The Pet Shop Boys’ Pop-Surrealist Oddity

A pleasantly odd and desultory road movie, It Couldn’t Happen Here transports the duo from the windswept Essex shore to a ghostly London nightclub. “Ever since I was a child, the comic and the hostile seemed to go hand in hand,” Tennant muses in voice-over early on, announcing the film’s tonal strategy. Menaced by various grotesques—biker gangs, an amorous bed-and-breakfast landlady, a blind priest who happens also to be a hitchhiking serial killer, skinheads in Union Jack tees—our heroes respond with their customary deadpan, playing the part of detached and unflappable observers (although their inability to keep a straight face when a ventriloquist and his dummy park themselves at the next table in a café makes for one of the more endearing moments). Barring one notable costume change into a gold lamé suit, Tennant wears black tie, as on the iconic cover of their 1987 album, Actually, while Lowe, who does not utter a word until half an hour into the film, is permitted a more casual get-up of leather jacket, jeans, and beanie. The Pet Shop Boys are required, in other words, not to act so much as to inhabit the personas they had established right off the bat, already plain to see in the video for their breakthrough hit, “West End Girls,” in which they impassively stalk through the streets of London, Lowe trailing a few paces behind Tennant.

From the prevailing mood of doom to the idiosyncratic staging of the song-and-dance numbers that are the film’s ostensible raison d’être, Bond (who died in 2024) does his part to undermine musical conventions. Drawn from the PSBs’ first two studio albums, Please (1986) and Actually, the songs are often truncated or interrupted, sometimes heard distantly in the background. Pieces of lyrics show up in the dialogue, which also features liberal and somewhat on-the-nose literary quotations: Lewis Carroll to underscore that we are through the looking glass, John Milton to remind us we are in a world after the fall.

Someone is shown reading a book titled The Structure of Time, pointing perhaps to the rampant use of anachronism. Multiple time periods seem to coexist, as indicated most conspicuously by the presence of a World War II fighter pilot who opens fire on the Pet Shop Boys. Tinged with Fellini phantasmagoria and dream symbolism, the movie is also extremely English—and would have been, even at the time, rather dated—in its fondness for broad pantomime. Bond described it as “a saucy seaside postcard come to life and gone mad,” referring to the cheekily caricatured souvenirs once beloved by British holidaymakers. (George Orwell, in a 1941 essay on the smutty postcard’s most celebrated and prolific exponent, the graphic artist Donald McGill, identified their two key qualities: “overpowering vulgarity” and “indefinable familiarity.”) The humor is largely of the dusty music-hall variety, veering from winking sight gags (a gaggle of nuns frolicking on the beach in boots and garters) to zany surrealism (two men with zebra-stripe face paint escorting a zebra along a railway platform). Among the British character actors who play multiple roles is Barbara Windsor, a stalwart of the risqué Carry On movies, called upon at one point to have a heaping English-breakfast platter dumped on her head and, at another, to lip-synch the Dusty Springfield parts on “What Have I Done to Deserve This?

The carnivalesque “It’s a Sin” sequence gives the song’s histrionic Derek Jarman–directed video a run for its money, even interpolating a mock silent movie viewed through a kinetoscope peephole. But it is the elegiac numbers that linger, and that best situate the movie in its moment. Tennant’s opening bicycle ride along a deserted waterfront at dawn is accompanied by the lushly melancholic title song, a collaboration with a pair of film-music legends (cowritten with Ennio Morricone and arranged by Angelo Badalamenti). The catastrophe of the title—the “it” that “couldn’t happen”—is the AIDS epidemic, then already raging, and the narrator is looking back at a more innocent and complacent moment when he and a friend deemed it unthinkable. (AIDS is a specter in some of the Pet Shop Boys’ most vivid and moving songs: see also “Being Boring” and “Dreaming of the Queen.”) The final leg of the journey—by train, then limousine—is soundtracked to the somber, foreboding “King’s Cross,” named for the then-scuzzy London neighborhood surrounding the railway terminus where many arrivals to the city disembark. Tennant has described the song as “a hymn for the rejects of Thatcherism,” and the accompanying imagery is fittingly stygian: a suburban commuter heads to work while engulfed in flames, and what we see of London is a literally burning hellscape. More than once, the title and the ambience of Jarman’s much more scabrous film of the same year comes to mind: The Last of England.

It Couldn’t Happen Here is a product of and a reaction to Margaret Thatcher’s backward-looking Britain, as was so much of the period’s great music and popular culture. But this thoroughly eighties oddity is not without relevance to the present day. As a darkly absurdist send-up of provincial England and its persistent strain of curdled nostalgia, it resonates unmistakably with a post-Brexit present. Bond’s anything-goes approach is also a welcome respite from the default slickness of twenty-first-century promo videos and visual albums. For all its eccentricities, It Couldn’t Happen Here heeds the prime imperative of the movie musical: to invoke one of the Pet Shop Boys’ most famous lines, it knows the importance of never being boring.