West Country Tales '82: The Beast (aka An Affinity With Solitude)

  

One of the more obscure entries into the BBC's folk horror canon is West Country Tales, an anthology series that aired in two separate runs from 1982 to 1983, and never went on to attain the same classic status as the long-running Ghost Story For Christmas, or even the cult curiosity of the largely junked Dead of Night. A home media release has yet to materialise, and it's ever been subject to late night repeats then they've passed me by. My personal introduction to the series was by way of the Cloud Waste and The Calf track "The Beast" (from the 2013 electronic album Rare Sounds Around Britain Vol 3), which sampled extensively from the West Country Tales episode of the same name. It was a track that spooked the bejesus out of me at the time, with the upshot that the episode itself now holds a special place in my heart. The unique hook of West Country Tales was that the spine-chilling dramas in question were all based on actual events that took place in the titular region of the South West of England...allegedly, anyway. The story goes that BBC South West made a local appeal to members of the public to submit their accounts of the strange and macabre things that had happened to them or to people with whom they'd crossed paths, and these were the results. "The Beast", which aired on 1st March 1982, was written by Kevin Crooks, but credits inspiration to a contribution by G.R. Parkhouse. How much of it came from Parkhouse's contribution and how much was altered in the scripting process is anybody's guess.

I do wonder if the lesser popularity of the series has anything to do with its format, in which narrative detail is related predominantly via voice-over monologue while the bulk of the (fairly minimal) character dialogue is regulated to the status of background noise, and which can be an acquired taste. It's a move that seems designed to hold the viewer at a certain distance, ensuring that we are never quite as immersed in the physical action unfolding before us as we are in the narrator's account of it. The idea is the tales are retained foremost within the realm of oral storytelling, the kind of yarn we might be treated to if we were seated beside a particularly garrulous stranger on a pub stool or an extended train ride, with the accompanying visuals representing the blanks that the listener is required to fill in for themselves. Given the series' origins as a collection of purportedly real-life testimonies, it imposes a detachment between voice-over narration and onscreen drama that implicitly invites the viewer to ponder its objectivity. We come away questioning how much of the truth (that is, assuming the account had any basis in truth to begin with) has been obscured in the telling, either through misremembered details or the pursuit of narrative flair, much as we would if a stranger regaled us with a tall story that had evidently been recited to other listeners on countless prior occasions. West Country Tales endeavors to be less an accurate snapshot of the happenings of the West Country than an affectionate tribute to the lore disposed to circulate in far-flung places, as well as to our capacity to suspend disbelief whenever we like where a story is going.

"The Beast" concerns an unnamed narrator (played by David Gilpin in the present and Jamie Barron in flashbacks, but with Jack Watson supplying the all-important voice-over) who journeys back to the Cornish farmhouse where he grew up, in order to confront the demon of his adolescence. He ends up doing so only vicariously, through the more recent experiences of the cousin who has since taken up residence on the farm. The story can be divided into two distinct acts; in the first, which is the shorter of the two, the protagonist recalls how, at age 15, he ventured out into the wilderness with a shotgun he had acquired without his parents' knowledge, intending to practice his hunting skills, only to himself become the target of the unidentified predator that had been stalking him through the undergrowth. In the second act, the adult narrator, still bewildered by the experience, is reunited with his cousin Jenny (Maggie Green), who recounts how her efforts to establish a peaceful pastoral existence with her husband Bill (Steve Tomlin) were slowly but surely transformed into a waking nightmare, with the realisation that they weren't alone in their country abode. 

The narrator has few specifics to offer about the nature of the titular beast, beyond this one chilling observation: "It was no animal...but then, neither was it human." We learn that its presence is indicated by the ghastly breathing noises it makes, reminiscent of gas escaping from a pipe, and that it has a penchant for savaging livestock, but within the monologue its menace stays vague and undefined, with not so much as a hint of the creature's origins or of what it might actually be. The visual accompaniment narrows it down a bit more extensively - the beast (portrayed by Milton Gaylord Reid) is shown only fleetingly, in a series of rapid and generally unfocussed shots, but we do get a single, clear enough glimpse of it staring at us head-on, in which it appears more-or-less human, but with an uncanny gaze and a pronounced overbite. It's also visibly wearing garments, which seems to undermine the possibility of it being a Sasquatch-like creature. If the visuals are to be trusted as an accurate representation of the narrator's testimony, then the most probable explanation would be that the characters are up against a deranged hermit who doesn't much appreciate having to share his range with pesky interlopers. Something that, while terribly sinister, isn't quite as unknowable a threat as the narrative would suggest. There is, however, a greater subtext to be mined from the tendencies of this human-shaped ravager. Importantly, the beast is persistent. It doesn't relinquish its territory, even as the farm changes hands over the decades. The narrator explains how, after the death of his father, the farmhouse was put up for sale and acquired by a man from upcountry who didn't stay there for long, accepting a smaller price than he paid for it and absconding to his sister in Torquay. In a vacuum, the narrator would not regard this outcome as unusual, noting that newcomers used to the hustle and bustle of urban living often struggle to acclimatise themselves to the stillness of the country; as he puts it, "It takes a lifetime to find an affinity with solitude." Jenny and Bill are not explicitly identified as former city dwellers, but they are, in the narrator's view, every bit as out of place as the abode's latest owners, seeing as it is "far too isolated for a young couple." The narrator's assessment that the beast is neither human nor animal would ostensibly mark it out as an unnatural being, but it is perfectly at home in the land that these outsiders find so unfavourable. Its forbidding, aggressively solitary nature suggests that it and the land are really one and the same, that the beast that menaces the characters throughout the narrative is the personification of the brutal remoteness that makes short work of so many escapism-seeking spirits.

 

The subtext to the narrator's story seems straightforward enough. He's an impulsive young man who aspires to attain "the power over life and death" with a discarded shotgun he has surreptitiously repaired (his father has forbidden him from using his own) and a couple of cartridges he obtained by trading a fountain pen at school. As he concedes, his aim is sadly lacking, his failure to take down a gull flying overhead foreshadowing his more critical ineptitude in venturing deeper into the wilderness. But even before then, one of the sequence's most striking images is a wide shot in which the protagonist is seen to wander ever further into a landscape that increasingly dwarfs him, a sure sign that he is out of his depth. As he leaves, his biggest fear is that he might be spotted by one of his parents, making the eventual ambush from the beast feel like the retribution of parental authority as much as that of a vengeful natural world, the gun he incompetently wields representing a violation against his actual mother and Mother Nature alike. In his case, he encounters trouble because he goes looking for it; to remain at the farmhouse, under the guidance of his parents, is to remain in safety. The surrounding landscape conceals a barrage of dangers that are both beyond his comprehension and his ability to master. It is both a matter of man being put in his place by a nature far greater than himself, and an impetuous youngster getting his first real taste of the tribulations of coming of age.

Jenny's story is more of a puzzle. It is also framed as a matter of youthful naivety losing out to the innate hostility of the world, with the narrator's explicit mention of the couple's callowness as the factor that makes them most vulnerable, and is built primarily around the tension between their expectations of idyllic rural living versus the grimmer reality. They try their hand at raising chickens, to achieve Bill's vision of a "proper farmhouse" breakfast of fresh eggs every morning, something that ends in disaster when Jenny returns home one day to find that a predator has paid a sneaky visit to the coop. Even before this unfortunate occurrence, Jenny is ill at ease with the artefacts of the violence that once characterised everyday life upon the farm, harbouring a special wariness of the piggery that was built 200 years ago, complete with a stone gully for draining the blood of the animals as they were slaughtered. It seems significant that the build-up to the second confrontation with the beast consists of the kinds of mishaps and challenges you might expect to face on the most unexceptional of farms, as opposed to anything too unambiguously strange - unidentified noises in the darkness (any noise can sound unnerving if you don't know where it's coming from), unexplained cracks in the window panes (birds sometimes fly into them), the cat showing up with the tips of its ears chewed off (which, as Bill points out, could have been caused by a run-in with a feral cat), the massacre at the chicken coop (possibly the work of a fox, although the delivery man who first stumbles across the aftermath has his doubts). The strongest evidence that anything uncanny is afoot come via the terrifying scratch marks that Jenny finds upon the outhouse door and the enlarged footprint located in the soil. Bill, who is undeterred in pursuing his rose-tinted dreams of pastoral living, farmhouse breakfast and all, always insists on the rational explanation, but for Jenny they add up to a bigger picture of the land and its inhospitable character, with its capacity to punish as much as provide.

As their perspective of the situation diverges, an emotional gulf develops between the couple (deftly conveyed in a shot that shows them seated at a considerable distance from one another at their dinner table), with Bill's dismissiveness of Jenny's concerns amounting to an insensitivity to her increasing discomfort with their remote existence. To that end, there are definite shades of the "During Barty's Party" episode of Nigel Kneale's 1977 horror anthology series Beasts, in which a country-dwelling couple are menaced by an unseen swarm of  intelligent rats that signify the gnawing prospect of social oblivion (it is the failure of titular radio DJ Barty, the narrative's spokesperson for the outside world, to commit protagonist Angie's name to memory that ultimately dooms her and her husband). This beast too seems to represent the onset of an all-consuming solitude, its attack on the chicken coop being less an assault on Bill's culinary cravings than a brutal silencing of the "familiar clucking" from which Jenny derives some reassurance of companionship and connection. And yet, Jenny's longing for "something tangible to happen" that will bring herself and Bill back together seems to inadvertently align her intentions with that of the beast. The narrative climaxes with Jenny hearing more strange noises in the dead of night and urging Bill to go outside and investigate. He traces the source of the disturbance to the much-dreaded piggery, where he is promptly mauled by the lurking beast. The irony should not escape us that Jenny has sent Bill to his metaphorical slaughter. We are assured that Bill survived the encounter, and that his physical injuries were minor compared to the psychological damage he sustained, although neither the voice-over or the visuals care to elaborate further, with Bill being ominously absent from the framing narrative in the present.

We might notice that the rules of the beast's modus operandi appear to have shifted in between the acts. In the narrator's boyhood account, he encounters the beast precisely because he roams away from the farmhouse, with the insinuation that he would have been safe had he stayed within the bounds set by his parents. Notably, his parents do not seem to have had any trouble with the beast during their tenure at the farmhouse - the narrator's story went disbelieved, and it was only following the death of his father in 1963 that the farm fell into a state of instability. Now most of his family has passed on, with the narrator making it clear that Jenny is his only living relative. Their shared vulnerability in being the last of their family's lineage makes it tempting to read the beast as a metaphor for the prospect of having to navigate a world after our parents' departure. A world in which there is no warm and protective (however strict) abode to return to, and we're left with only our self-sufficiency to lean upon, which even in maturity may not be as up to snuff as we would like to think. The adult Jenny and Bill are certainly no better equipped to deal with the advances of the beast than the teenaged narrator. The house itself, once a symbol of parental control, has ceased to be a place of safety, with the creature having taken to patrolling its vicinity, lingering directly outside the kitchen window, scratching on the doors and infiltrating the chicken coop. An alternative perspective is that Jenny and Bill have violated the retribution to the beast because they too violated the laws of the land, in their case by hosting a lively house warming party shortly after moving in, of the kind that the narrator suspects the house had ever seen before. Such jubilant gregariousness is not the norm within these parts. Perhaps it is simply the realisation that the house was never a place of safety, and that its residents were always as vulnerable within its walls as they were in the wide open, the land on which it sits being the same inhospitable terrain as the nebulous wilderness that surrounds - followed by the realisation that a key part of that menace still lingers on within ourselves.

The most striking shot in Jenny's flashback occurs in the aftermath of the aforementioned party, when Jenny has her first brush with the beast, having heard its unpleasant breathing sounds outside her kitchen window, and also her first inkling of her imperilled connection with Bill, whom she suspects of playing a trick on her. While we glimpse parts of this sequence from the kitchen's warmly-lit interior, it is shown predominantly from the beast's perspective, with voyeuristic views of the occupants from the outside, the glazing bar obscuring them in a manner that feels evocative of exhibits in a zoo. The implication is that Jenny is not so much safe on the inside as she is captive, a beast resigned to a state of perpetual entrapment (this notion of the farmhouse as a place of confinement lends a bitter irony to Bill's longing for free range eggs). Jenny's experiences bring her no closer to that coveted affinity with solitude - to the contrary, in the present day framing device, she seeks out the company of tourists in a crowded tea room - but her unwitting complicity with the beast, in directing Bill into its clutches, is suggestive of a kind of subconscious affinity with her prowling nemesis, of some common instinct that drives the two. The attack becomes an outlet for her own repressed resentment toward both her oblivious husband and her entrapment. The beast looks so eerily human, we suppose, because it encompasses the part of ourselves that originated in the same wilderness that has come to signify the dark unknown; it is the dark and all-too-knowable side of humanity that we were never quite able to leave behind as we made the shift to civilisation. Even as Jenny struggles to reconcile herself with the more bestial side of human nature (hence her hatred of the piggery), she yearns for the freedom the beast possesses, the ability to be a part of the land and not stifled by it.

"The Beast" does not build to a conventional twist in the style of "The Breakdown", a fellow West Country Tales intsllament that adheres more closely to the Tales of The Unexpected mould, complete with a gruesomely macabre punchline. The closest thing it has to offer is the curious lack of a third act - following the catharsis of the climactic confrontation, we might expect some form of concluding revelation to follow in the present, with the narrator and Jenny discovering something more definitive about their mutual tormentor, eg: a possible scrap of local lore shedding light on the creature's nature or its origins. Instead, the epilogue shows only glimpses of the abandoned farmhouse, now a total no-go area, and apparently still on the market despite its price being slashed even more times than poor Bill. The lack of human presence in the closing images confirms that it has been reclaimed by the uncanny stillness that characterises the adjacent space; meanwhile, the beast has slipped back into the obscurity from which it came, the narrator seemingly having accepted their encounters as one of those baffling facts of life that will forever evade closure or comprehension. The wisdom he is instead inclined to draw from Jenny's confidence is that places come with their own hidden baggage, the likes of which a house surveyor cannot possibly prepare us for, and that by settling down in a new abode, we sign ourselves up to be part of its ongoing and perhaps not always agreeable narrative. The final, winking gag on which the story ends derives from the fiendish anonymity it bestows on the pivotal farmhouse, making it representative of the prospective country getaways that litter the entire region: "If you're looking for a place in the West Country, remember this one." The message is clear - if it's peace and escapism we're seeking, maybe we'd be better off taking our chances in the Midlands.

 

 

 

Bitsa: What On Earth Was Going On At The Last Stop Cafe?

I'm not exaggerating when I say that the most baffling quarter-hour of television I ever watched in my life was an episode of a children's art show that aired on CBBC in the mid-1990s. If that was also your era, then I'll wager that tucked away near the back of your brain are at least a few memories of Bitsa. The program started life in 1991 and enjoyed a healthy run into 1996, yet it never attained the cult status of its CITV counterpart Art Attack - presenters Caitlin Easterby and Simon Pascoe were both on fabulous form throughout, but there was ultimately no challenging the legendary Neil Buchanan as the champion of after-school creativity. Nonetheless, I reckon Bitsa would have a much more prominent following if people were to look back and appreciate how balls to the walls weird the thing was.

The premise of Bitsa was that Caitlin and Simon would demonstrate various methods for flexing your creative muscles, guiding you the processes of making exciting knick-knacks out of sticky tape and Mr Kipling boxes. Assisting them in in their endeavours was a robotic being named Hands (a puppet operated by series co-creator Paul Goddard) who did not talk and communicated solely by humming. Episodes were made to a certain formula, where Caitlin, Simon and Hands would each get their turn in showing you how to make something, the children from a selected school would show off an art project they'd been working on, and we'd get the really manic part where Caitlin and Simon were challenged with making something within a time limit and with specified materials - although not all necessarily in that order, however. The connective tissue between each of these segments is where the series permitted itself to get truly weird, a quality that only became more pronounced the deeper it got into its lifespan. Whereas earlier installments had tended to have Caitlin and Simon assembling their creations from the confines of their studio, there was presumably enough of a budget boost in the show's later years for more filming on location. The vibe of the series felt more expansive, and with it the framing narratives seemed to get more ambitious, following an almost dream-like flow of developments - that is, if dreams were intermittently put on hold to allow room for crafting tutorials. I've likened it to Art Attack, but truthfully it was more like an arthouse version of Blue Peter.

The episode of Bitsa that stood out to me as being particularly incomprehensible aired in 1995 under the title of "Last Stop Cafe". It involved Caitlin and Simon being on location in London and having bizarre encounters (though never with one another) in various dining venues. I have distinct memories of watching it and immediately regretting that I hadn't taped it because I wanted so desperately to go back to the beginning and see there was any lick of sense to be squeezed from the entire demented affair. I settled for the next best option I had available at the time, which was to describe the events of the episode from memory to my eternally patient mum in the hopes that she would be able to explain it to me, as I so often did whenever something I'd seen on television (or advertising billboards) had left me totally disconcerted. But just you try describing the events of any Bitsa episode, not least this one, in an even vaguely coherent fashion. What chance did my mother have? My confusion was there for the long haul, with the image of Caitlin sitting in her squalid little cafe, surrounded by mannequins and indifferent waitresses, vexed by the time and by Simon's failure to show, being all set to nibble away at my brain for the ensuing three decades. Caitlin was permanently stuck in that moment, and so was I. It was only in 2025 that I found any prospect of release, with the discovery that "Last Stop Cafe" was finally up on YouTube. On getting reacquainted with it, I was surprised at just how much of the episode had stuck with me over the years. The only part that I had more or less completely forgotten was the entire sequence with Simon at the train station, but the rest of it still felt so fresh and vivid in my mind, as if I'd viewed it only a few weeks ago. Clearly it was something that the younger me had made a real effort to hang onto, in the hopes that my persistence would eventually pay off, and I would suddenly be in on the elusive joke. The punchline to that joke was always self-evident: "Three minutes to four...Simon should be here soon". It was the set-up that I couldn't make head nor tail of. The question is, am I any better equipped to do so 30+ years on, or is this rabbit hole darker and more interminable than the younger me had ever imagined?

"Last Stop Cafe" opens with Caitlin at the titular establishment, a run-down, bohemian-looking coffee bar that seems unlikely to pass its next hygiene inspection. The time is three minutes to four, and she's expecting Simon to meet up with her very soon. We find that Simon is enjoying coffee and a late lunch from quite another source, a food truck run by Hands, before becoming aware of the time and making a mad dash across London in an effort to keep the scheduled appointment with Caitlin. It initially appears as though Simon is having a much better time of it than Caitlin, who's stuck with the Last Stop's signature beverage of stale coffee (a distinctly unappetising-looking black sludge), while Simon gets an ordinary-looking espresso. I'm not so sure that the rest of the menu Hands is flogging compares so favourably to that of the Last Stop - the waitress's practice of serving spaghetti with her bare hands (and into a kidney dish at that) is wont to raise some objections, but at least it looks like actual edible spaghetti, as opposed to the pasta Hands offers Simon, which looks more like a plate of wires. More troubling still than the dubious food items on offer is the temporal mismatch between Caitlin and Simon's respective worlds. Simon takes his cues from Big Ben, which gives the time as quarter to four, and this does not align with the clock in the Last Stop Cafe, where it seems to be perpetually three minutes to four. The contrast established in these parallel narratives is one of frenzy versus inertia. Simon will spend the episode rushing from venue to venue while Caitlin never leaves the Last Stop (until the very end), and only moves from her seat to participate in the challenge segment. Caitlin looks to have settled in a place where time has ground to a complete halt, while Simon is constantly on the move.

My first question, on revisiting "Last Stop Cafe", had to do with whether time in the titular venue had literally stopped, or just the clock adorning its decrepit walls? After all, it seems perfectly in keeping with the broader theming of the cafe for it to put up a clock to give the appearance of broken time, with the joke being that Caitlin never quite cottons on. But then the very name, "Last Stop", feels particularly ominous in that regard. It could mean the last as in "last resort", meaning that it's right at the bottom of establishments you would consider trying. Alternatively, it may indicate the end of progression and that we have nowhere else to go from here. The distortion of time within is further hinted at via a sneaky visual gag that I certainly hope was not unintentional. Positioned on the saucer that holds Caitlin's cup of gloopy coffee is what looks to be an out of shape biscuit. The way that biscuit hangs over the side of the saucer puts me in mind of the melting clocks from Salvador Dali's 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory, commonly interpreted as signifying the nebulous nature of time within human perception.

It wouldn't be any more inexplicable than what unfolds at the end of the episode, when Simon, realising that he will not keep his appointment with Caitlin, attempts to buy additional time by scaling Big Ben (or rather a mat mocked up to look like the face of the clock) and turning back the hands. In doing so, he appears to do damage to the space time continuum, for rather than simply going back in time the entire scenario resets, with the participants rearranged. Simon is now seated in the Last Stop Cafe, being served stale coffee and observing, from the clock on the wall reading three minutes to four, that Caitlin should be here soon. Caitlin, meanwhile, has been transplanted to Simon's starting point, standing at Hands' food truck and receiving a plate of wire-spaghetti - which, unlike Simon, she is discerning enough to reject. The process seems set to repeat itself with the roles reversed (a la the Twilight Zone episode "Shadow Play"), but for the fact that Caitlin still seems to be caught up on some kind of time loop at the other end, with the moment of her pushing the plate back Hands' way repeating over and over.

All of this puzzled me immensely as a child, but I suspect that "Last Stop Cafe" wouldn't have stayed with me and haunted me to the extent that it did if not for the one additional serving of discombobulation that comes in the form of our post-credits stinger. Once the names have all rolled we get a brief moment with Caitlin, who is back in the Last Stop, watching the clock and anticipating Simon's impending arrival as if the final role reversal never occurred and she never strayed from her temporal prison. That bite-sized epilogue threw pretty much everything I thought I'd fathomed about the episode (which was already on shaky enough ground) into total disarray. What are we to make of it? Should we assume that Caitlin eventually made it to the point when she was able to restart the process, as Simon did before her, causing the scenario to reset and their roles to reverse yet again? Have we gone backwards in time, to before Simon's resetting of the narrative? Or is this just a humorous bit of repetition for repetition's sake, the preceding ubiquitousness of the statement ("Three minutes to four...Simon should be here soon") having transformed it into a running gag in its own right? Nowadays I feel most inclined toward option 3, but it's still an unsettling way to close out the episode, by giving the final word to Caitlin's inertia and that state of limbo in which it's always three minutes to four and an appearance from Simon is imminent but never arrives. In 1995 it was the teasing punchline to a joke largely lost on me. On a subconscious level, I think it something in Caitlin's bemused delivery that I responded to - she never explicitly grasps her inability to progress beyond 15:57, and that she's been making the same observation about Simon ad infinitum, but at the same time she seems far from immune to the absurdity of her situation. Her tone, when referencing Simon's supposed coming, is one of wavering certainty, as if she recognises that something has gone awry but can't quite put her finger on what. Her quiet befuddlement at the end of the episode so perfectly articulated by own confusion on having sat through it. Much like her, I'd spent the last 15 minutes waiting for clarity to rear its head and it had never quite materialised. As it turns out, clarity would not be forthcoming for quite some time. After more than 30 years, I'm still not sure that I quite have a hold on it. But at least I was able to take another crack at revelling in the Last Stop Cafe and its grimy mysteries. The place is so beguiling that it's as if I never left it at all. 

Actually, a more morbid interpretation did cross my mind upon revisiting the experience, having noted that Simon falls from Big Ben while attempting to turn back its hands. Is it possible that he's dead, and that the Last Stop Cafe is really some bizarre metaphor for mortality? It all goes back to what I said about the name of the cafe being particularly ominous. It is specifically the last stop, cobbled together around a theme of inertia, decay and expiration. Time never moves, the coffee is stagnant, the television screen shows a static image, a proportion of the occupants are motionless mannequins, and in one sequence we assume the perspective of a fly buzzing around the tables. Arguably undermining this interpretation is that Simon is not reunited with Caitlin on the other side. Rather, she's been restored to the land of the living, perhaps signifying the renewal of the cycle of life and death (with the former being as futile as ever). Crucially, Simon and Caitlin are always where the other party isn't. Their scheduled meet-up never occurs; even during the challenge portion of the episode, where each creates a makeshift telephone using the materials available, they are unable to make the all-important connection, as if blocked by the automatic incompatibility between their respective realms (that, and their phones are made out of cheese graters and cardboard). And yet they might not be as far removed as the aggressive contrast of frenetic motion and uncanny stillness would imply - there are a number of echoes in their parallel predicaments, which seem equally evocative of the fundamental tensions between existence and oblivion. Both protagonists find themselves up against the tyranny of a clock; Caitlin is held captive by a stopped clock that keeps her in a stationary moment, while Simon has Big Ben looming over him all throughout his journey, an omnipresent reminder that his time is in short supply. Each is in search of some deeper meaning or understanding that is expected to be revealed through the anticipated union with the other. Caitlin, who has already reached the end of the line, has taken the more passive position, hoping (much like Vladimir and Estragon awaiting Godot) that everything will finally come into perspective when Simon waltzes through that cafe door. Simon, meanwhile, is in pursuit of a purpose that perpetually eludes him. He cannot keep his appointment with Caitlin, in part because the world he has to navigate is too overwhelming, but also because he lacks the discipline to prevent himself from being sidetracked along the way. "I've got to meet Caitlin", he tells himself, shortly before wandering into a burger bar for a bite to eat. He's well aware that the clock is ticking, but convinces himself that he can put things off for a little longer. Sure, who can't relate to that?

Fundamentally, Bitsa is a show about artistic endeavour, and amidst the existential insanity we get demonstrations on how to craft smashing items out of household refuse. Caitlin shows you how to make a fashion wheel that switches the clothing on pictures of mannequins as it rotates. Simon makes a snapping monster out of the discarded straws and sweet boxes he gathers at the station. Hands blesses a two dimensional figure with three dimensional arms that are given motion when a cord is pulled. There's the aforementioned challenge segment, where Simon and Caitlin each create phones in an unsuccessful effort to get through to one another. The most curious demonstration comes with no explanatory narration, and is the contribution from our featured school (identified in the credits as Grange Primary School, London). It is the creation of the titular cafe - in a temporal trick reminiscent of Pulp Fiction, we go backwards in time to the point where pupils from Grange Primary were tasked with assembling those mannequins, arranging bottles and misshapen baguettes in offbeat displays and affixing tiger patterning to the side of the counter, before seguing back into the centrepiece moment, with Caitlin present and pondering aloud about Simon's whereabouts. I suppose this is the episode's great paradox - the Last Stop Cafe might signify stagnation, but it is itself a work of beautifully vibrant expression. The dubiousness of the menu aside, it doesn't seem like a deadening place to hang; the eccentricity of the establishment is simply too charming. 

What's also striking is the omnipresence of uncanny mannequins throughout the episode, with them popping up not just in the cafe itself, but at various stages of Simon's journey. In one skit he finds himself hampered by a queue of undressed mannequins (and clearly nobody saw anything overly risqué in having so many naked mannequin bossoms paraded around in a children's timeslot). Another mannequin is seated at the counter of the burger bar, prompting Simon to make the inevitable "don't be a dummy" joke, followed by a pun about the (then relatively novel) frustrations that come with using mobile phones, which he figures the static mannequin must love. As part of the backdrop in the Last Stop Cafe they feed into the overall aura immobility, but as far as Simon's interactions go it seems more pertinent to regard them as playful shorthands for consumerism and an eroded individuality, in an environment that's faster-paced but ultimately no less stifling than the one Caitlin is mired in. We might detect a similar critique of non-stop consumerism in the wastefulness of the commuters, who litter the station grounds with copious amounts of rubbish that Simon is wittily able to use as an outlet for his own creativity. Ultimately, my takeaway from the Last Stop Cafe is that artistic expression is the greatest power we have in a society structured to to leave us bombarded and overwhelmed. As is wonderfully befitting a series like Bitsa. All of those sessions in fashioning funky curios from materials otherwise destined for the tip weren't mere distractions designed to fill up a bit of empty time outside of school hours. They were lessons in preventing detritus, both literal and figurative, from getting on top of us by turning it into the tools of our own artistry. The clock is ticking, and precisely why we should allow those idle hands of ours a little mischief.

The Man Who Blew Away (One Foot In The Grave)

 Content warning: Suicide

The Christmas of 1994 was a Christmas quite unlike any other, all on account of what was happening at Victor Meldrew's house that year. 

One Foot In The Grave was then riding high among the cream of the contemporary Britcom crop. The previous year's special, "One Foot In The Algarve", had been a major ratings success, and you can bet that the BBC were eager to maintain that momentum with another festive special in 1994. Series creator and writer David Renwick didn't have time to devise a stand-alone special from scratch, but suggested that one of the scripts he'd been working on for the upcoming Series 5 could potentially be expanded to 40 minutes. The episode in question was "The Man Who Blew Away". Legions of Meldrew devotees tuned in to BBC One at 21:00 on 25th December, eager for another extended round of wacky hilarity with the irascible sixtysomething, and by 21:40 were sitting there in stunned silence, struggling to wrap their heads around what they had seen and keep a day's worth of Yuletide dining down. The episode garnered immediate notoriety, guaranteed to come up in conversations to the tune of "Can you believe THAT went out on Christmas Day?" for years to come.

If you are unfamiliar with this episode, then I fear that the content warning at the top of this page might have given the game away. The plot involves Victor and Margaret accommodating a house guest with suicidal tendencies, and having to talk him out of his latest attempt, which involves him climbing around naked upon their roof. Then in the epilogue they receive news that he made a subsequent attempt soon after leaving their company and on this occasion he succeeded. The episode promptly ends. Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!

In fairness, One Foot In The Grave had dabbled in some gloomy subjects in previous Christmas specials. "Who's Listening?" from 1990 contained a subplot dealing with the Yuletide struggles of a bereaved young family (albeit one that ended happily, by way of a deus ex machina). Pippa's pregnancy arc in "The Man in The Long Black Coat" from 1991 ended on a note of immense pathos, with her being injured in a bus crash and suffering a miscarriage. The thing is, neither of those specials had aired on Christmas Day itself. There was traditionally a safe enough buffer between the peak of the festive celebrations and Renwick's morbid indulgences. Even the ambitious, feature-length (and relatively breezy) "Algarve" had to make do with a Boxing Day slot. "The Man Who Blew Away" was the first One Foot In The Grave special to have the honor of going out on 25th December, and it yielded what has to be one of the show's most unapologetically downbeat endings ever (bested only by the final episode, "Things Aren't Simple Any More", which at least had mercy enough to sign off to the triumphant sounds of The Travelling Wilburys). It all makes a little more sense when you consider that it wasn't originally written to be a Christmas installment, but at the same time, there was something incredibly on brand about the series using that prime Yuletide slot to leave the nation not merely depressed, but seriously perturbed into the bargain. The ending to "The Man Who Blew Away" isn't only tragic, it's also deeply unsettling. A large part of that has to do with the song that accompanies the closing credits, "The Laughing Policeman" by Charles Penrose, a classic music hall song from 1922 (itself an adaptation of "The Laughing Song", recorded by African American singer George W. Johnson in 1890). The song had shown up at an earlier junction in the story, where it was nothing more than an insomnia-inflicting irritation to Victor and Margaret, but it acquires much darker overtones when it's repeated in the outro. Renwick remarks on the DVD commentary that he's always thought there to be something terribly "macabre" about the song - not because of the hysterical, borderline-crazed laughter that makes up the chorus, but because of the clicking noises going on in the background, which he reckons are evocative of something you'd find in the horror comedy series The League of Gentlemen. 

The irony is that I vividly remember watching the episode's festive premiere as a child and not finding the experience anywhere near as dark or disturbing as I should have done, on account of "The Laughing Policeman". I should explain that my school's Christmas show for that year had been themed around music hall, and "The Laughing Policeman" was one of the songs we'd performed. A really fun song to perform it was too. So when it cropped up in this episode, I was positively buzzing. It was something that I knew, and the excitement of that performance was still very fresh on my mind, so naturally I gravitated straight to it. When we heard the news at the end that Victor and Margaret's friend had died, I did think it was a weirdly sad way to cap off the episode. But then "The Laughing Policeman" started up again in the credits and it cheered me right up. It was only when I revisited the episode in the early 00s that it hit me what the real intention had been. You weren't supposed to laugh at the Laughing Policeman. The Laughing Policeman laughs at you. "The Man Who Blew Away" feels, more savagely than any other edition of One Foot In The Grave, like a story where the last laugh is squarely on the viewer. Which makes it all the more ballsy that it went out on Christmas Day. 

The circumstances of the episode's airing is a detail that will forever colour it, giving it a greater infamy than it would have acquired had it aired according to Renwick's original plans. But looking at "The Man Who Blew Away" thirty-one years after the fact, it holds up as more than just a twisted joke that rattled some 15 million people on the Christmas of 1994. The thing that always made it worthy of that coveted Xmas slot is that it stands out as one of the very strongest installments of One Foot In The Grave. A lot of that is down to the doomed character, Mr Foskett, and how wonderfully portrayed he is by Brian Murphy. He is one of the most hauntingly complicated figures ever to grace the series, at once ridiculous and tragic. Creating a character who is both soul-crushingly tedious and uproariously hilarious can be a challenge enough in itself, but Murphy pulls it off effortlessly, all while imbuing Foskett with a multi-layered pathos that has us running the whole gamut of emotions. On the one hand, we empathise fully with the Meldrews in finding the man unbearable and in wanting to give him as wide a berth as possible. On the surface his behaviour is beyond infuriating. He shows up on their doorstep and expects to be immediately accommodated, then talks at mind-numbing length about every nondescript detail in his own life, never letting anybody else get a word in edgeways. At the same time, we become increasingly aware that Foskett's rabid neediness stems from forlorn desperation; that this is a deeply damaged man teetering on the edge, and his various imposing tendencies amount to cries for help that the Meldrews are ill-equipped to provide. We become uneasy about where this story might be headed, and rightly so. We're still able to get in plenty of laughs at Foskett's expense, but this is all turned back on us in the final scene, when we are implicated, along with the Meldrews, as part of the wider unsympathetic milieu that consigned this poor fellow to oblivion. 

Mr Foskett is the narrative centrepiece of "The Man Who Blew Away", but the funny thing is that he doesn't appear until 22 minutes in. That's over midway through the episode. What's more, his arrival comes completely out of the blue, making it every bit as jarring for the viewer as for the Meldrews. There hadn't been so much as a throwaway mention of the character in any of the preceding scenes, so when Victor receives a telephone call and hears Foskett on the other end, we have no context for who he even is, other than that the mere sound of his voice is enough to make Victor jolt upwards in terror. His being there represents an intrusion from a terrible chapter in the Meldrews' past they had considered long buried; it's revealed to be such an absurdly minor chapter at that, but one that's left deep psychological scars on them both. Foskett was a fellow guest at a boarding house the Meldrews had stayed at during a trip to Weston-super-Mare seventeen years ago, and the bulk of their interactions came from him having to walk through their bedroom every night to access the bathroom. Obviously he talked their ears off then, and demanded their contact details so that they could keep in touch when their holidays were over. The Meldrews gave him a false address and hoped that would be the end of it. Foskett has tracked them down anyway. He might not manage this until the latter end of the story, but what's clever about that first half is that you can look back and identity how it's been building toward his appearance through its artful use of foreshadowing. The opening sequence has Margaret returning home to find that Victor has neglected to bring in the washing, and their clothes have blown all over the snow-covered garden. Among them are a pair of socks frozen into the shape of a boomerang. "I'd throw these socks away," Margaret grumbles, "Except they'd probably keep coming back."

On the commentary, Renwick states that one of the modifications made to his original script was the inclusion of snow in the outdoor scenes, to give the impression of a festive setting. Even so, "The Man Who Blew Away" does not actually appear to take place at Christmastime (which was not at all unfitting, since "Who's Listening?" was the only OFITG Christmas special that did - the specials were more an opportunity to tell stories on a grander scale than your regular episode). The only direct artifacts of the festive season are the box of Christmas crackers and reels of wrapping paper that feature in an early sequence, recent purchases from the Happy Shopper (a defunct convenience store brand that has since been supplanted by Premier), suggesting that the events of the special fall somewhere close to Christmas, although there is ambiguity regarding the precise proximity. Does it take place in the early winter, before the decorations have gone up, or in the aftermath, with Margaret having purchased marked-down crackers and paper in the January sales, so as to have cheap supplies ready for the following Christmas? I lean toward the latter, largely on account of the box of Milk Tray chocolates Victor is seen working through at the start (and in such a classy fashion, by skewering them with cocktail stick and dunking them in his tea), as it seems like the kind of seasonal gift that you might still have left over in the early days of January. Such details feel like arbitrary concessions thrown in to make an otherwise disconnected story a little more superficially Christmassy, although a great gag is mined from the presence of the crackers, when Victor opens one to find that someone has slipped an insulting joke inside - "What's the difference between Victor Meldrew and a chef who keeps dropping his pancakes? Answer: They're both useless tossers!" (Adding insult to injury is that the pranksters have failed to construct the joke correctly; as Victor points out, it should be "Why is Victor Meldrew like a chef who keeps dropping his pancakes?").

Renwick's other major modification was to pad out the initial sequence in the Meldrews' living room, and if "The Man Who Blew Away" has any real shortcoming, it's that the story takes a long time to get going. Even so, the protracted opening doesn't feel like time wasted, with the slowburn enabling the more outlandish material to land with greater impact - notably, when Victor casually approaches a drawer and pulls out an arm, a weird and macabre gag that falls within a sequence of lower-key moments and is not immediately explained. As it turns out, Victor has lately been the target of a string of bizarre pranks, with false limbs being left around his bin and garage to give the appearance of bodies stuffed within. Not only does the resolution of this narrative strand dovetail with Foskett's arrival, the repeated emphasis on disconnected body parts neatly foreshadows the grotesque visual on which the episode will end.

In spite of the misadventures with the clothes, the limbs and the crackers, the Meldrews are in an overall buoyant mood, because their car has been stolen. This is a very good thing, because if you watched "The Beast In The Cage", you might recall how much Victor struggled with their dsyfunctional Honda. As we join the Meldrews, the car has been gone for three months and they are planning which new vehicle to buy with the anticipated insurance settlement. That is, until their good cheer is interrupted by a telephone call, bringing the bad news that their Honda has been found, in one piece...and in Finland. This prompts a truly uproarious reaction from Victor: "FINLAND??? That car couldn't get to FINCHLEY!!!" The events of the Honda narrative, which occupies the first half of the episode, have no direction connection to anything that later goes on with Foskett, but we can see how the seeds are being sown for his eventual appearance. Coupled with Margaret's observation about the frozen socks, a running theme is being established regarding unrelenting nuisances finding their way back to Meldrews as they think they are rid of them. Meanwhile, there is a subplot unfolding next door with Patrick and Pippa, as the former prepares for an engagement with a couple of prospective business contractors. It's a relatively small part of the story, but it climaxes with the episode's most hysterical visual gag, which occurs once Foskett has made it out onto the Meldrews' roof, and which I wouldn't dare spoil here.

Between the unwelcome intrusions of the Honda and Foskett, there is a further bugbear to contend with in the form of Mr and Mrs Aylesbury, an unseen couple who live across the street from the Meldrews, and who apparently have a penchant for throwing raucous parties into the early hours. It's here that "The Laughing Policeman" first comes into play - right after a deceptive silence in which the Meldrews think the party has died down and the ordeal is finally over. The really nerve-grinding part is during the chorus, when the party guests all join in with the deranged laughing (before, as per Victor's account, spilling out onto the front lawn to do Chuck Berry duck walks). For as hilarious as this entire sequence is, I will say that it is the part of the episode that requires the greatest suspension of disbelief (yes, even more so than the stolen Honda showing up in Finland), on account of Victor's observation about no one else on the street is remotely bothered besides themselves. That much is a bit hard to swallow. I could see the Swaineys maybe shrugging this off, but there's no way that Patrick and Pippa wouldn't be just as wound up and inconvenienced as Victor and Margaret, particularly with it coinciding with Patrick's important business preparation. You just to have buy into the premise that this is another instance of universe conspiring purely to make life harder for Victor (and by extension Margaret), and that the Trenches are somehow impervious (since they are typically only affected wherever it will make Victor look worse). In this case, the universe's malice manifests as delirious laughter, permeating the Meldrews' walls and mocking their futility in the face of such unabating chaos. The one consolation for their sleepless night is that it's followed by Sunday morning, and under normal circumstances they would have no obligation to get up early. Under normal circumstances. This is of course where Mr Foskett chooses to rear his head, the seismic disaster in relation to which all other grievances - the inescapable Honda, The Laughing Policeman - have been mere rumblings on the horizon. This is also where the episode really shifts into full gear, with every last moment hitting with utter precision. Time could so easily have diluted the impact of that one joke where Foskett is revealed to be calling on a mobile from outside the Meldrews' front door, coming as it did from an age where mobiles were less prolific and this would have been more unexpected, and yet the timing and the delivery are so perfect that it still feels every bit as fresh as it did back then.

Foskett claims that he'd happened to be in the area visiting his sister-in-law and, having looked up the Meldrews' real address in a telephone book, had decided to call in on them. During the extended, one-sided game of catch-up he has them play, he reveals that his first marriage broke down soon after that holiday in Weston-super-Mare, resulting in the loss of his job and in thirteen separate suicide attempts, but that he's since picked his life up, remarried and has two wonderful sons. Foskett's gushing about his newfound familial bliss brings its own extraneous misfortune for Victor and Margaret. When Victor opens the door, he finds Foskett accompanied by two pre-teen boys and, assuming them to be the sons in question, the Meldrews let them in and offer them breakfast, only for them to take advantage of their hospitality and eat well beyond their fill of jam tarts and roast potatoes. And then it turns out that they aren't even Foskett's sons, but local children who were responsible for the pranks with the fake limbs (and also the Christmas cracker) and were sent by their father to apologise. As the dust settles from that misunderstanding, Victor finds Foskett in the hallway, looking very pale and shaken. He'd gone to make a telephone call to his wife Loretta, who'd declined to come to the Meldrews' on account of having a migraine, only to discover that she and the boys have taken the opportunity to make a bolt for it and abandon him for good. All of his talk about having found happiness with a new family was a sham; they couldn't stand him any more than anyone else he ever encountered.

Following a further mishap, where Foskett retreats to the kitchen for a class of water but ends up collapsing onto a pile of scattered rubbish, the Meldrews allow him to clean up with a bath, but are all the while thinking of how to awkwardly get rid of him, with Margaret suggesting they ring for a taxi. It dawns on her that it maybe wasn't a good idea to let Foskett lock himself inside the bathroom and out of their sight, given his extensive history of suicidal behaviour. Victor thinks she's overreacting, until he goes outside and sees Foskett out on the roof wearing only a towel, threatening to throw himself off. He ultimately has second thoughts, but not without slipping, losing the towel and having to dangle naked from the roof gutter. This is the narrative's major set-piece, with the tension and comic absurdity exquisitely nailed by Susan Belbin's direction, so that even the admittedly rather naff-looking night sky effects don't take us out of the moment. 

In the epilogue, set a short while after the ordeal, we learn that Victor and Margaret are making a habit of leaving their Honda unsecured, in the hopes of it being stolen again, although Victor is questioning the purpose, noting that any keys left in the ignition have been invariably returned by would-be Good Samaritans. Foskett, on the other hand, will not be back, at least not in the flesh; the Meldrews receive a package containing an update on their old friend, and it's revealed that he made his fifteenth and final suicide attempt after leaving with the police and sadly succumbed to his injuries in hospital. Before his death, Foskett shared that there was one thing that brought him comfort in his darkest hour - his friendship with the Meldrews, the kindness they had shown him on that day, and how pleased they had evidently been to see him after all these years.

Foskett remains something of a puzzle, and we are left wondering if he was perhaps considerably less oblivious than he let on. He comes off as a man in deep denial, commenting on how strange it was that the address the Meldrews had given him turned out to be bogus but convincing himself that he'd written it down wrong. This raises the question as to what really precipitated his arrival at their door - did his family's total abandonment of him come as such a surprise to him, or was it the result of a much more prolonged marital breakdown? It dawns on us that Foskett might have deliberately sought out the Meldrews because he knew that something like this would be coming and felt the need to be with friends when the dreaded news broke. The knowledge that his first marriage had ended soon after the holiday in Weston-super-Mare underscores the likelihood that he was having marital problems back then too, and that his interactions with the Meldrews had amounted to much the same thing. On both occasions, he'd been reaching out to Victor and Margaret, and while they'd sat and endured his company through gritted teeth, all they'd privately desired was to have him out of their lives. That a couple he'd known for a brief spell seventeen years ago should be the only people he could think to turn to tells its own desolate story. The most haunting thing about Foskett? We never even learn his full name. He talks at great length about his vast collection of antique dentures and his allergy to sticky tape, yet that one all-important detail never slips through. The Meldrews were all he had left in the end, and they weren't even on first name terms with the man. He is of course the figure alluded to in the episode title - the opening sequence, in which the onscreen title was juxtaposed with a discarded newspaper page with coverage of local weddings, had foreshadowed Foskett's marital woes as the factor that would drive him over the edge, while also subtly implanting the image of him as a soul drifting feebly upon the breeze, briefly fluttering into people's lives only to be swept out again into the ether. He is a man with a knack for alienating every single person he comes into contact with, with no lasting ties or connections to keep him grounded in any particular social setting. Much like that stray newspaper page, he is discarded rubbish, professing to carry joyous news but totally unwanted and destined to shortly become nothing. It is a haunting allusion, calling to mind how little the Meldrews, or indeed we the audience really knew him, in spite of the tremendous deal he had to say about himself. To The Meldrews, he was an annoyance that came into their lives for a day, while to us he was a momentary diversion to be laughed at, but the gravitas of Margaret's final reading impresses the sobering notion that this was a life, now lost because nobody cared enough to hold onto it. He can also be likened to the scattered washing found by Margaret in the beginning, with the lack of eyes upon him (both literal and metaphorical) leading to his terminal ruin. 

Foskett's belief that he'd found camaraderie with Victor and Margaret is by far the episode's cruellest irony, but of course Renwick isn't going to bow out without inflicting one further instance of cosmic misfortune upon the Meldrews. They open up the package to find that, as Foskett's last remaining allies, he has entrusted them with his legacy in the form of his collection of antique dentures, in which Victor had politely feigned interest in an earlier scene. The final visual of those assorted cabinets of lovingly displayed pearlies creates an uneasy connection between smiling and death, for these are not merely the worldly remains of Foskett himself, but the synthetic snickers of countless owners long departed, all grinning mindlessly from beyond the grave. An underlying theme of "The Man Who Blew Away" is the idea of laughter as a reflexive coping mechanism geared toward masking grim realities and staving off the omnipresent darkness of life. The knowledge that we're all going to die and the likelihood that life is absurd are as inescapable as the Meldrews' Honda; we have to find a way of keeping the pain at bay somehow. The episode ends with Victor expressing newfound sympathy for Mr and Mrs Aylesbury, for he now understands their need to stay up laughing with Charles Penrose into the early hours, and suggests that if he and Margaret cannot follow their example, they too risk sinking into suicidal despair. The final moments, naturally, produce no laughter from either party, only an awkward silence followed by a characteristically morbid punchline, in which Victor asks Margaret where she's keeping the sleeping pills. We linger on one last shot of Foskett's collection before dissolving into the closing credits, where the familiar tortoise footage is accompanied by a reprise of "The Laughing Policeman" in lieu of the usual Eric Idle-sung theme song. Previously a manifestation of the universe's mockery of Victor and Margaret, it now becomes something altogether more sinister - our own laughter and craving for escapism has been implicated in this process of addled diversion, making these hysterical wails of irrepressible anguish an eerie caricture of our own damnation. The presence of those tortoises only adds to the final uncanniness; their significance was explained by Renwick on the commentary for "The Beast In The Cage", where he notes that they are specifically giant tortoises, which are one of the most long-lived of animal species and thus symbols of longevity. Juxtaposed with Penrose's howls, they suggest suffering of a particularly interminable variety, of having lived so long and seen so much lunacy.

Which was certainly an uncomfortable point at which to leave us in the late hours of Christmas, although it should be noted that it did little to sour the public's appetite for further seasonal installments with Victor and Margaret. A festive edition of One Foot In The Grave Christmas would remain an annual event for the duration of the mid-90s, with three further specials, "The Wisdom of The Witch", "Starbound" and "Endgame" airing in the succeeding years (of which only "Starbound" missed out on a Christmas Day slot). Renwick would never again attempt anything with quite the same bitterly downbeat flavour as "The Man Who Blew Away", however, at least not within the festive specials. The upsets of Series 6 were still to come (including an echoing of the themes of "The Man Who Blew Away" in the episode "Tales of Terror"), but those were a good few years away yet.

Finally, since I'm such a VHS nerd, I've spent an unhealthy amount of time scrutinising the Meldrews' living room cabinet to see if I can identify which tapes they have in their collection. I'm not 100% sure, but I think that's The Addams Family there on the bottom right. Neat, the Meldrews have good taste then.

Living In The Bottle: The Beast In The Cage (One Foot In The Grave)

Something I've come to appreciate about One Foot In The Grave is how beautifully ominous the episode titles tend to be. In keeping with the series' quintessentially morbid tone, and with the unrelenting pessimism and freakish misfortune of its pivotal character, titles are typically nothing less than borderline apocalyptic threats, waggishly hinting at what form of disaster will inevitably strike the Meldrews on this particular outing. The suggestion of genuine horror is usually tempered by an evident sense of playfulness (though not always - "We Have Put Her Living in The Tomb" does exactly what it says on the tin, and is truly a nightmare to behold), with winking nods to popular culture (eg: "In Luton Airport No One Can Hear You Scream") or titles transplanted wholesale from more infamously macabre works (Edgar Allan Poe was a notable recurring influence, as seen from "The Pit and The Pendulum", "Descent Into The Maelstrom" and "Tales of Terror"), their significance cunningly repurposed to suit the circumstances of Victor's predicament. "The Beast In The Cage", a possible allusion to the short story The Beast in the Cave by HP Lovecraft, conjures images of something snarling, savage and inhuman becoming increasingly riled at its captive existence - and sure enough, Victor spends the entirety of the installment confined to his car, his plans for a bank holiday excursion having been brought to a standstill by a torturously slow-moving traffic jam. The implicit joke seems self-explanatory (Victor is, naturally, the beast and the Honda, which should have been his means of mobility, has become his prison), and yet so much more might have been made of it still. Absent from the final edit was an entire section of dialogue in which the meaning behind the title was expounded on more openly, with the suggestion that its analogical intentions were broader and a notch more complicated than simply relating another cosmic gag at Victor's expense.

In its early stages, the arrangement could be said to come more at the expense of the audience than Victor, even as we join him to discover that he's spent the preceding four and a half hours staring at the back end of a horse. When "The Beast In The Cage" first aired, on 23rd February 1992 as part of the sitcom's tertiary series, it was only the second of Victor's bottle adventures, following the formula laid out by "Timeless Time" of Series 2. By the time we got to "The Trial" of Series 4, viewers had been prepped to expect that these bottle episodes might become a customary occurrence, but for those venturing into "The Beast In The Cage" for the first time, the set-up probably seemed quite innocuous. There was nothing to suggest that this traffic jam business would be occupying the entire episode - that this wouldn't be the first scene of a larger story, and that before long we'd being fading out and moving along with the Meldrews to some fresher development. The "penny drop moment", when it occurs to the viewer that they've been inside the car for a little too long for comfort, and that the traffic jam might well be all that there is to this particular journey, ends up becoming its own bit of glorious meta humor. On the DVD commentary, show creator and writer David Renwick shares an anecdote about how Jonathan Powell, then controller of BBC1, had been watching the episode with his wife, who'd remarked to him about four minutes in, "I've got a feeling they're never going to get out of that car..." The notion that the Meldrews and the viewers are mutual prisoners, doomed to the resignation that they won't be going anywhere, is reinforced in Susan Belbin's direction. "The Beast In The Cage" is the most intensely claustrophobic of the One Foot In The Grave bottle episodes; compared to "Timeless Time" and "The Trial", were Victor at least had the comfort of being cooped up inside his own home, here he and Margaret have little freedom of movement, and the viewer is made to experience that along with them. Our view of the predicament is restricted mostly to what they can see of it. Other than the two aerial shots that open and close the episode, all of the action is shown from inside the vehicle. Even during a brief moment where Victor and Margaret get out of the car to exchange seats, the camera doesn't leave the vehicle's interior.

"The Beast In The Cage" also implements a twist, about twelve minutes in, that alters the rules of the dynamic - just as we've gotten used to the rhythm of the piece, and think we know exactly what this is going to be (ie: another two hander between Victor and Margaret), family friend Mrs Warboys (Doreen Mantle) suddenly climbs into the back seat, and it's revealed that she too is along for the (non) ride, having left the car in search of the nearest toilet. Her surprise appearance comes directly after Victor's declaration that his situation has already gone beyond all human endurance, indicating that it signifies a deepening of his torture. Sure enough, one of the first things she does on her return is to reveal how she bungled Victor's straightforward request for a packet of smoky bacon flavour crisps, confidently broadcasting that the pub she'd stumbled upon had three huge boxes full of the desired pick-me-up, but that she failed to bring any back with her. She subsequently offers him a cool refreshing ginger beer, only to admit that she didn't acquire any of that either. Part of what makes Mrs Warboys such an indelible character is that I think we all know someone in our own lives who is infuriatingly like her.

The presence of Warboys represents a deviation from the conventions of the One Foot In The Grave bottle episode, which tended to focus on the isolation of the Meldrews. Victor and Margaret were the only characters to appear in "Timeless Time" and Victor was completely alone in "The Trial". In both cases, all interactions with the outside world came via telephone - in "Timeless Time", a neighbour called to argue with Victor about his picture-straightening technique, while in "The Trial" there were various clashes with people who had irritated Victor, and an unwelcome call from Warboys herself. "Rearranging The Dust" took place in a solicitor's waiting room where Victor and Margaret were intermittently joined by other clients, but interactions were fairly minimal, and while a third person did eventually appear during the blackout in "Threatening Weather", they were predominantly on their own there too. The upshot of these Victor-Margaret two-handers is that something new and illuminating about their relationship or personal history was ultimately revealed, once they were alone and vulnerable enough to let the mask drop. "Timeless Time", for example, contains the only reference to their deceased son Stuart. This doesn't happen in "The Beast In The Cage". The episode closes with Victor making a poignant observation about how their squandered day trip is a distressingly good metaphor for his life's trajectory, but this doesn't tell us anything we don't already know. This shouldn't surprise us - having someone like Warboys listening in from the backseat doesn't facilitate the level of emotional nakedness that had the Meldrews opening up about Stuart, the origins of their relationship or what became of Margaret's father. But even before the third wheel enters the picture, we know that the Meldrews are far from alone; in keeping with this being the most claustrophobic of the bottle episodes, they're forced to share this entrapment with not only Warboys, but legions of other souls subject to the same stagnation, and to the same sense of scuppered ambition. This is the episode's bigger twist still - while Victor has been dealt a typically bum hand, in being stuck behind the rear of a horse for the duration, in the scheme of things he hasn't missed out more than anyone else. The loss of Stuart was a deeply personal one, and the Meldrews' sleepless isolation in "Timeless Time" symbolised how they were essentially alone in their constant, if rarely vocalised, mourning for their son. It was a pain that could only truly be known and understood by them. "The Beast In The Cage", on the other hand, proposes that there is something far more universal about their traffic-bound predicament; that everyone is travelling down the same congested highway, doomed to come to an eventual standstill and to contend with the disappointment of never being able to get to wherever they'd once thought they were headed.

The question of where the Meldrews thought they were headed isn't brought up within the episode's dialogue, to the point where it could be dismissed as deliberately irrelevant - as Margaret points out, it wouldn't be worth completing the journey now anyway - but this is where things get especially curious. Thanks to axillary One Foot In The Grave media, we know that they'd intended to go to a zoo...or at least, that was how Victor remembered it. Included in the script but excised from the final edit was a sequence of dialogue where he and Margaret come to the mutual realisation that their day has been so dominated by the congestion that they've lost all sight of their planned destination, only to arrive at completely different conclusions. Victor reckons they were going to Whipsnade Zoo while Margaret insists that they had agreed on Windsor Castle. For as adamant as Margaret is on the matter, I note with some amusement that the official synopsis given in the BBC's listings favours Victor's perception: "An outing to Whipsnade Zoo turns into a nightmare." I'm taking that as official confirmation that Victor was right...or at least I would if said disagreement had made it into the televised episode. As it stands, that synopsis is the closest it gets to retaining any formal connection to Whipsnade Zoo. Three years on, however, and we did get to experience that lost material first-hand, by way of Victor's foray into the wireless. The One Foot In The Grave radio series broadcast on BBC Radio 2 in early 1995 consisted of audio remakes of four classic episodes: "Alive and Buried", "Timeless Time", "In Luton Airport No One Can Hear You Scream" and "The Beast In The Cage" (interestingly, no episodes featuring Patrick and Pippa, which might have been a coincidence, or maybe Angus Deayton and Janine Duvitski were unavailable for recording). In this version of "The Beast In The Cage", the Whipsnade Zoo-Windsor Castle debate was retained, as was a further reflection on the matter from Warboys, and it's apparent that the decision to have their party headed for a venue filled with captive animals was not arbitrary. 

Listening to the radio installments is a strange experience, like stumbling into a parallel universe where the basic outcome was always the same for Victor but where things played out a little differently. The essence and direction of each narrative was kept intact, but the scripts were dotted with various minor alterations. Moments that depended prominently on visual humor or storytelling were obviously removed or rewritten, dialogue was frequently tweaked, and entirely new gags and sequences were added in, including material that might have been planned for the original television versions but hadn't made the cut (and in some cases were eventually accommodated in a different TV installment altogether - Victor's polystyrene rant in the radio version of "Luton Airport" was used five years later in the Series 6 episode "The Dawn of Man"). I should confess that for myself it's always worked the other way around - in the mid 1990s I had all four radio episodes on cassette and would listen to them constantly, long before I owned any media of their television counterparts, so in my head I'm hard-wired to accept them as the "authentic" versions, and whenever I watch the television originals I'm always conscious of the various ways in which they don't line up. It was an infinitely sounder and more flavoursome approach than the alternative, which was to extract the audio directly from the television originals and simply cut out whatever didn't work in radio form - as we saw when three other episodes, "The Man In The Long Black Coat", "The Broken Reflection" and "The Trial", were later released in audio form and did exactly that (I'm not sure if these received radio broadcasts, but they were made commercially available on cassette). In their case there were often abrupt fade-outs and set-ups with no payoff. "The Broken Reflection" was a particularly awkward choice, since an entire subplot about Victor minding Patrick and Pippa's houseplants had to be excised, presumably because it was too reliant on visual narration, causing the audio edit to feel both conspicuously short and to end on a bizarrely glum and humorless note. Anyone who listened and didn't immediately follow this up with the hilarity of "The Trial" was certainly going to have their day ruined.

In the radio remake's take on events, Warboys, who had inexplicably believed they were going to Cheddar Gorge, is troubled by Victor's mention of the zoo, as she's ethically opposed to keeping wild animals in captivity. Her line, "Animals in cages like that, it's not natural", feels key, since it's obviously supposed to echo what's going on around them, with all those human animals leading awkward and uncomfortable existences in their tiny steel cages. On the DVD commentary, Renwick explains that the zoo discussion was cut from the televised version because of time constraints, and while he acknowledges how it would have tied in with the ideas conveyed in the title, he ultimately didn't think that you needed to have them spelled out in order to grasp their significance. I only partially agree. While the humor of the title is discernible enough, omitting all reference to the zoo means missing out on a rich vein of symbolism - the implicit suggestion that, irrespective of whether or not the Meldrews had intended to get to Whipsnade Zoo, they have ended up at a zoo of sorts, that being the human zoo. It isn't simply in the insinuation that the humans are being confined, but that they are being exhibited as well - that their lives are not only meaningless, but amusingly so for anyone who happens to be surveying them from the outside. There is a moment, not translatable for the radio version, where Victor remarks on the traffic jam as being a "complete waste of human life" while observing the driver behind them in his rear view mirror. There is nothing about this driver in particular that ought to invite comment, but there's nevertheless something voyeuristic about the juxtaposition, as though Victor is musing on the absurdity of human life in general. It's also as close as the episode comes to breaking the fourth wall; although we spend the episode feeling the Honda's claustrophobic confines along with the Meldrews, our primary perspective, from where the windscreen should be, more reflects the position of someone looking in from the exterior than that of a fellow occupant. It is as though Victor, Margaret and Warboys have become our own personal exhibit, entertaining us with their daft antics from inside their wildly unnatural habitat. The ways in which humans respond to their constrained, inelegant existences cannot help but become the stuff of spectacle. We sense that if we were to uproot from the Meldrews and to wander around the surrounding exhibits, we would find plenty more to gawk at. At one point Victor sticks his head out the window and reports seeing a man sunbathing on the roof of a Pickfords removal truck (somewhat questionably, given the visible lack of sunshine).

This doesn't just apply to those poor sods with the misfortune of being stuck inside the traffic jam either. Anybody with a salacious or unlikely yarn to be spun around them is destined to become the object of idle diversion for the perpetually bored, as demonstrated in a sequence where Margaret and Warboys indulge in a round of lurid gossip about various characters in their community. For what sums up both the absurdity and the banality of modern living more succinctly than the remark, "Of course, she wears nothing in bed except Sainsbury's cocoa butter"? This is followed by what sounds like the basis of a particularly grisly urban legend, when Warboys suggests that said individual risks sautéing herself to death whenever she uses her electric blanket, and then a similarly dubious tale about a man who had a cast removed to find that his arm had mysteriously disappeared. Victor ponders aloud why people would be compelled to circulate stories of such squeamish mortification (before Warboys lets it slip that a few comparably lurid stories have been shared about him), but how else are they going to fill the vapidness and stagnation of their own captive lives? 

The Whipsnade Zoo analogy doesn't end there, however. Once Warboys has made her stance on zoos explicit in the radio version, she suddenly goes off on a strange train of thought about the larger predatory animals (specifically tigers and vultures), and whether it might actually be good sense to keep those creatures confined, to prevent them from roaming around and mauling everybody to death. It's a suggestion that clearly touches a nerve in Victor (alas, we have no way of discerning what Margaret makes of it). In a way, I can understand why this aspect of the discussion was cut, since it is a bit rambling and nonsensical, even by Warboys' standards, and the dialogue they prioritised for the television version is honestly a whole lot funnier and sharper. But from a thematic standpoint it suggests a complicating of the analogy, with Warboys proposing that the alternative to this vapidness might be even more unbearable. If we stop to consider these implications, we might arrive at the conclusion that the titular "beast" is not Victor specifically, but humankind in general, and the "cage" is the thin veneer of civility that keeps us from tearing one another's heads off (and possibly exacerbates our urge to do so). Early in the episode, Victor had professed an understanding for why some people are driven to violate that societal taboo and become psychopaths. But those ferine tendencies run deep, and will find ways of manifesting beyond physical brutality. Later developments would appear to confirm that we are all just snarling zoo animals, imprisoned side by side, maddened by our mutual entrapment and angrily swiping at one another through the bars of our exhibits. We get multiple instances of Victor coming to blows with other frustrated individuals who, in lieu of outright savagery, are forced to resort to more creative means of expressing their latent beastliness. The first of these involves the driver of the vehicle to the Meldrews' left, and it's perhaps not a total coincidence that he bears an animal name - one Mr Salmon (Trevor Byfield). True, a salmon might not be the first creature that comes to mind when we picture a raging beast, but there is something decidedly fishy about him (a joke made within the episode itself).

The Salmon encounter is a good demonstration of why Victor's reputation for being a relentlessly bitter individual unreasonably kicking off about everything under the sun is frankly unearned, for Salmon is being astoundingly rude to the Meldrews, loudly blazoning through their personal space with his sketchy advances on Lisa (Louise Duprey) and Carol (Tish Allen), the two twenty-something girls in the vehicle to the Meldrews' right. As Renwick so aptly puts it on the commentary, it amounts to a complete dismissal of Victor's existence. I think most people in his position would have a hard time containing themselves. Margaret implores him to choose the civilised alternative, by winding up the car window and disengaging; retreating into the symbolic cage is their best defence against getting sucked into the ferocity of the world outside. Victor refuses, countering that this would mean further stifling themselves for someone else's benefit: "We're not suffocating to death inside here...just so he can get off with two sex-hungry trollops!" (to which Carol produces the terribly vicious but supremely witty response, "I notice it worked for you..."). It also has to be said that this entire sequence is a whole lot funnier in the television version than the radio, where we miss out on some wonderful visual gags - not least, the outrageous decal seen on Salmon's car window when he finally winds it up in his own churlish act of retreat. Also sacrificed was a great moment where Salmon receives a call on his characteristically chunky 90s mobile (back then, a sign that he was flash), which transpires to be for Victor, and to be coming from somebody further down in the queue looking to take their annoyance for the slow movement out on him.

Another confrontation happens more indirectly. Throughout the episode, we had heard various grumblings from Victor about the mechanics at his local garage and how ineffectual they were in fixing his seemingly cursed Honda. Toward the end, Victor decides to put a cassette on, only to discover that the mechanics, tired of his complaining, have used it to record him an insulting message - and what's more they've done it in song form, to the tune of "Cwm Rhondda" (I like to think this is a deliberate callback to the ending of "Timeless Time", where Victor had threatened to get even with the intrusive sparrow by sneaking up to its nest with a Welsh male voice choir). On the commentary, Renwick states that one of his favourite running gags throughout the series was the idea that people who had scores to settle with Victor would go to ridiculous lengths to do so, orchestrating elaborate revenge schemes that would require far more planning and effort than they should logically be worth. He cites another example from the episode "Warm Champagne", where a professional artist neighbour had painted an unflattering faux pub sign in Victor's likeness, pointing out that it would have cost him a night's sleep or two just to get it done. But maybe these boxed-in beasts really do have nothing better with which to occupy their minds.

As with "Timeless Time", a preoccupation with time and its finiteness pervades "The Beast In The Cage". An inconvenience Victor contends with at the start of the episode concerns a clock that is two minutes fast and which cannot be turned backwards, meaning that he has to run it through the entire cycle just to have it show the correct time. We circle back to the symbolism in Victor's final reflection, as he mournfully muses that, "You can't turn the clock back." There's the resignation that it is now too late in the day for the Meldrews to do anything with their bank holiday, and that as soon as the traffic clears they'll have to turn around and head for home. (In the radio version, Warboys offers the flimsy silver lining that "at least it's been a day out...a change from just sitting at home all day", a gag pre-empted in the television version with the acknowledgement that the Meldrews wouldn't have accomplished anything more productive by staying put, other than Victor cutting his toenails.) It is, incidently never stated on which bank holiday "The Beast In The Cage" is intended to take place, but we can narrow it down a little. On the commentary, Richard Wilson confirms that the episode was filmed in the winter, which accounts for the gloomy conditions outside, but that it was meant to be set during the summer. (The incongruous weather needn't have been an issue, given the temperamental nature of the British climate, only the script makes it clear that this is supposed to be a blisteringly hot day on top of everything else - we have Victor complaining about the Honda being like a bread oven and his feet like a pair of boiled lobsters, that man sunbathing atop the removal lorry and Victor's insistence that Warboys put ice in his pineapple cordial, which to his horror contains a dead wasp.) It could very feasibly be the Spring bank holiday that falls on the last Monday of May, but from our thematic standpoint it makes far more sense for it to be the bank holiday that occurs on the last Monday of August, and is traditionally viewed as the final opportunity for a day of summer's recreation before the autumn kicks in. This opportunity being denied the Meldrews aligns with that underlying sense of time having run out, and with Victor's concession that his life ultimately didn't end up going anywhere, despite the sense of vigour and purpose he recalls feeling in his younger years. Margaret offers the consolation that it is the same for everyone - that we are all the same boat/traffic jam/metaphorical zoo, and all we can do is to try to make the best of it, as Warboys suggests.

"The Beast In The Cage" has a neatly cyclical narrative, opening with Victor rejecting Margaret's offer of a sucky sweet, insisting that he is more likely to be sucking on the car's exhaust pipe before long, and closing with him belatedly accepting her offer. This is preceded by one final threat of bestial behaviour, as Victor (presumably none too seriously) announces that he's become so hungry he might have to resort to eating Mrs Warboys. Instead, he chooses the civilised alternative and asks Margaret to pass him the sweets, a signal that he's resigned himself to fate. The camera pulls out into another aerial shot as the credits roll, showing the Meldrews still imprisoned in the congestion, and we leave them on an even more indeterminate note than than we did at the end of "Timeless Time". In that episode there was a certain predictability to the monotony, for we knew that the morning would come soon enough, and they'd be opening up yet another can of worms (even if that represented an unknowable nightmare in itself). Here, we don't know much longer they might be forced to endure their inertia, and there's no indication that they'll be moving on any time soon. For now, the final shot emphasises both the extent of their entrapment, and how far afield their predicament extends. There are a million stories in life's great traffic jam. This has been one of them.