You know that feeling you get when you catch someone doing something out of character? For example, if you were to walk into your parents’ home and find your mother listening to Iron Maiden or something similar? It’s a strange feeling – you feel that everything you thought was right is in fact wrong, and you’re going to have to go through a serious change in your entire world view.
Well, that’s the feeling I got this morning when I tuned into BBC2, only to find Postman Pat flying a helicopter.
It’s part of some kind of unholy Postman Pat spinoff series, entitled Postman Pat: Special Delivery Service. Just watching the credits made me aware that this was not the Pat we all came to know and love in those heady days of the mid-1980s. To the strains of a slightly more tweely sung version of the familiar theme tune (altered only in the line “letters through your door” to “presents through your door”, as if children can’t get excited enough about electricity bills and suchlike), we see images of Pat driving his normal van, then a much larger van, and then inexplicably bursting through a hedge on a motorbike. Then there’s a brief interlude in which Jess manages to get catapulted skyhigh and Pat has to spin as if he’s in Dancing On Ice in order to catch him, after which your mind is subjected to the above-mentioned shift in world view when Pat appears in a helicopter, dropping presents by parachute to four children. He then performs a loony little dance in front of the assembled populace of Greendale, which now appears to be a vast metropolis.
This particular episode starts in Pat’s home, where Pat’s son Julian is trying to decide what music would be best at the school disco. I didn’t know Pat had a son, and it seems faintly implausible that he could ever get one. I don’t imagine any woman would be able to go through the necessaries with him without getting the words, “Postman Pat, Postman Pat, Postman Pat and his black and white cat” looping round in her head, rendering the process ... difficult, to say the least. And picturing Postman Pat at the point of making his special delivery, as it were, is something that I don’t wish to dwell on.
The hilarious conversation between Pat and Julian is interrupted when Pat’s mobile rings and somebody at the sorting office tells him that there’s a special delivery to be made – “a very special delivery”. Pat gets into his van, tells Jess there’s a special delivery to be made, thus hammering this in for the third time in fifteen seconds, for the benefit of really thick children, and then drives off. An insane jingle – “SPECIAL DELIVERY SEEEEERRRRRRVICE!” – then starts up, and immediately this lodged itself in my brain where it has remained all day, and probably will remain there for all eternity.
Pat arrives at the sorting office, which is a massive red building so futuristic it wouldn’t look out of place in Doctor Who as a state-of-the-art space station. Pat enters this new atrocity – Mrs Goggins and her sweet little village post office appear to have been retired, given that neither appear in this episode – and finds someone called Ben (who I assume is Pat’s boss) pissing about with a disco machine. Jess panics and runs off, something repeated about three times in the course of this scene, before Ben reveals that this disco machine is the special delivery. This is a welcome attempt to inject realism into Postman Pat, if you ask me. The Royal Mail blatantly do open all interesting-looking parcels, and nick them if they fancy it, so Ben’s just being a regular employee. He tries to cover his tracks by claiming that the intended recipient of the disco machine asked him to open it and test it out, but I’m not buying that.
Pat loads the disco machine onto a truck thing, then drives it round like a maniac until – as we all foresaw – he breaks the disco machine. He doesn’t seem that concerned, unlike Ben, who cries “What are we going to do???” with all the panic of a Royal Mail employee knowing he’s likely to be made an example of. Pat just says he’ll take the machine to Ted Glen, and drives off in a big red truck.
We then cut to some children looking forward to the disco, and thus begins a dull subplot in which there’s a lot of boring lessons to be learned about how everyone dances differently and it’s okay to dance however you like. Ra ra ra. No one cares, least of all me, so I won’t mention it again.
Ted Glen is by now hard at work, and in this new incarnation has a really deep scary voice – so sinister that you half get the impression he’s going to deliberately fuck up the disco machine good and proper. He’s as good as his word though, and actually improves the machine above and beyond its original specifications. Quite why, therefore, he’s still stuck in his junkshop in Greendale and not working as a senior engineer for Sony or Panasonic is beyond me. Maybe he scared all the senior executives with his voice at the interview, so he didn’t get the job.
So Pat gets driving happily along with the new disco machine in the back of his big red truck. He comes across a policeman called Arthur, who has closed the only bridge into Greendale seemingly for his own perverse amusement. He says urgent repairs are being done, but there’s nothing apparently wrong with the bridge and there’s no workmen there, and in the ultra-efficient world of Postman Pat, I can’t imagine the workmen wouldn’t already be there, beavering away. The only conclusion then, is that PC Arthur wants to cause a little havoc. He won’t bend the rules for Pat, who claims that this is the only way into Greendale, something I can only imagine being true if Greendale were surrounded by a moat. Pat then reverses his van into a field to turn around – and it looks for a highly entertaining moment that he’s going to reverse into the river – and hurtles off back to the sorting office, flicking V-signs at PC Arthur as he goes. (One part of the summary of that last paragraph wasn’t true. See if you can guess which.)
Ben notices on his high-tech Post Van Detection System that Pat is heading the wrong way, and calls Pat on his mobile. Pat answers – hands free, of course – and tells Ben to get the helicopter ready for take off! There’s then a short and pointless interlude where Pat gets stopped at a level crossing for about five seconds – the episode must have been running a tiny little bit short of time – and then we cut to the disco where we see the kids moaning about the fact that the disco machine isn’t there yet. Julian says his dad “left home ages ago” which is very helpful and I’m sure won’t contribute to Pat getting into trouble for arsing about on the way.
Meanwhile, Pat appears to be driving through the streets of Greendale in an effort to get to the sorting office so he can fly back to Greendale ... not sure if they thought that shot through properly. He gets all suited up and flies off with the disco machine attached from a rope below the helicopter. It’s a bloody ridiculous concept, if you ask me – Pat could barely drive his van in the old series, so it’s difficult to adjust myself to the notion that he’s a fully trained helicopter pilot. This whole series beggars belief. When since have Royal Mail offered delivery by helicopter? It’s never ever going to be cost-effective. And if someone did say, “We need a disco machine delivered to our school by 3 this afternoon,” the likely response from your average Post Office employee would be, “On your bike, mate, you’ll be lucky if you get it there at all.”
The other things that wind me up about this episode are the absence of Mrs Goggins, Miss Hubbard and Reverend Timms. The old Reverend’s disappearance isn’t surprising – he’d probably provoke a jihad or something – but why should the poor old postmistress be put out to pasture in favour of some young oik who opens all the parcels? And the interfering old busybody Miss Hubbard ought to have had at least one line in this episode. (I could write it myself – “I don’t hold with discos, Pat, I don’t understand them. String them all up – it’s the only language they understand,” would probably fit her character well enough.) It’s ageist, if you ask me – there’s no one in this programme older than Pat.
I will be watching Postman Pat: Special Delivery Service again tomorrow in order to confirm a suspicious theory I have about this programme: I feel that it’s very likely that every episode will involve Pat having to deliver something in a special way, him trying to do it using his van or motorbike or big red truck, then coming up against an insurmountable obstacle like a policeman, and him having to go back and get the helicopter. If I’m correct, then I will offer him a sage piece of advice: just take the helicopter in the first place, you moron, you know you want to anyway. And I will suggest to the Royal Mail that they build a new sorting office on the Greendale side of that bridge.