Wildlife on One '98: Uninvited Guests (aka Intruders Happy In The Dark)

So far, my deep dive into the strange and enthralling world of murine horror has taken me to some curious places. We've encountered giant rats on the moon in vintage sci-fi anthologies, uncanny monsters in 1990s children's entertainment, and off-screen menaces in minimalist 1970s horror. Something I have not yet gone into as an example, however, is the nature documentary. "Uninvited Guests" aired as part of the BBC's flagship wildlife program, Wildlife on One, which ran from 1977 to 2005 and was narrated by David Attenborough (who is a fantastic person in virtually every regard, and we as a society did not deserve him; it's just unfortunate that he hates rats). The twenty-eight minute documentary was devoted to the subject of house pests - more specifically, pests in the process of taking over a vacant building, located in some unspecified part of the UK, after its human occupants have mysteriously packed up and fled. Much like Mouse Hunt, this is another story about the battle between man and mouse (and various other tiny specimens of the animal kingdom) for the dominance of a creaky old property, only here the battle is far more subtle in nature. As the miniature squatters go about exploiting the house's nooks and crannies to their own ends, their domestic bliss is intermittently disturbed by the intrusions of an estate agent, who has his work cut out in attempting to make the crumbling abode seem attractive to an assortment of prospective buyers - a task made no easier by the occasional intersecting of the parallel stories.

I was watching during the documentary's initial broadcast on 21st April 1998. I thought it was riveting stuff, and yet I must have been exhausted on the day in question, because for the life of me I could not keep my eyes open. In a moment of extreme weakness, I closed them for just long enough to be completely insensible for the final third of the documentary, only to awaken just a handful of seconds before the fade-out. It closed on a distinctive image, with a couple huddled together in bed in a state of evident unease, as if terrified at the thought of what might be stirring just beneath them. Attenborough's narration had previously emphasised that the house's prospects of being sold were becoming increasingly bleak, so it came as a surprise to see that, by the end, humans had apparently succeeded in making the property halfway livable again. Or had they? That couple seemed pretty worried about something, and I desperately longed to know the context. Alas, this was in the days before catch-up TV, and unless you'd set your VCR, once something had aired it was gone, potentially forever. If you wanted to see it again, then you were at the mercy of the scheduling bigwigs seeing fit to grant it a second run, which tended to happen far more frequently with sitcoms than with natural history documentaries. So for all I knew I had squandered my one opportunity to see this properly forever, and all because I had momentarily given in to that infernal carnal impulse of mine. Still, I never forgot the anxiety of that couple at the end, and the image continued to haunt me for just shy of twenty-two years. According to the BBC's online TV guide, "Uninvited Guests" was repeated only once, on 26th August 2004 on BBC2, but I did not happen to catch it. Wildlife on One also never saw any kind of DVD or Blu-Ray release, and while I would intermittently search YouTube for the program, just on the off-chance that anyone else had uploaded it, I always came up short. My prospects of ever seeing the elusive documentary in full were bleak...until January this year, when I discovered that someone had very courteously uploaded the episode, along with many other Wildlife on One episodes, to The Internet Archive. Obviously, I wasn't about to let this get away.

"Uninvited Guests" did not disappoint. I can see exactly why this made such a great impression on me back in 1998, and why I'd remained so driven to find what had passed me by in the aftermath. "Uninvited Guests" must be one of the quirkiest installments of Wildlife on One (I would hesitate to call it the quirkiest, because I have memories of another episode done in the style of CSI, with all these forensic tests being carried out to determine which rainforest-dwelling carnivore had whacked and devoured an innocent sloth - sadly, that episode, "Amazon Assassin", is not on The Internet Archive). Nature documentaries aren't, of course, traditionally thought of as potential horror fodder - even at their most carnage and Amazon assassin packed, they are generally perceived as safe, non-threatening viewing. And yet they have the potential to depict the world from an entirely different, more alien perspective, and this is something that "Uninvited Guests" certainly excels at. It celebrates the strange beauty of decay, and the process of something familiar and domestic being transmuted into an inhospitable wilderness, as nature comes creeping in in a variety of small but powerful forms and reclaims the terrain as its own. But what makes the documentary especially memorable is the manner in which it wittily intersects this process with the fictional human drama running alongside it. (Unfortunately, the information given in the end-credits is fairly limited - we are told that the human cast consisted of Jeremy Balfour, Lindsey Harvey, Peter Nicholas, Louis Dougherty and Katie Holder, but I am unable to say who played what role. Also not revealed is anything of the filming locations; I would at least have liked to have known where the house used for the exterior shots was based.) Footage of mice, slugs and silverfish is juxtaposed with an array of hauntingly atmospheric shots showing the various abandoned material artifacts left to stagnate around the property. Some of this imagery - moth-eaten taxidermy, a baby doll with hollowed out eyes - seems a little too knowingly on the nose, as if the documentary intends both to unnerve us and slip in a few tongue-in-cheek gags at the expense of horror cliche. The episode is filled with playful visual gags - at one point, we see the pages of a book blowing in the wind, revealed to be a copy of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and elsewhere we see a snow globe topple in an obvious nod to Citizen Kane. But none of this detracts from the genuine eeriness of the story being told - or, more accurately, the implicit narrative that's only vaguely alluded to. We get a handful of scenes in which the estate agent is nervously attempting to talk up the building to apathetic house hunters, but far more telling is the drama communicated by the absent humans - the untold stories of those lives suddenly vacated. We get only a very distant, fleeting glimpse of the house's original owners during the establishing sequence, as they pack their bags and abandon the property in the dead of night. The estate agent later informs us, somewhat cryptically, that they left in "something of a hurry." Eloping? Fleeing a possible forensic investigation? We can only speculate. Early shots, also from the well of horror convention, show children sneaking a cautious glimpse at the building grounds, suggesting that the abandoned house has become the subject of local lore and curiosity. Is the house haunted? It might as well be, for the previous owners pack up and exit in such a hurry that they leave behind their cat, who continues to stalk the halls of the property as a sort of avatar for its absent owners. The cat, it seems, was never really there, in the sense that Attenborough's narration never sees fit to acknowledge it. It is less a member of the house's ever-increasing fauna population than a ghost, a silent reminder of a fading past that Man and Nature alike regard with equal indifference.

What is unsettling about "Uninvited Guests" has less to do with its emphasis on the assortment of floorboard-dwelling creepy-crawlies with which we could be sharing a home and wouldn't know it, than with its depiction of what would become of the world we'd leave behind if we were to suddenly up and disappear - the evidence that we were ever here, and of the lives we once led, and how rapidly this is picked apart, modified and eradicated by the opportunists who arrive to take our place. At the same time, a great deal of admiration is evoked for the sheer resourcefulness with which the various guests adapt and make use of the decaying property - the mice who, having worked their way through the jars of biscuits and Marmite in the larder, are able to survive on the tallow in candles and soap, the slugs who feast on the yeast-flavoured delights growing on the outside of botttles, and the lice who live off the mold inside old books. There isn't a corner of the house that goes exploited, with every crack becoming a potential entrance point, if not for wildlife then for garden fungi, seen mushrooming here through delightful use of time-lapse photography. Much like one of the more wonderfully grotesque of these residents, the slime mold, described by Attenborough as "an alliance of hundreds of thousands of amoeba-like creatures" assuming the form of a slug-like creature and exuding slime in its quest for sustenance, one gets the distinct impression that all of these guests are coming together to represent the collective character of the house - which, far from declining, is finally realising its full potential. Only ever ostensibly a place of safe domesticity, it appears that the wilderness was never actually banished around here, merely lurking out of sight beneath the floorboards, waiting for the moment when it could finally crawl to the surface and assume complete control. This is reinforced by the fact that, for the most part, the human interlopers seem blissfully oblivious as to the myriad of animal dramas unfolding all around them. There are only two points in the narrative in which the human and wildlife narratives directly intersect - a moment where the estate agent, in the midst of a house showing, stumbles upon the mice raiding the food supplies and comically redirects his clients to a different part of the building, and another in which a couple of prospective buyers encounter a "tegenaria", or cardinal spider, lurking in the bath tub, and naively assume that they've vanquished the eight-legged menace by washing it down the plughole, when it's merely been lying in wait for the deluge to subside. (Due to the obviously staged nature of these encounters, it seems a safe bet that the animals we see are not actually wild home invaders but captive specimens, which is probably the case for a number of other scenes too). There comes a point where it seems difficult to say who are the real inferred "uninvited guests" of the title, as it is the human house hunters who appear out of place amid the increasingly murky domain (not that the animals have total mastery - that cardinal spider is apparently unable to climb its way out of the bath tub, foiled by the slippery enamel surface).

The documentary ends with a superficial victory for the humans. Following a harsh winter, in which the various domestic artifacts become lifelines for the house's resourceful wild residents, spring arrives, and brings hope for renewal. The cat is last seen being scared away by the falling debris caused by a family of squirrels nesting in the chimney, foreshadowing the arrival of the modern human family who will shortly move in and get to work on renovating the property, pulling out every stop to reclaim it back from the jaws of Nature. But although they toil hard in removing all traces of wilderness from within (their cleaning efforts are interspersed with various shots the family's young children running ruckus around the property, creating endless disturbance for the animals and signalling that their dark and dank paradise has finally been shattered), the task proves unending, for there is, in the best horror fashion, a grisly twist in the tale. While many creatures may be in the process of moving out, for others the real utopia is only just beginning. All around the house, legions of blood-sucking parasites are awakening to feast on the spoils brought by their fresh human company, roused by the warmth of the carbon dioxide in their breath. The war between Man and Nature, it seems, is not over but is merely entering a whole new phase, and while Nature may have been forced back into the sidelines for now, there is the implicit suggestion that it maintains the upper hand.

The final moments of "Uninvited Guests" play like the opening of a horror story, with our proud home-owning couple attempting to sleep in their new bedroom, only to find themselves inexplicably unsettled. They are intuitively aware of the other presences stirring within the house and, despite the husband's best attempts to reassure his wife that, "There's no one here but us", can only lie there in the cool grip of insomnia, as the documentary fades out with the sounds of an off-screen calamity occurring downstairs. It's never established what caused that, but I like to think that it was the cat, who didn't completely scarper when the squirrels sent a shower of soot raining down upon it. Obviously, the ghosts of this house's untold history won't be banished quite so easily.