It’s a quarter of a century since the nation was stopped in its tracks by a dog saying the word ‘bugger’. Image / The Spinoff
It’s a quarter of a century since the nation was stopped in its tracks by a dog saying the word ‘bugger’. Image / The Spinoff
It’s a quarter of a century since the nation was stopped in its tracks by a dog saying the word “bugger”. This is the complete history of Buggermania – the ad, the controversy and the enduring legacy.
When Hercules the dog passed away in 2004, his body lay in state for several days and was visited by over 2000 members of the public. The 6pm news assembled a package of his greatest film and television work, soundtracked by Fields of Gold by Sting. Messages of condolence ran in all the newspapers, remembering his “toothy charm, intelligence and beautiful nature”. The NZ Herald ran a black page with just one word to express their grief – bugger.
Hercules was the mud-splattered star of the 1999 Toyota Hilux “Bugger” ad which, although now a quarter-century old, remains one of the most talked-about popular culture moments in New Zealand history. Not only is it one of the top five most complained-about ads of all time, the Bugger ad launched screeds of unofficial merchandise from tyre covers, to hats, to number plates, and is thought to have single-handedly shifted the wider public attitude towards the expletive and advertising standards.
This is the complete story of how that ad came to be, and the impact that it continues to have on Aotearoa New Zealand, 25 years on.
Far from utes, Swanndris and rolling green pastures, the origins of the Bugger ad can be traced back to the gleaming Saatchi and Saatchi offices in inner city Wellington in the late 1990s. John Plimmer was a writer for the agency at the time, and recalls getting the brief from Toyota, who were a brand new client. They had previously been on the books with rival agency Colenso, responsible for the iconic Crumpy and Scotty Hilux campaigns of the 80s and 90s.
“There was a huge, huge legacy that we were following on from, which was quite daunting,” says Plimmer. “And with it being our first big job for them, there was a lot of pressure not to drop the ball.”
With around a month – “a luxury now” – to work on the brief for the new Toyota Hilux, Plimmer headed out of town to a bach in Ōpito Bay with his frequent collaborators Howard Greive and John Fisher. “We wanted to just get away from the city and get a bit rural with it,” says Plimmer. “And what was really handy was that there was a great big working farm out there owned by a hilarious rural couple called Murray and Sue.”
John Fisher (art director) John Plimmer (writer) Howard Greive (writer).
One of the key selling points of the truck was that it was more powerful than its predecessor, a detail which the team quickly latched on to. “We started to think: what if things start to go wrong because it’s too powerful?” Someone threw out the sight gag of a cow stuck in a trench, another of a dog missing the back of the ute. “And then the word ‘bugger’ popped out,” says Plimmer. They wrote the whole script in around 45 minutes.
“It was one of those serendipitous creative moments that you get occasionally,” he says. “It was honestly a moment of magic.”
‘Can we even do this?’
The writers knew that the ad was funny, but they also knew that they could run into problems with “bugger” being the only word uttered in the ad. A 1999 study by the Broadcasting Standards Authority found that 16 per cent of people surveyed found the use of the word “bugger” to be unacceptable on television and radio. “If the first lines out of an actor are ‘B****r’, ‘C**t’, ‘F**k’, I’d say: ‘No way, cut it out!’” a survey respondent from Napier said at the time.
There was never any alternative word on the table: it was bugger or nothing. “It was just the right word for a small f****p,” laughs Plimmer. “It wasn’t too offensive, but it was still cheeky and irreverent, and everyone used it really. There was also Sir Edmund Hilary knocking the bugger off when he climbed Everest, so we had some backup quotes from history where it had been used colloquially if we needed them.”
Aware of the contentiousness of the word and wondering if they would even be able to say it on television, the script for the ad went in front of TCAB (the Television Commercial Approval Bureau) to “cast an eye” before it even went to Toyota. “They basically told us it will be offensive to some, but they thought we could defend it,” says Plimmer. “There wasn’t a lot of research or data in those days, so a lot of it was truly gut instinct at every level.”
Director Tony Williams (right) on a shoot in the 2000s.
Tony Williams was attached to direct the project, a man who already had his own decorated history in advertising. Not only had he already directed the Great Crunchie Train Robbery ad, but he worked on a Jockey commercial way back in 1961 that was controversial in its own right. Featuring a man walking into a bank and his clothes vanishing, it caused quite the scandal at the time. “That was banned,” chuckles Williams. “You couldn’t show a man in his underpants.”
Williams was invited to meet with Toyota, along with Plimmer, at their head offices in Palmerston North. “We took them through it all and they laughed a lot and were really into it straight away,” says Plimmer. “But their questions were, predictably, can we even do this?” Williams still remembers what he said: “I’m sure there’ll be a few little old ladies who will probably object to the word bugger being used, but I think it’s a very funny ad and I think New Zealand will love it.”
“They looked at me and said ‘okay, we’ll bet on your head’, and approved it.”
‘An enormous range of buggers’
The two most crucial roles in the Bugger ad were always going to be the farmer and the dog. “We wanted a whimsical farmer, not a big butch farmer. Somebody who could really play with all those different connotations of bugger,” says Williams. They put out casting calls in our major centres and watched as dozens upon dozens of New Zealand blokes uttered “bugger” hundreds and hundreds of times.
“We saw 40 people in Wellington, maybe 60 in Auckland, but no-one who was put forward worked,” says Williams. “They could do it, they could play a part and say the word, but it just wasn’t funny. ‘Bugger’ is supposed to make you laugh, but all these guys were using it too strongly as an expletive and it did sound rude, it didn’t have the nuance that we wanted.” With no options left, they threw the casting net across the ditch.
“I’m ashamed to say it, but we got our actor out of Sydney,” says Williams. “John [Kearney] walked in and he just brought this humorous aspect to it. He went through an enormous range of different ‘buggers’ and we just looked at each other and said: ‘he’s the one that can do this’.”
John Kearney delivered an impressive range of buggers. Image / YouTube
Casting the dog was slightly less difficult. Film and television animal trainer Mark Vette had been working extensively in the local industry for years already and had a huntaway/rottweiler rescue named Hercules that was perfect for the role. Beginning his career as Hercules’ pup in Hercules (hence the name), he had also appeared in Xena and was mere months away from a long stint on The Lord of the Rings films.
“He was a super, super smart dog who knew about 145 commands,” says Vette. “He would get me get a beer out of the fridge, he could close the bathroom door if you asked him.” But could Hercules be trained to mouth the word “bugger”? And was Vette bothered by the term? “It didn’t offend me at all – I’ve been using bugger all my life. I spent some time farming as well, so in the farming fraternity especially it’s very much a slang word that’s always been there.”
With just a couple of weeks before the shoot, Vette set about training Hercules for the specific behaviours needed for the ad. The speak command to mouth “bugger” was no problem – “basically a little wee ‘woof’ to blow his lips out” – but the lying in the mud posed a hurdle. “Hercules was okay learning on a flat, dry surface at first but, when we first started doing the training in the mud, you could almost see him thinking ‘bugger’ to himself,” says Vette.
Mark Vette and Hercules. Photo / The Spinoff
While Hercules was having a “bugger” moment of his own in the lead-up to the shoot, so was the director. Williams had been spending some time sailing around New Caledonia before returning to New Zealand to make the ad and had been romancing “a beautiful French lady” on his holiday who had agreed to move down under to be with him. “It looked like a very exciting future for me, so I was full of great expectations,” he says.
The night before the Bugger ad was set to shoot, he was alone in his Auckland hotel room when he got a message that echoed that in his own Dear John ad the decade prior. “She said she changed her mind and wasn’t coming, so I was in a bit of a mess about it and how I was going to cope with this big bloody shoot the next day.” He managed to get last-minute anxiety medication to calm his nerves, but still told everyone on set the next day what had happened.
“They all just looked at me and said ‘oh Tony … bugger’.”
‘No two buggers were alike’
The Bugger ad was shot over three days on a private property in Muriwai, west Auckland. Perhaps it was due to the anxiety medication leaving him “floating” through his fresh heartbreak, but Williams remembers a very fun and relaxed shoot. “There was a lot of laughter all day and it helped me through my own personal bugger crisis, so it was a good thing to be working on.”
In each of the five set-ups in the ad (the fence falling over, the tractor falling over, the airborne tree stump, the stuck cow and the mistimed ute jump), Williams made Kearney deliver the word “bugger” with a range of different emotions. “We would want a light and playful bugger, a forlorn bugger, an ‘oh, bugger me’,” he says. “It’s quite amazing how many ways you can get somebody to say that word.”
One of the challenges was making Hercules jump onto the back of the ute look believable. “When the dog jumps up and the ute takes off. He’s sort of suspended in the air, but then he has to drop,” says Williams, who was “racking his brains” as to how to do it. “We started trying him on an actual rig but it looked a bit false,” says Vette. “So we ended up getting him to jump up onto a box covered with a green screen, and removing it just as he goes to land on it.”
Hercules in the mud on set. Photo / The Spinoff
Hercules landed on a soft mattress, not in the mud, and would later nail his big “bugger” close up in the trenches with a soft bark to be dubbed over. “He really sold the gag,” says Vette. “And then he just had to recreate it thousands of times.” Vette also had the stuck cow sequence and the exploding chook house to deal with, and fondly remembers a day spent head-to-toe in mud. “It was quite the scene,” he says. “I still visit that property sometimes and it brings back all the old memories.”
But beneath the mud, everyone knew there was gold. “We saw a rough cut in-camera on the day,” says Vette. “And everyone just knew: ‘yahoo, this is going to be great’.”
These were the days of celluloid, so Williams recalls a fair few days after the shoot in the edit suite piecing all the buggery together. “It was a bit like putting together a bit of music, deciding precisely which bugger should go with that particular situation,” he says. “Whether it was an explosive bugger, or a sort of a mystical bugger, or a playful bugger, each bugger had a slightly different tone or inflection, and no two buggers were alike.”
When they had finished editing, Williams showed the cut to his colleague Howard Greive, who had brought along his 8-year-old son. “By the end this kid had literally fallen off the chair and was hugging himself and screaming with laughter and then was running around laughing himself sick,” says Williams. “We just looked at each other and I just said ‘I think we’ve got a winner’.”
‘Low intelligence, foul-mouthed humour’
The Bugger ad premiered on a Sunday night in March, 1999. “In those days, it was always a big Sunday night launch for big advertising campaigns,” says Plimmer. The ad had been given an AO rating so could only play after 8.30pm, meaning it likely ran in the middle of a movie. “It’s likely there was a big mix of people around the television screen in one house,” posits Hilary Souter, chief executive of the Advertising Standards Authority. “And some of those people were shocked.”
It didn’t take long for the complaints to start rolling in. “What I objected to was, from memory, that the entire script consisted of the word ‘bugger’,” one complainant wrote. “I object on the grounds that bugger is a swear word and I would no more like to hear sh-t, f-ck or p-ss used in a similar manner. I have an expectation that an advertisement will promote a product and not rely on low intelligence, foul-mouthed humour to convince me to purchase a new car.”
“I strongly object to such advertisements coming across my television set and do not feel I should have to get up and turn off the set during commercial breaks to ensure I am not offended.”
Hilary Souter, chief executive of the ASA. Photo / The Spinoff
Theirs was just one of 120 complaints filed with the ASA, making it one of the most complained-about in New Zealand’s history. “For most people, it’s a pretty funny laconic farming character,” says Souter. “But for others, the only thing that resonated was this repetition of this expletive that was not acceptable language.” The ASA also received a petition with 145 signatures demanding the ad be banned. “Not a common thing for us to receive.”
The outrage around the phrase “bugger” relates to its historic definition relating to sodomy, says Professor Miriam Meyerhoff, a New Zealand-born sociolinguist at Oxford University. The controversy, she says, represented “a clash between people for which the meaning of it is still very linked to its historical derivation, and then people for whom it was semantically bleached, and was just a generic reference to some kind of mood or attitude.”
She adds that moral panics around language often have little to do with the actual language itself. “Nobody in 1999, aside from a few members of the close brethren, would have been unaware of the use of the word bugger to mean ‘damn’,” she says. “What people were really objecting to was this idea that this outside talk has come inside, that the ad crossed an invisible boundary and brought a certain kind of language into the home.”
It is also possible there was an element of classism in the response. “There is this kind of old-fashioned blokeish on-the-farm kind of notion of New Zealand, which feels really alien now,” says Meyerhoff. “But absolutely part of the outrage could very much have been people not wanting to hear ‘working class talk’ in their households.” Later, she put it another way: “I’m sure the people complaining were outraged in Karori, rather than outraged in Foxton Beach.”
Professor Miriam Meyerhoff. Photo / The Spinoff
Saatchi and Saatchi argued to the ASA that “the advertiser is directing its communication to the rural community, where the term employed is one of everyday usage.” It also outlined the colloquial expression of “bugger” in public by the likes of Sir Howard Morrison (“there must be times in everyone’s live when you look back and say ‘bugger, bugger, bugger’” – 1998) and former prime minister Jim Bolger (“Bugger the Pollsters” – 1993).
They also referenced their earlier consumer research, which found that 81 per cent of the people who had seen the commercial liked it, and 82 per cent of the interviewees did not feel the commercial was offensive (no mention of the 1 per cent who didn’t find the commercial offensive, but also didn’t like it.). Taking into consideration the context, the medium and the intended audience, the ASA ruled that the advertisement was unlikely to cause widespread offence.
The ruling made the front page of The Evening Post on March 23, 1999, with the capitalised headline “BUGGER PASSES THE TASTE TEST” (the subheading read: “Plus: Chief Justice is a woman”). “It was unprecedented in terms of media coverage,” says Souter. “What I can say is that our complaints increased 20 per cent overall year on year from 1999 into the 2000s, so it certainly raised people’s awareness of the ASA and the role that we play.”
‘People started to wear hats with ‘Bugger’ on them’
All this public conversation also lodged “bugger” into the local lexicon more firmly than at any other point in history. Released every few years, the BSA’s What Not To Swear reports show “bugger” plummeting down to be one of the least offensive words in 2009 (along with “bloody” and “bollocks”) By 2013, “bugger” is 31st on a list of 31 potentially offensive words. In the latest 2022 study, there’s no mention of “bugger” at all.
A search for the word in news headlines sees it uttered by everyone including politicians, sportspeople, media commentators, academics, and civilians alike. Is there a single other expletive that has undergone such a dramatic evolution in such a short time? Souter pauses for a moment. “Bastard would be interesting.”
The Bugger ad also impacted New Zealand well beyond language standards. “Quite quickly people started to wear hats with ‘bugger’ on them, or have ‘bugger’ around their number plates,” says Williams. “That’s when I realised it was actually becoming truly iconic.” Along with caps, T-shirts and wallets, the most distinct item of the era was the spare tyre covers, found on the back of trucks all over the country, emblazoned with a cartoon splatter and the word “BUGGER”.
An example of classic Bugger merch. Photo / The Spinoff
“We used to say that if we had $1 for every tyre cover sold from the Bugger ad, we’d be quite happy now,” laughs Plimmer. “It was crazy, but it really seemed to get embraced by the whole country.” In 2013, the Bugger Cafe opened on State Highway 25, showcasing a range of bugger-based moments and inviting customers to “laugh a little”. In 2015, New Zealand’s “most sought-after number plate” (BUGGER) sold for just over $34,000 on Trade Me.
The Bugger ad also aired in Australia, but not before a similar internal moral panic about the word. “The Australians were so horrified that they asked us if we could dump the ‘bugger’ entirely and change it to ‘balderdash’,” says Williams. “I just said ‘you’re mad – that’s not going to work’.” It received one formal complaint (not upheld), and Hercules the dog would go on to win Australian Dog of the Year. “Like the pavlova, they stole our dog,” says Vette.
That was far from the only award the Bugger ad stashed away in its proverbial flatbed. It won over 10 awards in Australasia and even made it to the Cannes International Advertising Festival. Was there any cultural confusion? “Not really,” says Plimmer. “It is just good silly sight gags, so anyone can watch it and smile.” The Bugger ad won a Golden Lion award but lost the grand prize to a Guinness ad directed by 2024 Oscar winner Jonathan Glazer.
As for the “Australian” dog of the year, Hercules went on to star in The Lord of The Rings trilogy, The Last Samurai, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more film and television productions including Vette’s own Pound Pups to Dog Stars. “Everyone loved him and he knew it,” laughs Vette. “He wore glasses and hats and would cruise around with that X-factor.” Vette says that without Hercules, he may never have taught subsequent dogs how to drive, or fly.
“He taught me the real extent of a dog’s abilities and that you can go places that I never thought you could go with a dog,” says Vette. “I’ve probably had four or five really special dogs in my life, and he was certainly one, if not the one.” Vette remains touched by the public outpouring of grief following Hercules’ passing in 2004. “The number of people that came through was just extraordinary, it was really quite moving to have a dog that was so loved by so many people.”
Hercules still receives posthumous rollovers from the Bugger ad, and the entirety of it is donated to dog rescue organisations. “He’s still helping dogs to this day,” says Vette.
Life and death, wins and losses, outrage and laughter, all contained within one 45-second ad for a ute. “Buggermania and the bugger ad is such a good reflection of that specific moment in time,” says Souter. “You had a strong brand, an award-winning agency, a medium with a huge reach across New Zealand audiences and they all combined to reflect this true movement in our community standards – all thanks to a farmer, his wife, a dog, and the word bugger.”
“When you think about it like that, it’s pretty extraordinary, really.”
