Review

Culture

Film & TV

9 August 2024

7 min read

Help for the Heelers

The benevolent butterfly effect in Bluey’s season finale.

From Mockingbird

Mockingbird connects the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life.

A cartoon dog family stand in their kitchen

Bluey and family.

Ludo Studio.

Written by Bryan J. This article first appeared in Mockingbird, 23 April 2024. By kind permission.

“Daddy, there’s no God in Bluey’s world, is there?” No joke, my precocious four-year-old PK [Pastor’s Kid] son asked me this question after watching the new Bluey season finale, titled “The Sign.” It’s a deep question, one that comes from a place of honest curiosity — “The Sign” is, without a doubt, one of the most spiritually significant episodes of a series that is known to offer big questions to little kids. The Heeler family is presented with a life-changing decision with no guarantee of a happy ending, and the whole of the episode features the family wrestling the unknown of the future. The fact that my son could pick up on the high stakes of the episode, the philosophical questions about the goodness of providence, and the impossibility of knowing whether the future was bright or not … let’s just say it justifies the tears that come every time I watch the episode with him.

Which is five times now. I have watched the finale five times and wept every time. Isn’t this show made for preschoolers?

“The Sign” reveals a family in transition. After offering a number of hints earlier in the season, we discover that the Heeler family dad, Bandit, has accepted a job offer that pays a lot more money, but will require him to move. Chili (aka Mum) agrees with the choice to move and take the new job, but she has sincere concerns about leaving family, friends, neighbors, city, and a beloved house behind. Bluey, of course, has trouble coming to terms with the idea, as any preschooler would, and Bingo remains blissfully ignorant of the big changes coming her way. The preparations to move coincide with preparations for Uncle Rad’s marriage to family friend (and Bluey’s godmother) Frisky, with the family’s four preschool girls joining in as flower girls.

Big changes bring big questions, of course. Nowhere is this more evident than in Bluey’s preschool classroom. Calypso, the teacher, models a zen-like spirituality for Bluey and her friends. At the end of story time, Bluey asks her teacher “Why do stories always have happy endings?” Her teacher responds, “Well, I guess ’cause life will give us enough sad ones.” (Is this a kid’s show?) This inspires a host of sad stories from Bluey’s peers: a guinea pig that ran away, a divorce, a lonely dad. It’s now that Bluey announces her not-so-happy ending, telling her friends that she is moving. To help the class cope with their sadness, Calypso reads her students a parable of a farmer, who approaches all of life’s good luck and bad luck moments with the simple attitude of “we’ll see.” It’s a story without a happy ending (or without any ending, really), and the kids don’t buy it. “Is that it?” asks one, disappointed. “What happens next?” asks another. “Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to, Bluey” says Calypso with kindness, which Bluey takes to mean that their family house won’t sell (which it does, in the next scene).

Big questions also mean big feelings. An enraged and fearful Frisky, dismayed to discover her fiancé expects her to move out west where he works, runs away the morning of the wedding. Chili hops in the car, with four preschoolers in tow, to track her down. A series of events, which can be only described as providential, take place along the way. Chili, Bluey, Bingo, and cousins run into just the right person, spill juice cups at just the right moment, and make pit stops at the precisely needed spot, to find Frisky in quiet reflection at a local hilltop park. Groom-to-be Rad shows up, too. Frisky and Rad talk through their concerns and move on with the wedding, announcing there that they’ve chosen not to move west as planned. It’s a lovely wedding, with dancing and family and fun and a host of easter eggs for eagle-eyed viewers to enjoy. “You’re having a happy ending!” announces Bluey to her godmother, before turning to her mother and asking “Do you think we’ll have a happy ending too?” “I don’t know,” replies Chili, “But I’m done trying to figure it out. I just wanna dance.” Queue the happy dance montage.

Still, providence has not finished working with the Heelers. On moving day, a whole host of minor events from previous episodes collide to cancel the sale of the Heeler’s beloved house. It’s hard to describe every little flap of the butterfly’s wing that impacted this outcome — a combination of stuck coins, romantic encounters at the drugstore, inchworms saved from being squished on the slip-and-slide, and overzealous real estate agents all played their part. In a moving montage, Bandit takes the call about the canceled sale of the home, changes his mind about the new job, symbolically rips the for-sale sign out of his front yard, and is tackled by a loving family who realize they don’t have to move anymore. The family sits on boxes in their empty kitchen floor eating takeout cheeseburgers, relieved of the anxiety of moving, while the show rolls to credits. The song playing in the background is called “Lazarus Drug,” sung by the same voice actor who plays preschool teacher Calypso. It’s a song about love drawing someone back to life, perhaps a nod to the love of Bandit’s family drawing him back to the reality that they may already have a great life, and money wouldn’t make it any better. The Heelers get their happy ending, too.

The Greeks were the first to use the storytelling tool we know by its Latin name: deus ex machina, God from the machine. In Greek drama, at the climax of a seemingly unsolvable problem, a machine (usually a trap door or crane) would lift or lower an actor onto the stage portraying one of the gods of the Greek pantheon. These gods would step in and provide a solution to a drama’s seemingly unsolvable and complex problem. Nowadays, the term is derisive, an insult that implies lazy writing or poor storytelling. At the time, however, the audience loved these deus ex machina solutions. At the risk of psychoanalyzing the past, one imagines they would have been quite happy to imagine that the Gods cared enough in the affairs of humans to intervene for a happy ending.

Deus ex machina is a criticism that can be leveled at this season finale. After all the adults tell the precocious preschooler that life gives out happy and sad endings, we are not given any sad endings. The only way to navigate change, according to the wisdom of the world, is sit back, embrace a sort of desireless “zen” regarding the future, and say “we’ll see,” but everyone nonetheless gets a happy ending. After bending over backwards to lay out how the future is fickle and unknowable, the show still insists on showing how everything lined up just perfectly for Bluey’s “prayers” to be answered. It’s not just her either. Aunt Brandy’s desire for a child comes to fulfillment, after we are told numerous times that it is not meant to be (S3E31). Winton’s divorced and depressed father meets the mother of the terrier triplets (S3E45), and the two come together and form a new family. The shaggy hair dogs get their house with a pool. Everything works out just fine. Despite the look of a Greek tragedy, in which everything ends poorly for the protagonists, things end up turning out fine, just like every Greek comedy. Or, to put it in Elizabethan terms, what starts out like Hamlet becomes A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream.

In Bluey’s world, the happy endings are real. The parents always muster enough energy to play with their kids. The right parenting lesson is always on hand, and handed down with pithy aphorisms. Hurt feelings are acknowledged and reconciled with emotionally intelligent strategies. The love shown between friendships and family members is realistic and optimistic. Moreover, in this square dog world of Brisbane, Australia, when parents and grandparents are at the end of their ropes, providence steps in to help guide the way. Happy endings are not so much earned in Bluey’s world as they are a given, or perhaps gifted, sometimes by tired and exhausted parents, but also, by an unseen benevolence watching over them. What is grace, after all, if not an unexpected happy ending?

So how did I respond to my son’s question? “Yes,” I told him, “there is a God in Bluey’s world. Who do you think made all those happy endings come true?” It’s not an answer I should have come up with so quickly. I’m not usually one to offer a succinct one-liner that sums up decades of media study and theology in a bite sized nugget for my four-year-old. Perhaps, instead, it was providence that gave the answer for me.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Identity

Music

20 November 2025

6 min read

Life is complicated, and Alan Bennett know it

Beneath The Choral’s cosy nostalgia lie some discordant truths

Roger Standing

Roger is a theologian and author with a particular interest in the relationship between faith and culture.

Ralph Fiennes conducts.

Sony Pictures.

There is something wonderfully disconcerting about the movie, The Choral. On the face of it, it’s a feel-good tale in the light-hearted British comedy-drama tradition. Set in the fictional Yorkshire town of Ramsden during the First World War, the local choral society put on their annual production. Confronted by a succession of challenges and setbacks they persevere and accomplish their goal.

With Ramsden beautifully conceived and filmed in the model village of Saltaire, it is evocative of its time and place. Scripted by national treasure Alan Bennett, now aged 91, it is shot through with his well-observed wit, penchant for understatement and gentle melancholy. This is a heady mix.

That the film is directed by BAFTA, Olivier and Tony Award winner Nicholas Hytner, a longtime collaborator with Bennett (The Madness of King George, The History Boys and The Lady in the Van) and includes Ralph Fiennes, Roger Allum and Alun Armstrong among its cast only underlines the dramatic quality of the ensemble.

So, all things considered, you’d expect this to be a heart-warming foray into the cosy nostalgia of the familiar. The fact that it is also the first original screenplay from Bennett in 40 years, with Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius as its musical heart, would also seem to guarantee universal critical acclaim. Wrong on both counts.

From the outset, something doesn’t seem to be quite right. It’s a little off. The progression of a young postboy and his mate around the town on their bikes, delivering telegrams to young, widowed women is heartbreakingly poignant. But Ellis, the postboy Lofty’s mate, disturbs the pathos of the moment by cheerily embracing the possibility of romance, “Grief, it’s an opportunity!”

Of course, the backdrop of the film is the war. The war has robbed the Choral Society of its choirmaster and its male members. Then, having recruited young men in their place, the prospect of conscription on their eighteenth birthdays is inescapable and inexorably drawing closer. We know what’s coming and a shroud is cast over their endeavours.

The war also throws up issues of patriotism and the demonisation of everything German. Even Battenberg cake is frowned upon.

The newly recruited choirmaster, Dr Guthrie played by Fiennes, is also held in suspicion as he had previously lived in Germany by choice. For him it was a nation of high culture, philosophy and civilised society.

At one point he recites

“A man should hear a little music every day of his life so worldly cares may not obliterate the beautiful in the human soul.”

Revealing he is quoting “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe” he is abruptly rebuked, “For God’s sake man, lower your voice.” So it is that the Society abandons its customary performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion for the Elgar, with Bach “being a Hun!”

Guthrie is also suspect in the minds of some because “he is not a family man”. Behind the euphemism lay a relationship in Germany, cut short by the beginning of the war and the German joining the Imperial Navy.

When the choir learn from a newspaper report of “829 Germans killed at sea” they break out into a spontaneous and raucous singing of “God save the King”. Knowing the ship, Guthrie is left in private, unshared grief. For the audience, the nationalistic enthusiasm rings empty, hollow and jarring.

People’s lives are complicated, what drives and motivates them remains largely unknown and the consequences frequently unanticipated. Bennett pulls back the curtains a little bit to give us a peak. Things are not straightforward. Issues are not as black and white as we tell ourselves. Our impressions and the stereotypes that inform them do not stand scrutiny.

There’s the mill owner, Alderman Duxbury (Roger Allam), who funds “the Choral”, chairs the committee and expects a leading role is the epitome of privilege. Yet he has lost a son to the war and is deeply grieving himself, unsupported by his wife who is paralysed by her grief and emotionally frozen.

Then, as the film progresses, Clyde returns from the front after being ‘missing in action’ and having lost his arm. However, he discovers that his fiancé, Bella, had ultimately been unable to wait for him and has taken up with Ellis.

Processing his trauma and negotiating the loss of Bella, to his shame he manipulates her for a sexual favour. Hero and villain, pain and pleasure, light and dark all laid bare within the beauty of the Yorkshire landscape and Elgar’s transcendent music. A gifted tenor, Guthrie casts Clyde in the leading role while Bella and Ellis take their places in the chorus.

Complicated!

Other characters are interlaced into the tale with their own backstory. Salvation Army singer, Mary, has an angelic voice and takes the female lead. A committed Christian she resists romantic advances, while Horner, the Societies’ accompanist wrestles with the whole idea of war and the love that dare not speak its name. When the sensitive musician is robustly led away to prison by the military another discordant note is played in the audience’s mind.

Then there are cameos by a pompous and self-important Elgar, the thoughtful and compassionate Mrs Bridge, a woman of ill-repute, and the local vicar, who is more concerned about the Roman Catholic theology contained in John Henry Newman’s religious poem, The Dream of Gerontius upon which Elgar based his oratorio.

“Purgatory …” says Clyde, “… I could take you there tomorrow!”

The closing thought is Newman’s, not as the Society performs, but as the lads, now 18 and in uniform, wave to their friends as their train leaves the station. The oratorio scores the scene with the Angel’s farewell:

“Softly and gently, dearly ransomed soul, In my most loving arms I now enfold thee.”

While the film has been received warmly by some, not everyone is convinced. Rachel LaBonte is clear that the narrative is:

“… suffocated by the sheer number of characters at play, and the odd disconnect between their individual arcs.”

And Guy Lodge in Variety observes:

“Bennett’s script flits inconsistently between generations, foregrounding certain perspectives before they suddenly recede …”

But actually, this is the genius of Bennett’s script. This is what life is like. Every day we bump into loads of people, each one living their own life, with their own issues and their own back story. And you can be sure there is an ‘odd disconnect’ between our lives no matter how much we have in common.

And life does ‘flit inconsistently’ between triviality and seriousness, between the interests of the young or the old, between what matters, what’s a priority and what’s a diversion.

While the substance of the town of Ramsden, the elevating art of the Choral Society and horror of the war frame the story, what it’s about is the people. A diverse, complex set of individuals who inhabit a particular place and a particular time. They share the space, but each have their own lives to navigate and each of their lives is complicated. And the number of characters and the flitting about is precisely how Bennett makes his point.

It was a first world war British Chaplain who advised the men at an army camp in Zeitoun, Egypt to be careful about judging those around them:

“There is always one fact more in every man’s case about which we know nothing.”

If we only knew what baggage people are carrying, what they’re wrestling with and what they’re keeping to themselves we would see them in a different light. We might even, perhaps, treat them more kindly.

Life is complicated. We are complicated. In these febrile times it would be good to remember that and cut each other some slack.

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