Farthing Wood Deaths Revisisted: An Introduction

If you were a child growing up in the UK in the early to mid 90s, then odds are that you encountered The Animals of Farthing Wood at some time or another. Based on a series of novels by Colin Dann, and featuring the voices of Rupert Farley (Fox), the late Ron Moody (Badger) and Sally Grace (Owl), the animated series was absolutely huge back then, at least if the buzz in my particular school playground was anything to go by. I was eight years old when it first started airing, in 1993, and I became a devotee almost immediately. I read all of the Colin Dann books, I collected every single issue of the tie-in magazine, Farthing Wood Friends, I completed the Panini sticker album (ordinarily I lacked the patience or devotion required to see a Panini sticker album through to completion – Farthing Wood was the major exception), and I even dragged my family to London just to see a Farthing Wood Xmas grotto they were hosting at one of the major department stores (Harrods, I believe?) at the end of that year.

I don’t think that it’s unfair to acknowledge that Dann’s initial book owed more than a slight debt to Richard Adams’ vastly superior* Watership Down – in fact, the basic storyline was more or less identical to the first half of Adams’ novel. When the only home they’ve ever known is bulldozed to make room for a housing estate, a group of wild animals are forced on a perilous journey across human-modified landscape in the hopes of reaching a new haven (in Farthing Wood’s case, a nature reserve named White Deer Park). The obvious difference is that, whereas Watership Down focused exclusively upon the rabbits’ eye-view (with only one major non-rabbit character, a seagull), Farthing Wood was very much an inter-species affair. Predator and prey alike had to learn to set aside their differences and band together for the common good. This was achieved through something known as “The Oath of Mutual Protection”, which in practice just meant that the bigger/more useful animals looked out for the smaller/weaker ones, who seldom got a chance to fulfil the “mutual” element of their pact.

I haven’t read the books since primary school, but I recall the series being more or less faithful to the original story. The only major difference was that a handful of characters who were males in the book were changed into females in the interests of a more gender-diverse cast (note that Kestrel, despite being characterised as a female, clearly had male plumage – I suspect that it was unintentional, but that doesn’t stop my adult self from interpreting the character as transgender). Fox was chosen to lead the animals along the way, and while this decision was not greeted with universal enthusiasm (Owl, being the most intelligent of the animals, was resentful that he was chosen over her, and Hare initially disliked having to look up to a natural predator) by the end of the series he had proven his leadership mettle, and the majority of the Farthing Wood creatures had made it safely to White Deer Park. Unfortunately, there were a few rather traumatic losses along the way, and that’s what this particular retrospective is going to be focusing upon.

The fact that Farthing Wood wasn’t afraid to bump off sympathetic characters on a regular basis is one of the things that really set it apart from other children’s shows of its era. The deaths were one of the key things I recall people really talking about back then – whenever an episode rolled around in which one or more characters met their tragic/gruesome end, it immediately became the talk of the playground. We couldn’t get over the fact that so many of these cute and vulnerable little creatures, whom we so desperately wanted to wanted to see make it all the way to White Deer Park, were being crushed, devoured or otherwise obliterated. I encountered a number of people who even refused to watch the series at all because they thought that it was “too sad”.  At the same time, the deaths were one of the things that people really "liked" about the series - it made it feel extra suspenseful, and ensured that the stakes for the characters were always very high. Since it’s the aspect of the show that seemed to have the biggest impact, I thought that it would be interesting to do a retrospective on it, by digging up those memories of childhood horror and seeing how they measure up to adult scrutiny. Hence we have “Farthing Wood Deaths: Revisited”.

A total of eleven characters died during the first series, although a number of them went together, leaving us with six different incidents of death in total. Given that they were spread out over the course of thirteen episodes, that means that just less than half the episodes featured a tragic loss of some variety. For this retrospective, I’m going to be examining each death in detail and rating it in relation to three different factors, on a scale of 1 to 10:

HORROR FACTOR: This refers to how shocking or violent the death in question was. Farthing Wood wasn’t exactly graphic in its depiction of death (expect nothing at the level of Martin Rosen’s 1978 feature film adaptation of Watership Down), but some instances certainly were pushing the trauma boundaries a little hard, particularly in light of the school-aged target audience.  A perfect 10 indicates that they went about as far as they could possibly go within the confines of being relatively kid-friendly.

NOBILITY FACTOR: This rates the overall worthiness of the cause for which each character died. While only one or two deaths were arguably the result of some form of intentional self-sacrifice, there were a number who died whilst trying to help the other animals, and that deserves recognition. Note that if a character dies of old age (also a rare occurrence), they get an automatic 10. Nothing more noble than simply slipping away when your time has reached its natural end and enabling the cycle of life to continue.

TEAR-JERKER FACTOR: How likely the death is to make you cry. Some deaths were certainly played up for tears more than others.

Note also that while I intend to cover both Series 1 and 2, I will NOT be covering any of the deaths from Series 3, because I honestly didn't care for Series 3 (the same goes for the Colin Dann book that it was predominantly based upon) and I would sooner not have to revisit it, even in the interests of completism. I think that there were only actually two major character deaths in Series 3, anyway – the rest were all reserved for nondescript villainous henchmen. Let’s just give it an instant zero on all counts.

One final note – as of the time of writing, The Animals of Farthing Wood has still yet to be released on DVD in the UK. You might be able to get hold of one of the old VHS releases on Ebay or Amazon Marketplace, although keep in mind that these do not contain the full episodes, merely edited versions. But here's a hot tip - the full series has been released on DVD in Germany, and these do contain the English audio.

UPDATE: As of October 2016, the complete series of The Animals of Farthing Wood has been released in the UK as a DVD box set.  I personally happen to think that the Germans got the better deal, however.  There, they released each of the series individually, meaning that you weren't obligated to own Series 3 just to get the two really good ones.

*The fact that I’ve not read any books in the Farthing Wood series since I was in primary school notwithstanding, I do remember deeming them as somewhat ersatz once I’d moved onto Adams’ book - which, admittedly, I also haven’t read in years. Note that while I do have a lot of admiration for the 1978 animated film, the 1999 animated TV series is another matter altogether - that actually felt like an ersatz answer to the animated Farthing Wood series.  Which is a topic for another entry at another time.