Flat Eric is dead. Long live Flat Eric

The brightest marketing star of the year is about to crash and burn. The yellow techno-muppet who was Sta-Prest into service by Levi's will be killed off in his final commercial tonight. But his legend will live on

Imagine the scene. I am spending the month of March in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in a remote valley in the Scottish Borders. Getting away from it all. There's no television, no radio, newspapers or magazines. Everything is tranquillity and brown rice. And then one morning, this rotund Scottish monk called Gendun comes bouncing - and I mean bouncing - up to me in the dining-room, a big silly grin on his face. He's making a noise like a blocked waste-disposal unit and nodding his head like he's just contracted St Vitus's Dance, and when he notices my look of utter perplexity he says: "Have ye' no' heard that record, that Flat Eric? Fantastic!" And he bounces up and down some more, his robes flapping around his ankles. "Duh-duh-duh-duh-du-du-du-du-du-du-duh!"

Imagine the scene. I am spending the month of March in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in a remote valley in the Scottish Borders. Getting away from it all. There's no television, no radio, newspapers or magazines. Everything is tranquillity and brown rice. And then one morning, this rotund Scottish monk called Gendun comes bouncing - and I mean bouncing - up to me in the dining-room, a big silly grin on his face. He's making a noise like a blocked waste-disposal unit and nodding his head like he's just contracted St Vitus's Dance, and when he notices my look of utter perplexity he says: "Have ye' no' heard that record, that Flat Eric? Fantastic!" And he bounces up and down some more, his robes flapping around his ankles. "Duh-duh-duh-duh-du-du-du-du-du-du-duh!"

This is the power of advertising at the end of the century. Gendun - whose duties included enforcing discipline among the novice monks - had spent just one evening in Glasgow visiting relatives, and had come back a Flat Eric fan. He'd seen the TV commercial, heard the record - which had gone straight to number one - and come back proselytising the joys of Flatdom. After two weeks of his humming, I knew the tune myself, even though I'd never heard the disc. I knew what Flat Eric looked like, even though I'd never seen him. I knew he was selling Levi's. And I realised that if he could get a wisecracking, hard-bitten, fortysomething, Motherwell- supporting monk pogo-dancing in front of the rookies, then this puppet really had to be something special.

For those who've spent the last seven months in even more isolated circumstances than a Scottish monastery, Flat Eric is the advertising story of the year. And yet his brief reign as the marketing icon of 1999 is about to come to end, because tonight he will make his last appearance in a Levi's TV commercial. Flat Eric is being killed off by the people who launched his short and meteoric career.

He first appeared, albeit in prototype form, in a music video for a French techno group called Crispy Bacon. At that point, advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty was drawing up a campaign to re-launch Levi's Sta-Prest brand. The company has been in trouble recently, with jeans sales slipping badly - doubtless due to the recent trend for combat pants. Only a week ago, Levi's announced that it will close its factory at Whitburn, West Lothian, making nearly 600 workers redundant. Even by the the end of last year, the company had decided to refocus and concentrate on non- denim products, and asked BBH to come up with an appropriate campaign.

Sta-Prest cotton drill trousers had originally been part of the early Seventies skinhead uniform, along with Ben Sherman shirts and Dr Marten's boots. In order to appeal to the target 16- to 24-year-old age group, BBH's creative team of Phillipa Crane, Kim Papworth and Tony Davidson had decided to make a series of surreal "road movie" commercials featuring a young man and... they weren't quite sure.

Then Crane stumbled across the Crispy Bacon video, and knew that she'd found what she was looking for: a furry yellow puppet whose innocent expression belied a taste for head-banging techno. BBH hired Quentin Dupieux, a 25-year-old French musician and film-maker who had invented the puppet and made the Crispy Bacon video, to direct the Sta-Prest commercials.

Almost overnight, Britain took Flat Eric to its heart. For the hip, it was a surreal delight to watch a TV ad where almost nothing happened. No violence, no special effects, no video-game characters - in short, no hard sell.

Instead, we had a leisurely pace, quaint camera angles, a cheap feel to the film. And we had a somewhat melancholy young man called Angel driving around in an old Chevrolet, with a mad-looking yellow furry thing drinking something called Wizz while tapping his fingers in time with the dance music on the radio, and occasionally lapsing into a bit of aggressive head-nodding. It became clear that the pair were on the run from the police. In a later ad, they were shown defacing their own wanted poster. And in the most recent, they are shown lying on mortuary slabs, apparently the victims of a monster hot-dog which has fallen on their car and crushed them. Only Angel's Sta-Prest have retained their perfect creases, and when the police leave the room, Eric starts dancing. Or rather, twitching on his slab. Is he dead, or is he just waiting to get up and boogie again?

A large part of the first commercial's success was also down to Dupieux's Flat Beat, the heads-down, no-nonsense techno tune that he recorded for the ads, and which would eventually storm the charts across Europe, bringing Levi's the kind of coverage that marketing directors don't even dare to dream about. The Flat Eric phenomenon was dissected in newspapers and magazines. Semioticians talked about the ads' existential themes. And now, almost before we had time to know him, Flat Eric is about to bite the dust. But why?

"It's powerfully affecting," says the cultural analyst Peter York. "We took Flat Eric to our hearts, because we knew that he understood music and a good many other things. And it is the wilder shores of cool to go into the area of death and resurrection, which is not an area that advertising usually touches on."

Derek Robson, who directed the Flat Eric campaign for BBH, says his company wants to go out with Flat Eric still at the top. "We decided to kill him off because there's a new era dawning for Levi's, and he's not in their plans. But he looks certain to live on with the consumer."

Indeed, Levi's official range of Flat Eric merchandise includes T-shirts, bags, hats and the puppet himself. And that's just the legitimate stuff. The pirate goods include keyrings, badges and rings. And, if you can be bothered to cross the Channel, you can splash out on the 7ft Flat Eric puppet that is selling like hot cakes in Belgian and French street markets.

And so, even in death, it seems that Flat Eric will live on. And everyone agrees that his brief career really is the strangest story in advertising history. Certainly his creator, Quentin Dupieux, has further plans for his puppet, although at this point he is reluctant to spell them out. "Flat Eric actually belongs to Quentin, not to Levi's, and he's been very protective of Eric - what he can and cannot be seen doing," says an insider who worked on the project but prefers to remain anonymous. "I think he's got plans for more records, a television series, and perhaps even more advertising."