Every few years I try to track something down that I half remember seeing on TV in the 1990s, but I have so far had no luck finding it as I don’t have much to go on. I think it was a UK made for TV production, either an episode of a TV show, or maybe a one off TV movie.
The scene I remember features the lead character in an office with his boss. The tone is generally surreal and dreamlike. The office is white and there is a big window. As part of the scene his boss tells him about the famous Chinese story of Zhuang Zhou’s Butterfly Dream:
"Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know that he was Zhuang Zhou.
Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou."
I can’t remember if this is all in one scene, or maybe two scenes spread across the story. Either at the end of the scene, or towards the end of the story the main character finds a matchbox on his bosses desk with a fluttering sound coming from it. His boss is nowhere to be seen. He picks up the box, listens to it, and then opens it. A butterfly flies out of the box and out the window.
This has been driving me nuts for years. Was it a weird film/TV show? A comedy sketch? An illustrative part of a documentary? An advert?
If anyone has any ideas or pointers, please let me know.
I’m thinking of Spaced, maybe the episode when Simon Pegg’s character takes his comic book manuscript to a publisher. But I haven’t seen it in a while; I don’t know if this happened, or my mind just plugged your description into that scene because it would fit with the tone of the show.
Ha ha, it definitely has a Spaced feel, but I’m a fan of the show and know it pretty much inside out…so it’s not spaced. I think it was a bit earlier in the 90s than Spaced, maybe around 94-96…but I can’t be certain.