There was a British playwright who enjoyed a huge vogue, oh, maybe 30 years ago. His name was Harold Pinter. He wrote short, intense plays with simple titles like The Homecoming and The Birthday Party.

The thing about Pinter’s plays that reached out and grabbed you was the characters. They were weird. Unsettling. They were not grotesques, like Frankenstein or Freddy Krueger; on the contrary, they tended to look and feel very human.

But they didn’t behave quite right. They reacted to each other – or failed to react – in ways that did not compute. I vividly remember one man who sat in a chair for many minutes, while the dialogue continued around him, quietly tearing a newspaper into long vertical strips. Why was he doing that? What was going on in his head? What did his behavior mean to the other characters? Nobody seemed to know… including, most of all, the audience.

I have recently begun to wonder whether Harold Pinter, who is still alive and well and living in England, is doing some freelancing. Specifically, did he recently decide to accept a large honorarium for the introduction of a root beer called Barq’s?

In case your remote is welded to TVOntario or pbs, let me recapitulate the Barq’s spots for you.

Everything seems ordinary. The setting is an outdoor snack-bar kind of place, maybe from Coney Island or Stanley Park or the cne. There is no reason to believe that anyone has been murdered there for days. The hero, who runs the snack stand, isn’t good-looking enough to be on Baywatch, but he likely could have made it through the first two casting callbacks.

In Spot One, the hero is looking for an old buddy named Johnny, to obtain his reaction to the proposition that Barq’s has bite. He cannot see Johnny – nor can the camera – but he does see a shapely, snugly dressed woman. In true Pinter fashion, he pays no attention to the woman, nor she to him (or does she?) but instead continues to seek Johnny. Johnny is there somewhere, because we keep hearing him, (or do we?) repeat the mantra-like question, Barq’s has bite?

Eventually, Johnny is found, and we learn why we could not see him. He is vertically impaired, standing in at maybe four feet, eight inches. He sips the product in question, and acknowledges the veracity of the original proposition, i.e., Barq’s has bite. Fade to black.

Eh??!! Say what??!!! Where is the logic? Who is that woman? Why is that guy short? What happened to the casting people who are supposed to make everybody either Revlon beautiful or Calvin Klein weird? For that matter, where’s the pour shot with the bubbles? This commercial is strange, man, very strange.

Spot Two is slightly less strange, but more than makes up for it by being deeply and wonderfully politically incorrect. The hero/proprietor returns, but this time his customer is (a) black, (b) blind, without being either Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder.

There is again verbal jousting about Barq’s and bite. This time, however, the blind man takes a sip, and shouts ‘I can see!’ But just a split-second before the producers can be hauled off to Ottawa and the Tribunal of Slightly Pushy Product Claims, he acknowledges he was kidding, and settles for the admission that Barq’s indeed has bite.

These are mainstream commercials, from the former employers of good ol’ Bill Cosby, the highly conservative Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Company? They can’t be.

Harold Pinter must have mugged the client, snuck in and done ’em.

One of my yardsticks for measuring admiration of advertising is to consider whether I could have created the spot myself. Usually, I wind up thinking, with some immodesty, ‘Yeah, sure, with a good briefing, a good art director, a couple of weeks and a good bottle of bourbon, I coulda done that.’

Well, I couldn’t have done the Barq’s spots. They are just a little too weird, a little too illogical. I could not have shut off my left brain long enough.

And yet they meet – strongly – the two major criteria of good advertising. They imprint themselves on your brain, and they hit you hard with the selling proposition: Barq’s has bite.

I feel about the Barq’s commercials as I do about the plays of Pinter. It’s hard to say that I like them – they’re a long way from warm and fuzzy – but I admire them a lot.

John Burghardt’s checkered resume includes the presidency of a national agency, several films for the Shah’s government in Iran, collaboration with Jim Henson to create the Cookie Monster, and a Cannes Gold Lion. The letterhead of his thriving business now reads ‘strategic planning – creative thinking’. He can be reached by phone at (416) 693-5072, by fax at (416) 693-5100 or by e-mail at burgwarp@aol.com