For television schedulers, Christmas Day sits on their bowed and sagging
shoulders like a nagging ex, keen only to point out their failings. “Look at
what you used to be,” it crows. “So many millions loved you. Where are they
now?”
In the past, Christmas Day promised something phenomenal in audience terms.
Among Britain’s most watched television programmes ever, we find the 1966
World Cup Final, the Apollo 13 splashdown, two royal weddings, one royal
funeral and three BBC1 Christmas specials. More than 30m of us tuned in for
Den divorcing Angie in the 1986 EastEnders special, enjoyed the 1977
Morecambe and Wise Christmas special, and Only Fools and Horses’ Batman and
Robin episode entertained in 1996. Even in this multi-channel download age,
when Christmas Day primetime figures on BBC1 have dropped to 11m-12m, it
remains the one day when the family is likely to watch the same set at the
same time. We switch on just after noon and the screen flickers away until
the end of the day. There are still millions of us for the schedulers to win
over, so the pressure is always on.
Flicking through that list of past triumphs, one thing becomes curiously
clear. If you want us to switch on, book a double act: Del Boy and Rodders,
Eric and Ernie . . . This year’s tinselled twosome is Wallace and Gromit,
and it is testament to something enduring about the Plasticine pair that
when you hear their new film is airing on Christmas Day, you think, “Oh,
yes, of course.” Yet you would be hard put to pin down why.
Perhaps it’s about the return of two old friends. Their production company,
Aardman Animations, signed a five-picture deal with DreamWorks in 1999, but
2005’s Curse of the Were-Rabbit performed badly at the box office — despite
giving creator Nick Park his fourth Oscar — and the two parted company last
year, two films early. We who had nurtured 30-minute bursts of Wallace &
Gromit on traditional festive British television — The Wrong Trousers
debuted on December 31, 1993, and A Close Shave aired on Christmas Eve, 1995
— shuddered to hear that a marrow became a squash to please the American
chief executive of DreamWorks, Jeffrey Katzenberg. Now they are back where
they belong, clowning amid the wrapping paper in A Matter of Loaf and Death,
a pun we’re not sure Mr Katzenberg would approve of, referring as it does to
a true-blue British cinematic triumph by Powell and Pressburger.
The BBC, of course, is revelling in their return. Curse of the Were-Rabbit
goes out at 4.30pm on Christmas Day while Loaf debuts at 8.30pm, sandwiched,
as it were, by two slices of EastEnders. As well as Gromits passim, the
broadcaster’s festive channel idents are by Aardman, thus offering us some
Plasticine rather than a winter scene.
Yet it isn’t just that we’re glad to welcome back old friends. Our deep-rooted
affection for them rests in an understanding that what we are watching is a
labour of almost insane love. Loaf and Death is half an hour long, but took
almost two years of Park’s life, from conception to post-production. And
this is his fastest yet; it took Park six years to make the 30-minute A
Grand Day Out. When I visited Aardman’s Bristol studios, there were 14 sets
running side by side, producing between one and three seconds of film per
day. Park was constantly moving from set to set to set. At one, he’d sit and
act out a conversation between man and dog for an animator to copy, his
mouth wide open in Wallace’s cheese-eating grin. At another, he’d discuss
shadows, lights and the distribution of dust in an attic that appears for
less than a minute in the final edit. Then he’d run to meet the composer
Julian Nott, to hear the score and make suggestions. Then he’d watch a few
frames of bread dough landing on Gromit’s head and ask the animator to
reshape certain splash marks. There was more action than on the studio floor
of any major motion picture — though Park was experimenting with
blockbuster-style green screen and finding it to his taste.
“I’ve resisted digital and effects like this for a long time,” he explained
with the glee of a child delighting in a recently unwrapped toy, “but it’s
speeding things up and we’re not losing quality. There are still basics that
we use. When Wallace and Gromit’s van careers down a very long hill, we
still put the camera at an angle and keep feeding strips of road in at the
front and out at the back.”
Park’s love is also evident in the detail.
A Matter of Loaf and Death finds Wallace running a bakery — as if you hadn’t
guessed from the title, although it’s clearly Gromit who does all the work.
It’s a dangerous job, though, as someone is slaying bakers one by one,
having chalked up 12 to date. By now, of course, you should have seen a
reference to a “baker’s dozen” coming. If not, you might want to watch the
thing in slow motion. There’s easily one visual pun every couple of seconds,
from the wind-powered bakery’s name, Top Bun, to Wallace’s love interest,
Piella Bakewell. The groans induced by baking puns are endless, from the
fear of a “cereal killer” to Pat O’Cake’s Patisserie, as are dog gags in
Gromit’s cultural life — a poster of Citizen Canine hangs in his room, while
Puppy Love and McFlea are in his record collection. Pop culture generally
gets more attention than in past Parks. The movie Ghost’s infamous
throwing-a-clay-pot-as-foreplay scene is spoofed by a moulding-the-dough
lovefest, and homage-to-Hitchcock camera angles abound.
It’s fair to say we love what Park loves — not least the voice of Peter
Sallis, whose Last of the Summer Wine northern lilt helped Park to define
and refine his hero over the years (though Sallis was actually born and bred
in Middlesex). “When I heard Pete read the word ‘cheese’, it helped shape Wallace’s
mouth,” Park explains. Single and childless, he conceived Wallace & Gromit
as a 21-year-old student at the National Film and Television School. He
asked Sallis to voice A Grand Day Out for the princely sum of £50. “Seven
years later, I phoned to tell him I had finally made the film, and he had no
idea who I was,” Park recalls.
“Any actor in the world would have done it,” Sallis adds magnanimously.
“Although I’m not sure they’d have done it quite as well.”
For Dr Michael Lowis, a psychologist who researches the effects and use of
humour, it’s that voice that draws us in. “That particular soft northern
voice is instantly likeable and recognisable, yet gives most of us a slight
sense of superiority,” he explains in his own soft Yorkshire accent. “It
makes him a typical bloke with foibles and allows us to laugh affectionately
at his mishaps. Humour used to be far crueller than it is today. We would
laugh at dwarves and the crippled or lame, whereas now we only find spoof
misfortune funny. Real pain cuts off laughter right away.”
“It’s like a clown — the slapstick of someone else’s misfortune is probably
the first source of human laughter,” agrees Dr Neil Martin, a reader in
psychology at Middlesex University and the author of Psychology: A
Beginner’s Guide. “There are two main theories of humour, and both flow
through Wallace & Gromit like an absurd river.
One is the theory of incongruity — the odd, the novel or the unexpected.
Wallace & Gromit have plenty of that, from a dog that drives and cooks
and invents a metal detector to the Wanted poster of Feathers McGraw in The
Wrong Trousers, where a penguin with a rubber washing-up glove on his head
is tagged: ‘Have you seen this chicken?’ Then there’s superiority and
the need to have a victim, which means pratfalls for everyone.”
Loaf and Death certainly provides ample buffoonery. Wallace is attacked by a
maniac in a forklift, spins on his windmill’s sails and, at one point, has
his trousers explode. Gromit’s desperate attempts to keep his master alive
mean clinging all night to a chandelier over the killer’s bed and nearly
losing his first love, Fluffles, to a time bomb. All this is set against the
idyllic cobbled streets and two-up-two-down houses of the duo’s unnamed
town, based in part on Park’s hometown, Preston, and combined with nearby
Wigan, where he researched the set designs.
For Lowis, this village is Albion, a mythic representation of an England that
never existed. It’s an idea that provides the back-drop of classic
television comedy from Dad’s Army - “Let’s face it, the second world war was
horrible,” he points out - through the dales of Summer Wine and the imagined
cosy prison world of Porridge. It’s the puns and knowing cultural references
that rescue Wallace & Gromit from being a Hovis-ad museum piece and give
them a knowing, postmodern touch.
Finally, there is the bond at the core of the show: the man and the
anthropomorphised dog, in itself a staple of humour in almost every culture.
For Dr Chris Ritchie, at Solent University, Southampton, the duo’s
relationship comes from the heart of comedy archetypes, echoing something
fundamental in our psyche. “The double act goes back to ancient Greece,” he
argues. “They believed the world was divided into the Apollonian and the
Dionysian - Apollo represented order and wisdom, Dionysus was change and
chaos, and the god of comedy. Dionysus supervised the comedy festivals, and
his followers regularly appear in comic plays. It’s a metaphor for that
mildly schizophrenic element of the human psyche where, on the one hand, we
want to party, but on the other we need control. We know that if we only
party, that leads to destruction, while living under the leaden hand of
absolute order is boring.
“If you look at our comedy from then on, it’s always referencing that
dichotomy, using identical structures, from clowns through commedia
dell’arte to Abbott and Costello. Even the jokes are the same. Ernie tries
to create something; Eric wrecks everything. Where you see a break, however,
is with alternative comedy. French and Saunders, Rik and Ade, Newman and
Baddiel, Punt and Dennis – all had two ‘funny men’ rather than one straight
and one funny. Wallace and Gromit are basically a return to the classic
tradition.”
Park agrees with the thesis – “Gromit loves order and Wallace is a constant
force of chaos,” he nods – but says that the inspiration for Wallace was his
late father, Roger, an architectural photographer who died of cancer in
2002. When Park was 11, his father gave him a camera, and he began filming
hand-drawn strips of the family’s pet hen, Penny, and a rat called Walter.
Like Wallace, Park’s father “worked in his garden shed a lot, was full of
ideas, but he wasn’t so much of an inventor, more of a keen handyman. He
would always be doing a project - whether it was building a coffee table or
a caravan. When I was seven, he made a caravan from scratch. It was like
something Wallace would build, just a big square box”.
It’s this garden-shed tinkering, aligned to tea, cheese and a tank top, that
punts the show the final few yards to our hearts, Ritchie argues. “People
say British psychology is conservative and respectful, but it’s anarchic and
antiauthoritarian,” he suggests. “We hate being bossed around and told what
to do. We hate people who set themselves up over us. Our humour is a way of
rebelling safely - we tell jokes at the expense of our bosses so we can face
going into work the next day. Wallace and Gromit always face aggressive,
bossy baddies. They bumble through with some make-do-and-mend, jokes and a
load of chaos.
“I think that’s the reason we love them, and why they’re worthy of Morecambe
and Wise or Del and Rodney affection. Because, basically, they’re us.”
A Matter of Loaf and Death is on BBC1 on Christmas Day at 8.30pm, preceded by
Curse of the Were-Rabbit at 4.30pm
