"The Breakdown" is often singled out as one of the oddities of West Country Tales, largely on account of its lack of any supernatural content. Written by Josephine Poole and based on a contribution by Janet Holt, it is a brooding little drama about the perils of getting caught in remote places with the wrong sort of company, with a gleefully macabre closing twist that wouldn't have seemed at all out of place in an episode of Tales of The Unexpected. That being said, you're not actually going to mistake it for Tales of The Unexpected, for it does that very West Country Tales thing of having a voice-over narrator do most of the talking, shouldering the burden of dropping all of the cumbersome exposition while the characters make more minor chitchat in the backdrop. It is the voice-over narration that I suspect tends to get stuck in some people's craws about West Country Tales, keeping it from becoming a classic in the league of Tales of The Unexpected. But it's also the use of the voice-over narration in "The Breakdown" that makes it such an unsettling entry to the West Country archive.
I noted in my coverage of "The Beast" that the seeming purpose of the voice-over narration was to impose a degree of distance between the viewer and the action on screen, something that might initially frustrate us but that recreates the experience of hearing a story second-hand and only being able to get so close to the truth (an important part of the series' texture, given that these tales were supposedly based on real-life testimonies). "The Beast" was told in the first-person, from the perspective of a character who was grappling with the inexplicable and whose objectivity as a storyteller we would certainly question were he to share his account with us in the real world, however much we enjoyed hearing it. We don't get quite the same effect with "The Breakdown", where the voice-over takes on a very different form to that of "The Beast". For one, it is supplied by a third-person narrator (Keith Barron), with the story being rather short on internal characters who could have convincingly fulfilled this duty (the eventual outcome would make it extremely difficult for either of the principal players to be relating it first-hand, and while a third character does show up eventually, he's in the dark on a lot of the details). Likewise, no attempt is made to give Barron's narration any kind of context in terms of local lore - he isn't recounting this as something that happened to a friend of a friend, or as a legend attached to a nearby building (one wonders what Holt's own connection was to the story she submitted). He is simply an all-knowing (if not all-sharing) observer who seems eerily fascinated by the pivotal encounter. There are times where he comments on the characters' actions with a cool matter-of-factness, as if they were subjects in a nature documentary, and other times where he comments for them, his words providing a sinister inner monologue that contrasts with the mundaneness of their own muted dialogue. "The Breakdown" is a cautionary tale about the banality of evil, where Barron's narration articulates a taster of the less-than-savoury impulses lurking below a surface of overwhelming quietude. It is a slow-brewing story, with little in the way of overt drama until the very end, but the commentary ensures that we are always aware of that omnipresent menace, the silences and the relative ordinariness of the characters' interactions exuding an incongruity that becomes all the more chilling. Meanwhile, the action is punctuated by a succession of abrupt fade-outs, indicating the slightest passage of time, but also the blank, obscured spaces in which the viewer can never quite be certain what is transpiring.
The episode centres on an anonymous woman (Anita Harris) whose car, a green Ford Escort, comes to a sudden standstill in an isolated part of Devon, about an hour's trek from the village of Ipplepen, where the only other human in sight is Bill Foster (John Abineri), a devoted gardener who's lived a solitary existence ever since his wife Aileen died under circumstances that were deemed suspicious, but ultimately not suspicious enough to have Bill tried for her murder. The lingering uncertainty has rendered Bill a pariah amongst the local community, who nevertheless regard his story with a lurid fascination - Barron notes that if Bill were to open his garden to the public, he would have no shortage of gawkers stopping by, but not for how beautiful his flowerbeds look in the summertime. (Unfortunate characters named Bill seem to be something of a running theme in West Country Tales, for it was also the name of the husband from "The Beast" who ended up bearing the full brunt of the titular creature's fury). None of this means anything to his unexpected visitor, who is simply seeking help with restarting her car and, failing that, access to a telephone, and who is too good an opportunity to pass up for the companionship-starved Bill. He goes to inspect her car and sneakily dishes out further damage so that she'll be forced to stay put. He then invites her into his house while he pretends to call the garage in Ipplepen on her behalf, claiming at first that he cannot get through before deliberately waiting until past the garage's opening hours to try again and leave a message. When she politely requests that he ring her a taxi, he informs her that the only taxi service in the area is run by the garage, and offers to put her up until morning, which she accepts. All the while, Barron's narrator frames Bill's regard for his guest in distinctly predatory terms that are designed to get our alarm bells ringing. We hear a startling metaphor about a spider and a fly, and repeated emphasis on how much this woman's form and aura reminds him of Aileen, not least in her comparably attractive legs.
There's no question that Bill is a creep, but ample ambiguity as to just what level of creep we're dealing with. It could be that he was wrongly judged as a killer by the villagers and that he was in fact the victim of one of life's great tragedies through the loss of Aileen. Forced into solitude and pining for his wife, he's become sad and desperate enough to want to cling onto whatever scrap of warm human company might come his way. Alternatively, he could be sizing up another potential murder victim, the qualities that make her similar to Aileen being the very things that might make her susceptible to his machinations. So many of Bill's behaviours are left open to interpretation - for example, when he first becomes aware of the woman's presence outside of his grounds, his immediate response is to study her through a pair of binoculars, an action that could be seen as voyeuristic but also, the narrator informs us, represents his primary means of maintaining any semblance of connection with other people. Even the act of gardening seems double-edged, with the observation that Bill is locked in a struggle to prevent his grounds "from reverting to the jungle it seems to determined to be". Does it point to an inner struggle, to keep his own feral tendencies in check, or does it evoke those same themes seen in "The Beast", where the wilderness becomes a symbol for the social isolation that threatens to consume those who cannot find their affinity with solitude? The narrator's description of the garden brims with violent imagery that appears, ostensibly, to paint the surrounding nature as a victim of Bill's attacks - a peacock wandering the grounds "screams like a woman", while the gardening tools are "honed to a razor edge" - but more likely reveals the extent to which he remains cornered and forever pushing back against a past that persists in haunting him. The screaming peacock effectively mocks him, and no matter how hard he hacks away at the undesirable shrubbery, it will simply return to its overgrown form.
The woman, for her part, seems all-too willing to accept the hospitality of this man in the middle of nowhere whom she doesn't know, something that might on the surface read as total naivety. She is an outsider of another kind, a tourist roaming the countryside and going wherever the road takes her, with no apparent purpose other than to enjoy herself, a sure-fire indicator of an innocent who doesn't anticipate what a dangerous place the world can be or what she might in fact be getting into. Or is she more canny than she lets on? The narrator articulates her inner thoughts a lot less than those of Bill, but does make it known that she is also a loner, her husband having left her for another woman. It is another titbit of information that seems to set her up as an easy victim, the kind of individual so desperate for company that she's less inclined to reject the advances of a stranger, but it could just as easily suggest that she has an axe to grind of her own. An additional, particularly curious revelation is made during a sequence where she attempts to prepare a sandwich in Bill's kitchen and accidentally cuts her finger, prompting the narrator to divulge that while she's unfazed by the sight of other people's blood, she can't stomach the sight of her own. Foreshadowing for the the further blood-spilling she's sure to endure if she continues to hang around with Bill? Or perhaps it's letting us in on something else entirely?
Indeed, "The Breakdown" amounts to a rather puckish exercise in confounded expectations and deceitful appearances, culminating a grisly visual punchline when the mechanic who runs the garage in Ipplepen (Brian Jennings) receives Bill's message the following morning and goes out to retrieve, repair and finally return the car. Piecing together the evidence that Bill has had a female visitor and being all-too aware of the man's reputation, he sneaks into the house to have a nose around, hoping to gain insight into what goes on behind the local pariah's closed doors. His salacious curiosity is rewarded with the shock of discovering Bill's corpse, brutally skewered, with the woman nowhere in sight. He escapes the scene in the newly-repaired car, and as he does so, we hear a radio broadcast advising that police are looking for a woman last seen at the wheel of a green Ford Escort. The nature of why they are looking for her is never disclosed (might it have anything to do with her husband and his lover?), but the public are cautioned not to approach her because she's dangerous. Poole's script has carefully engendered one set of expectations, only to have thing go in the opposite direction entirely. Bill's grasping desperation, the characteristic that appeared to make him so menacing, was in fact what made him vulnerable. As he conspired to keep the woman stranded at his abode, he was unwittingly laying out his own trap all along, beckoning in and isolating himself with a total stranger who turned out to be a psychopathic killer. Of all the rotten luck.
Still, what complicates our final assessment of "The Breakdown" is that it never definitively answers the question of whether or not Bill was guilty of Aileen's murder. We might assume that because he winds up the victim of this scenario then he was a misjudged innocent all along, but his meeting his match in a more insidious party doesn't automatically preclude the possibility that he might have been a killer himself. Both things could be true, and we leave the story not knowing what to make of Bill - was he a tragic figure or a villain who got outplayed? Ultimately, his backstory proves to be something of an elaborate red herring, Poole being less interested in delving into the psychology of these characters than in setting the audience up to have the rug pulled out from under them. But the shadow of the deceased Aileen nevertheless looms too large over the proceedings for her to be dismissed as a irrelevant misdirection. As noted, "The Breakdown" contains no supernatural elements, other than in a figurative sense - the narrator wonders if the woman, as she enters the garden, will "catch the ghost screams of Aileen losing her balance, and her life, on the garden path?" Aileen later appears as a static photograph, in ghostly black and white, once the woman gains entry to Bill's living room (his oddly upfront description of her as his "dead wife" is another little detail designed to keep us firmly on edge). As night sets in and the fateful seduction gets underway, the narrator assures us that Aileen's image stands forever vigilant. IF Bill was indeed her killer, then a tempting interpretation would be that she and the woman are somehow in cahoots - that the appearance of the mysterious woman represents a homecoming for Aileen, a reckoning carried out on her behalf by a figure who uncannily evokes her memory. That the woman specifically drives a green Ford likewise seems to align her with the unruly garden that Bill is constantly battling and unable to keep in check for long; she becomes an extension of that same wilderness, which for all we know represents the inexorableness of Bill's guilt and which, in spite of his resistance, was always fated to get the best of him. If Bill is in fact innocent, then Aileen's memory becomes a symbol for him at his most vulnerable; his seduction of the woman is framed as an act of allegorical infidelity in which the sacredness of his wife is affronted through his willingness to let the wilderness in, opening himself up to his inevitable misfortune. The woman is a final, deadly manifestation of the outside world that he worked so tirelessly to keep at bay and which had already driven him to the periphery of civilisation. Her cold-blooded murder of Bill becomes a shorthand for the means by which society has callously condemned him.
What, finally, are we to make of the episode's last sequence, in which the mechanic flees the scene of the crime using the same vehicle that had, only the day before, provided mobility for a homicidal fugitive on the run? If the woman no longer has her wheels, it might be more challenging for her to get about, but it might also be more difficult for anyone who has heard the police warning to identify her, if this is the information they have to go on. The implication is that she's made a clean break and disappeared into the West Country, absorbed by the same treacherous wilderness from which she mysteriously materialised, and who knows where she'll end up next and strike again? In the meantime, there is something comically incriminating in having the mechanic drive away in the very car we hear described in the police alert, suggesting a degree of complicity on his part. Although he professes (or rather, the narrator professes on his behalf) not to believe the stories about Bill, it doesn't take him long to start entertaining the possibility that he might have been up to his alleged old tricks with this brand new blood. He goes snooping around in search of the lurid evidence, but gets a rather different shock to the one he had anticipated. He is a representative of the local community, with its gossips and gawkers who distrust Bill but also treat his miserable story as a curiosity to be savoured. More crucially still, his perspective aligns with that of the viewer, in being in the dark about what exactly has gone on the night before but having strong pre-conceived notions as to how the scenario is likely to have played out. We head back into the building expecting a properly nasty conclusion, edging ever closer toward it with the same morbid fascination. Our mutual craving is technically satisfied, but comes with the additionally disturbing reminder that danger could be lurking in just about any guise. And now, like the mechanic, we've no choice but to ride along in that treacherous Ford Escort. The wilderness has gotten the best of us all.
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