The NSPCC campaign isn’t what it seems, apparently. Richard Cook
investigates
That advertising folk lie and deceive is now so well known as to be
almost a commonplace. Television programmes are made on the subject and
newspaper articles penned, but everyone, no matter how tarnished, has to
draw the line somewhere. That these people could possibly lie and
deceive for charity hardly bears thinking about at all.
But just ask BFCS about the campaign it has created for the NSPCC this
Christmas. Just ask them about the so-called exploding teddy bear and
see how far admen are prepared to go in their lies and deceptions these
days.
In one of these NSPCC films, directed by Michael Seresin, we see a
number of harrowing shots of abused children against the backdrop of the
Chris Rea song, Tell me There’s a Heaven. Among them is a frightened
little girl sitting on the floor. Her fear is explained in a flashback
showing her teddy bear exploding as it is slammed against the wall. The
ad ends with her sitting outside her house in the rain, cradling her
broken bear.
It’s an undeniably powerful film, and because it was for charity the
director donated his time, prop hire firms came gallantly to the rescue
and everyone pitched in. In the end, that film and its companion piece,
directed by John O’Donnell, were made for pounds 30,000 instead of the
hundreds of thousands they might ordinarily have cost to shoot. And the
lies and deception. Well, that ain’t no teddy bear.
In fact, the production team saved the pounds 1,000 a special effects
company might have charged to stuff the poor animal with mini-explosives
and have it disgorge its contents in spectacular fashion against the
wall.
‘Basically, what we did was to buy a few pounds 10 rucksacks - the ones
that look like teddies - from Woolies. We cut their stomachs open,
stuffed them with straw and then removed the zips and partially sewed
them up again,’ the producer, Cleo Hodgkinson, explains. ‘Then we shot
the sequence of them slamming into the wall at high speed to make it
look as dramatic as possible.’
The team also managed to deceive the viewer with an imaginative choice
of location.
They were looking for a range of interiors that reflected different
income levels. This time, space was the problem, as accommodating film
crews in the flats that the team originally scouted was proving
unworkable.
The solution was an abandoned mental hospital near Epsom in Surrey,
which the set decorator, Marianne Ford, miraculously transformed into
the ad’s various sets. This she did basically by sprucing up the
desolate and rubbish-strewn rooms into various stages of disrepair. The
rooms may look dismal enough in the finished shots, but this is actually
the work of BFCS volunteers who had to clean up rooms that were knee-
deep in newspapers and broken glass with paint peeling off the walls.
