desperately wrong. A woman (possibly the wife of one of the two, or else a client they're doing building work for) wanders into view with a fresh supply of beer, and delivers the ad punchline, buoyantly advising them to "Drink up!", in a bitterly inadvertent toast to the ruination their overconsumption has brought. Then she too catches wind of the fact that this isn't the time, and the entire scene sinks into sombreness, the carousing atmosphere abruptly voided. The call's recipient turns to face them, and the ad fades to black before he's able to deliver the harrowing message. We sense that the darkness might have set in on their social circle for quite some time. 

What's equally haunting about that closing sequence is the way the recipient initially ingests the news, insisting that, "He was a just here a few s...", as if trying to negotiate with some higher power as to why his friend couldn't possibly have departed so suddenly. Alas, there is no quibbling with it. As TAC are so adept at illustrating, the barrier between being and non-being really is that flimsy.