Cathy Jamieson would not approve, but then she never does. After a chance meeting in a garden, an older man and a young boy develop a disquieting friendship, brokered over a can of soft drink of the type now roundly frowned upon in the salad bars and fuel zones of Scottish schools.
As if the shameless consumption of sugar-enriched beverages were not sufficiently wanton, the pair then embark on a frantic, whistle-stop tour of the country, much as Lolita and Humbert Humbert did in the infamous novel, with nary a thought given to the continuing imbalance in the performance of boys within Scotland’s education system. As so many of these stories do, it ends tragically when the boy is abandoned in Glasgow’s George Square, the swirling winter snows an emblem of his estrangement and desolation.
Well, that’s one way of looking at the first Irn-Bru Christmas tele- vision campaign, which hit our screens last night. Another way to regard this £250,000 incursion into the Yuletide manger is as a charming pastiche of Raymond Briggs’s animated classic The Snowman, a film that has been shown on British television every Christmas since 1982.
Another way involves wondering in a “disgusted of Tunbridge Wells — is nothing sacred?” way whether it’s strictly necessary for Mammon to grab every totem of harmless childhood innocence he can by the throat and rattle them until the coins flow from their pockets.
And so the piping, angelic strains of The Snowman’s musical highlight, Walking in the Air, now the official theme tune of Christmas after Slade’s Merry Christmas Everybody, is adapted to accommodate the lines: “We’re walking in the air/ I’m sipping on an Irn-Bru.” And as with the film, in which a snowman magically flies a young boy to the North Pole to meet Father Christmas, the pair take to the skies to wing their way through the animated analogue of a Colin Baxter calendar — from the Falkirk Wheel to the Forth Bridge, down Buchanan Street in Glasgow, through Landseer’s painting The Stag at Bay and the Glenfinnan Viaduct to George Square, onto which the boy falls after being jettisoned for refusing to share his can of Irn-Bru.
“I think it’s [Irn-Bru’s maker] Barr’s plan that the advert comes back Christmas after Christmas,” says Gerry Farrell of the Leith Agency, the advertising creatives who developed the concept. “We’re hopeful that it’ll become a well-loved Scottish classic.”
The light tread of boot upon finer public feelings, however, has become the leitmotif of Irn-Bru’s ad campaigns in recent years. Keen to reorient Irn-Bru’s reputation as the manual labourers’ mouthwash of choice and the morning-after saviour of all who’d slid down the slippery slope the night before, Barr elected in 1998 to retool Irn-Bru as a party in a bottle, bursting with youthful impishness and with not an inch of builder’s pecs to be seen. There may also have been a possibility that the classic Irn-Bru slogan, “Made in Scotland — from girders”, contravened EU legislation on the accuracy of foodstuff labelling.
And so followed an outpouring of television and poster campaigns that induced dyspepsia in the gullets of the types who enjoy complaining to regulators: the pregnant mother who attempts to induce her reluctant baby from the womb with a can of Irn-Bru; the grim reaper advising drinkers not to be scared as Irn-Bru would be available on the other side; the woman who serenades her children, then reveals she was formerly a man (Ofcom received 17 complaints from transsexuals); the cow that explained “When I’m a burger, I want to be washed down with Irn-Bru” (700 complaints).
Irn-Bru advertising’s greatest infamy came in August when a TV ad for the Irn-Bru 32 energy drink — slogan: “Attack life with a hammer” — drew the attention of Strathclyde police’s violence reduction unit, concerned by the vision of a man in a blue cuckoo suit threatening an elderly librarian with “I’ll shush you, you tweedy old cow”.
“There are some people who’ll pick up the phone about anything,” says Farrell. “We do walk a tightrope with the television ads, but the tightrope is constructed by the shows that surround the ads, we’re just keeping up with those.”
With the zeal of the convert, Barr and Irn-Bru seem inordinately proud of their late-career adoption of the wholesome and hearth- centric, albeit in a commercial that sees a young boy dropped from a great height by a vengeful creature made from frozen water, and they have extended an invitation to visit Sherbert Animation, the London studio where it was made. Invoking visions of men with rolled-up shirtsleeves receding into infinity as they toil at draughtsman’s boards, an animation studio sounds enticing, a Disneyesque factory of dreams.
But in the modern, Apple Mac age, of course, what you get is a youth staring at a monitor in an office on Great Portland Street while someone sends out for coffee. There’s not a soul with a mini-lens dangling from their neck or a director who strides around framing shots between stretched fingers. That happens elsewhere, executed by trusted freelances. Here they just come up with the storyboards and discuss visual style and similar matters. Jayne Bevitt was the producer of the Irn-Bru ad, charged with the task of ensuring it retained enough of Briggs’s style to qualify as “affectionate homage,” even though The Snowman creator is less than flattered by the tribute. “The snowman has a different body shape to the Briggs version,” she explains, holding up an original illustration. “It’s a different scarf and a different nose.”
As gripping as the minuscule differences in fictional ice-creatures are, I’m still occupied by Bevitt’s earlier revelation that the ad’s director, Robin Shaw, had found it necessary to undertake several location- scouting trips north. Given that the ad’s script calls for the Falkirk Wheel, the Forth Bridge et al, it’s a fairly safe bet that the places best resembling them are the Falkirk Wheel and the Forth Bridge, surely?
“But those tourist snapshot images never give you the feel of the place,” says Shaw. “You need to know the full layout because you have the snowman and the boy flying over and then flying away again.” The advert features the Princes Street Gardens ice rink, which wouldn’t have been there at the time of the location visit. “But I could still get the real feel of the place,” Shaw says, “and how it would have been laid out had it been winter. Anyway, my mother lives up there, near Loch Lomond. It saved on the hotel bills.”
Shaw professes profound admiration for Briggs and claims The Snowman was among the works that shaped his desire to become an animator. Given this, did he not find it infinitely depressing to sully a classic of childish wonder all for the sake of flogging some cans of fizzy drink? “Not really,” he says, “because the original film has surpassed the limitations of iconic status. The Snowman is not just a piece of children’s animation, it’s now something for all the generations.
“And the Irn-Bru commercial will appeal in a very similar way, even if you don’t want to buy the drink.”
Tasteless TV - the most offensive adverts
Kentucky Fried Chicken: The most-complained about advert in British television history arrived in April 2005. The spot for the Kentucky Fried Chicken Zinger Crunch Salad depicted workers in a call centre talking with their mouths crammed full of KFC takeaway, and was overwhelmingly considered a quease-inducing disincentive for consumers to go anywhere near the chain again. The Advertising Standards Authority received 1,671 complaints.
Cock o’ the Walk canned fruit: An infamous 1960s cult American television commercial that is a big hit on the internet. Two obese sisters dance rather wobbily in celebration of the arrival of the low-calorie canned fruit. “These are dandy for the weight-watching fan!” goes their banjo-driven song.
Pot Noodle: Wisely intuiting that their student-friendly dehydrated noodle snack was horrible, yet somehow addictive, Golden Wonder commissioned an infamous series of commercials that depicted a fondness for Pot Noodles as a kind of sexual perversion. When the slogan “Have You Got the Pot Noodle Horn?” got the company into hot water with the authorities, it launched a new campaign featuring miners digging for noodles — and was swiftly accused of racism by outraged viewers in Wales.
The Glasgow Fort: The huge shopping mall was censured this year by the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre for showing a commercial before the watershed in which a female shopper breaks into suggestive heavy breathing when faced with the supposedly seductive wealth of shopping choices within what the less sexy among us can only see as a grim retail monolith.
Mazda: A storm of feminist indignation was raised when the Japanese car manufacturer launched a campaign in which a female mannequin’s nipples slowly became erect after the dummy was driven in the back of their latest model.
