Something Weird on TV: Beasts Part One – An Animal Tormented

In October and November of 1976, legendary screenwriter Nigel Kneale rolled out a six-episode limited series for British television broadcaster ATV. Ostensibly all based around “bestial” horror, the series nonetheless largely eschewed typical monster movie tropes – partly as a result of rather limiting budgetary restrictions – and instead opted for some more unorthodox approaches to the theme.

In an interview with Andrew Pixley at Time Screen in 1986, Kneale recalled that the idea was to create six dissimilar scripts with a “very simple connecting link, which was that there should be an animal element.” Kneale goes on to say that, “In fact, the aim was to make them as different as possible: one comedy, one horror, one straight drama, one mystery… all sorts.”

Despite its relative brevity, Beasts left a significant impact on the worlds of British TV, folk horror, anthology television, and more. “For something that was only six episodes long,” writer, editor, and genre researcher Johnny Mains writes in the introduction to Andrew Screen’s The Book of Beasts, “Beasts buried itself deeply in the minds of those who watched it.”

That’s certainly true of me, which is why we’re covering the series here, and why what was intended to be a single column about a six-episode show has blown up into two installments and spilled over into the Horror as Folk column that I also write here at Signal Horizon. Longtime readers and listeners to the Horror Pod Class will also know that I have an abiding fondness for the work of Nigel Kneale overall, and Beasts is no exception.

Because of the peculiarities of television in the 1970s, the various episodes of Beasts were not always shown in the same order. For the purposes of this column, I’m looking at them in the order (and using the airdates) specified on Wikipedia, even where this is disputed by the information put forth in Andrew Screen’s book, which is probably the most comprehensive source on the series available.

Beasts kicked off in October of 1976, likely with the episode “During Barty’s Party.” However, in keeping with the aforementioned order on Wikipedia, we’ll be starting with “Special Offer,” about an animalistic poltergeist in a grocery store. The topic of poltergeist activity was not a new one by then – Kneale himself had already explored it in the past, notably in his 1949 short story “Minuke,” which prefigures the 1982 film Poltergeist in interesting ways – nor was the episode’s ultimate explanation for it any more novel.

Comedian Pauline Quirke plays a young shop assistant whose unrequited crush on her abusive manager expresses itself in increasingly violent poltergeist manifestations around the store, which she blames on an animal that no one else sees, quickly nicknamed “Briteway Billy,” after the shop’s mascot.

The idea of telekinesis as an outlet for the repressed sexuality of bullied young women must have been in the public zeitgeist at the time. Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie had come out just two years before, and Brian De Palma’s classic screen adaptation would hit theaters within a month of when “Special Offer” was broadcast.

In the Wikipedia episode order, it is followed by “During Barty’s Party,” which has the surprising distinction of being the only episode in the series to actually feature a living animal as the antagonist. In this case, that takes the form of huge migrations of thousands of rats, though we in the audience never actually see them, only hear them gnawing and scratching. Kneale likened it to “making The Birds with no birds.”

While this was likely a budgetary consideration, it also helps the episode to become one of the most chilling of the bunch. Even Kneale himself called it the “most effective story we did.”

Essentially a two-person siege film, “During Barty’s Party” consists of a couple whose house happens to be in the path of one of those aforementioned rat migrations, which moves in beneath their floorboards. There’s a bit of a “nature run amok” fob toward the rats being “super rats,” more aggressive and resistant to poison. “Now we’re the enemy that doesn’t always win,” the wife of the couple says in one of those lines that could only have been written by Kneale.

Mostly, though, the rats could be anything. The real horror comes from the inescapable sense that something is wrong, which builds into the trapped desperation of the two characters as the rats gradually cut them off, and the significance of seemingly innocuous details are revealed.

In a series filled with unlikely premises, “Buddyboy” boasts perhaps the unlikeliest of them all, as the ghost of a dolphin haunts the decayed site of his former aquarium which is being turned into a porno theater.

As unlikely as “Buddyboy” is, though, even more unlikely is the fact that it is possibly based, however loosely, on a true – or, at least, almost true – story. In The Book of Beasts, Andrew Screen reports the history of “Flipper,” a ghostly dolphin who haunts the Peacock Theatre on Portugal Street and who “manifests as a ‘spectral squeaking, not unlike a crying baby, to be heard desolately wailing by its now abandoned and rusted prison.’”

The ghost of “Flipper” may not be real, but there really were dolphins in the Peacock Theatre. They were kept in a tank under the floor, not unlike the submerged tank in “Buddyboy,” and they performed in a striptease revue put on by “King of Soho” Paul Raymond, where they were trained to, among other things, remove the bikini tops from young performers.

These dolphins weren’t named Flipper, though. They were Pixie and Penny, and neither died in the Peacock Theatre. They lived for several more years after being transferred to the Flamingo Land Zoo in Yorkshire. They were not alone, however. Small “dolphinariums” like the one in “Buddyboy” were common in seaside towns throughout the UK, and there were some in London, as well, including the London Dolphinarium, which closed down in 1973 after the unexplained demise of one of its stars, a cetacean named Sonny Boy, whose death is often conflated with the supposed Peacock Theatre haunting.

These various facts – including Paul Raymond’s association with the kind of sexualized productions that are the stock in trade of “Buddyboy” star Martin Shaw’s character – make it seem pretty inescapable that these unlikely stories influenced the creation of Kneale’s most unusual script.

According to Screen, “Buddyboy” was “one of the least respected episodes of the entire series,” a claim borne out by reviews both contemporary and modern. Writing for Video Watchdog, Kim Newman said that the episode “never quite gels,” which is probably true enough, but there’s certainly a lot going on in “Buddyboy,” not least being what Screen describes as “clear parables between the exploitation of women and the exploitation of captive animals.”

That’s it for tonight, but join us next month as we dive into the remaining three installments of Beasts and talk about folk horror, werewolves, Hammer films, and the episode that had the biggest impact on me and my fiction.