Inside No. 9 '22: Wise Owl (aka Bird of Prey)

Content warning: child abuse 

Earlier this month we bid farewell to the BBC series Inside No. 9, a show that could be aptly described as the modern-day successor to Tales of The Unexpected, but with plenty of personality and devilish ingenuity all of its own. Like ToTU, it was comprised of half-hour stand-alone comic dramas exploring the meaner side of human nature, typically with some kind of ghoulish twist at the end. Creators Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, who'd previously collaborated on the gleefully grotesque cult comedies The League of Gentlemen and Psychoville, tended to star in each story, although always as different characters; occasionally they took a backseat, and at least one episode, "3 by 3", did not feature them at all. The one major constancy was that every episode took place in a venue that in some way pertained to the number 9. Usually this denoted the house or apartment number, but Shearsmith and Pemberton also liked to think outside of the box in terms of how to work in that titular number (for example, in one episode, "Diddle Diddle Dumpling", it referred to the size of a shoe that formed a pivotal plot detail). The genre of the series was also perpetually shifting - some episodes were flat-out horrors, others were surprisingly tender tales of human vulnerability. One of the thrills of the series was entering into each weekly 9 and never knowing exactly what you would find. Besides the 9, there were really only two guarantees - a) every episode contained a "hidden hare" (literally an ornamental leporine slipped somewhere into the mise en scene) and b) the toilet and its related bodily functions always featured to some capacity, usually as a revolting observation on the side. Actually, I can't claim to have gone through the entire series with a fine enough comb to say for certain that the latter applied to absolutely every episode, but I feel confident in saying that episodes devoid of shit, piss or fart jokes were a whole lot rarer than episodes where nobody dies, and those constituted a slim minority. Shearsmith and Pemberton may be creative geniuses, but their trains of thought never seemed to venture far from out of the toilet bowl. And that's grand - the toilet has long served as a beautiful shorthand for everything ugly and forbidden about the human psyche, the matters we'd sooner flush into oblivion and not give a second's thought. We might recall the specific ground that Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho broke in 1960, with its unusually prominent focus on a flushing toilet.

Psycho, most appropriately, was given the tip of the hat quite a few times throughout Inside No. 9. One episode, "Private View", opens with a "Psycho moment", where a popular guest star is introduced and abruptly killed off. In "Merrily, Merrily", a character who mentions having studied psychology is met with the plebeian response, "Yes, I've seen that. Where she gets stabbed in the shower..." And of course, it's hard to not have the Bates in mind through much of "Death Be Not Proud", watching David's morbid relationship play out with his own gruesome mother (itself transplanted from Psychoville); they are gleeful caricatures of the very archetypes the Bates helped cement in popular consciousness. The most substantial of all these Psycho homages, though, occurs in the series 7 episode, "Wise Owl", which was directed by Louise Hooper and first broadcast on 1st June 2022. Its protagonist, Ronnie Oliver (Shearsmith), is an obvious counterpart to Norman Bates, albeit one who lurks in a suburban home in Rochdale (numbered 9, of course), rather than an isolated pocket of the Californian highway. He is yet another socially maladjusted figure who practices taxidermy, has a thing about birds and mentally has never escaped the shadow of the parental figure who dominated him throughout childhood. The particulars of the plot, however, are less evocative of Hitchcock's film than of the Richard Franklin-directed sequel, Psycho II (1983); Ronnie, like the middle-aged Norman, has returned to face his childhood demons following a lengthy period of hospitalisation. There are also echoes of Stephen King's Pet Sematary, with Pemberton playing Derek Blenkin, a client who tasks Ronnie with resurrecting the deceased pet of his five-year-old daughter, an albino rabbit named Ferrari. Like King's protagonist, Blenkin is hoping to delay a conversation about death with his daughter, confident he can pass the stuffed rabbit off as living by telling her it's always tired. His concern for his daughter's feelings is comically undercut by his desire to secure to the cheapest possible option, suggesting to Ronnie that he might leave off the rabbit's legs if it will spare expenses.

Now that the series has formally concluded and I've seen every installment, I have few qualms in declaring "Wise Owl" my personal pick of the bunch. It is, in my eyes, an unmitigated triumph. Given my fondness for all things Psycho, the Bates allusions alone might have been enough to get it into my good graces. But what really elevates this one to such immaculate heights is that it doubles as Shearsmith and Pemberton's affectionate tribute to yet another subject near and dear to my heart - the public information film. Shearsmith and Pemberton were clearly hotly attuned to the impact that such films had on the legions of tender young minds raised on their sombre teachings, tensions that lingered well into adulthood. They wove a beautiful, smartly-observed little horror yarn from that idea, one powered by a rich plethora of creeping disturbances but also an undercurrent of genuine pathos. "Wise Owl" is centred around a fictitious series of public information films that existed in a parallel version of the 1970s, an era that boasts particular infamy for the array of shocking and psychologically scarring educational films that found their way onto UK television screens, a lot of which played like miniature horrors and were specifically intended to be seen by younger viewers. The decade has, in recent times, acquired quite another infamy, as an era in which certain celebrated public figures were able to commit sexual offences with impunity. In a few cases, those infamies have intersected, with some of the most memorable PIFs of their day featuring since-disgraced figures who were then deemed credible as the voice of reason. There was a time when "Teach Them To Swim" was considered such a gentle and wholesome PIF, up against the barbaric likes of "Lonely Water", but now it's every bit as cursed, if not more so. Such apprehensions haunt "Wise Owl" to the core.

"Wise Owl" opens with an animated segment, a faux PIF presented with all the grain and crackle of a 1970s artifact. A brother and a sister (the voices of Dylan Hall and Isabelle Lee Pratt, respectively) are out playing with a kite. The boy, the older of the two, states that he's been asked by his mother to keep guard of the situation, something he immediately blows by demanding a go with the kite, causing it to fly away and get caught against a pylon. The boy thinks it's a perfectly a sensible idea to climb the pylon and retrieve the kite, but is stopped by Wise Owl (voice of Ron Cook), a friendly talking strigine, who advises him of the dangers and why he should not mess with electricity. The sequence beautifully nails down the qualities that made these vintage PIFs so indelible to the children who had to accommodate them amid their regular teatime viewing - in particular, that haunting sense of childhood innocence on the cusp of some awful, irreversible disturbance. The danger the children are in is made all the more stark with the knowledge that it is the little girl's sixth birthday, and the kite that lures them to that dreaded pylon an item of particular excitement for being her present. As a pastiche of a 1970s public information film, it plays itself almost entirely straight, to the point where I could have bought it as a genuine specimen of the era. The only part that doesn't quite ring true is when Wise Owl retrieves the kite himself by blowing in its direction, providing a facile solution to the problem of the girl's lost present, so that the character goes from being authoritative to super-heroic. For now, a pivotal dynamic is established. Wise Owl is the voice of reason; vigilant, trustworthy and benevolent, a parental surrogate who can be counted on in the absence of adult supervision. The boy is foolish and courts disaster. The girl is innocent and helpless.

The look and the tone of the "Wise Owl" animations was blatantly inspired by the "Charley Says" series, in which a young boy named Tony was prevented from making stupid decisions by a cat named Charley (who, unlike the Owl, couldn't speak English, only a discordant garble of purrs and yowls, which Tony inexplicably understood). Two of the Charley shorts are recalled directly at later junctions in the episode - the one where Charley stopped Tony from playing with a box of matches, and the one where he stopped him from going off with a sinister figure who'd approached him in the playground with the (undoubtedly false) promise of taking him to see some cute puppies. There was, however, never a Charley short devoted to the dangers of scaling pylons - the inspiration for the opening sequence (and the use of an owl in general) looks to have been drawn from the 1978 film Play Safe, where a cartoon robin was lectured by an owl on the dangers of electricity, citing grim examples of children who met horrible fates by playing too close to live wires and substations (including one particularly infamous interlude with Jimmy and his Frisbee).

As Ronnie goes about his business inside the house (which includes a harrowing moment, the story's analogue to the Psycho shower scene, where he contemplates suicide by climbing into a filled bathtub with a mains-powered radio), his routine is interspersed with further animations starring Wise Owl and the children. But unlike the opening sequence, both contain obvious disturbances to the formula, suggesting a breakdown of the security Wise Owl supposedly upholds. In the second PIF, the boy and his sister are enjoying a day at the beach. The sister goes off with their mother to paddle in the waves, while the boy, left alone to dig sandcastles, is approached by a strange man who offers to show him a starfish. He nearly accepts the invitation, but is once again saved by the interventions of Wise Owl, who advises him that the man's intentions might not be as friendly as his appearance (which is really not at all friendly, since he's literally a looming shadow in a trench coat and fedora; he actually looks a lot like the stranger in that illustrated edition of "Eddy Scott Goes Out To Play" I covered a couple of years ago). As a pastiche, it doesn't play itself quite as straight as its predecessor, with the added bit of blackly adult humor in the stranger's upfront observation that the boy looks "nice and shiny". It's also a little more on the nose with its nightmarish imagery - unlike its "Charley" equivalent, in which the playground prowler gave up the instant he was called out, we here get the extra sordid detail of the stranger's dark, gangly hand reaching out to seize the boy, prompting a violent response from Wise Owl, who swoops in and bites the hand. With the boy spared, Wise Owl turns and delivers the relevant lesson to the camera: "Don't be a Twit You! Always stay safe with your mummy and daddy! Wise Owl knows best!" The sequence doesn't end there, however. It rounds off with an unsettling epilogue, where Wise Owl flies away, leaving the boy alone once more, shaken and crying out for his mother.

An even more disturbing subversion occurs in the third film, which takes place, once again, on the girl's sixth birthday. Impatient for their mother to arrive home and to light the candles on her cake, the children retrieve the matches themselves from the mantelpiece. But on this occasion, no Wise Owl appears. No cat named Charley either. No voice of authority at all, in fact. The children are simply left to their own devices. The boy, ever the instigator of disaster, strikes one of the matches and holds it close to his face, smiling at the camera while the little flame dances ominously atop the head. We then cut back to Ronnie, who is studying his reflection in the bathroom mirror, stroking back the greasy curtain of hair around his ear to reveal the cluster of burn marks obscured underneath. It now becomes apparent that Ronnie and the animated boy are one and the same. The sequences we've seen are conflations; Ronnie has remained so subjugated by the Wise Owl and his teachings into adulthood that he's obliged to filter his own childhood memories through the form and imagery of the character's PIFs. Although Ronnie is now in his 50s, he is still identifiably a child, and lives his life according to the rules laid out by the Wise Owl. Safety consciousness is baked into his psyche, to an obsessive degree; he responds to a buzzing fridge by unplugging most of the house's electrical appliances, removing all the light bulbs and retiring in the darkness. He also makes a point of never talking to strangers. When Blenkin shows up at his door, he accepts the rabbit but avoids engaging with him on any conversational level. The girl who appears alongside him in the animated sequences is identified as his sister, Joanne, and before long we've discovered the terrible reason why it seems to be perpetually her sixth birthday in his memories. It's a date that will forever haunt Ronnie, the day when the kind of catastrophic, worst-case-scenario nightmares outlined in public information films spilled over into his reality. It seems that Ronnie really did attempt to light the candles on Joanne's cake without adult supervision, and it all went horribly wrong. Ronnie was burned and Joanne did not survive. Ronnie has lived with the guilt ever since.

A common theme throughout the animated segments is the absence of the children's mother, and Ronnie's apparent inclination to make bad decisions when left to manage his own welfare and/or his sister's. In the present, Ronnie receives a video call from his mother (Georgie Glenn), who still worries about the possibility of Ronnie doing something stupid on his own. She reminisces about a childhood pet of Ronnie and Joanne's, a cat named Mimsy that was eventually evicted on account of Ronnie's allergies. She then asks Ronnie if he'll be coming to see her on Monday for an important family anniversary. Ronnie responds by referencing that other parental figure whose whereabouts have, up until now, remained unaccounted for. "Will Dad be there?", he asks. Her answer suggests that he is elusive and doesn't involve himself in family matters. "You know what he's like." Ronnie may be without parental oversight, but watchful authority is omnipresent through the eyes of the various stuffed cats, lambs and badgers that adorn the shelves above and are ever peering down on him (in that regard, they fulfil a similar purpose to Norman Bates' stuffed birds). Explicit note is made of the fact that there are no owls in the macabre menagerie, although Ronnie gets a nightmarish visitation from something even more grotesque (and darkly comic), in the form of a monstrous man-owl hybrid that steps into the living room during the night, head rotating and genitalia on full display.

The following morning, Ronnie begins work on stuffing Ferrari the rabbit, and we get a fourth "Wise Owl" PIF, only by now the pastiche has given way into full-blown parody. In this sequence, Ronnie and Joanne are mourning the death of their pet cat, when Wise Owl appears and instructs them on how to preserve their beloved friend forever, guiding them through the taxidermy process in lurid detail. I mentioned that some level of bathroom humor was a requisite for every episode of Inside No. 9, although "Wise Owl" is actually one of the mildest examples on that front. All we really have (besides the toilet's inevitable showing in the backdrop of the bathtub scene) is Ronnie's mother's recollection that Mimsy "had a way of looking at you...like you were muck on its shoe". We do, however, get plenty of uncomfortable gross-out bodily humor in watching this cartoon cat be skinned, its eyes gouged out, its body incinerated and its tanned hide stretched across an artificial skeleton (in Ronnie's words, "Like putting a sausage into its skin"). The cat is, troublingly, identified as Mimsy, although I don't take to mean that the cat was actually killed and stuffed in real life. Rather, an allusion is being drawn between the childhood pet and childhood innocence; once dead, it cannot be restored to what it was. We know that, despite Ronnie's declaration at the end of the PIF that Mimsy is "good as new", that a stuffed animal is in no way the same as a living pet. Blenkin's plan to pass the stuffed Ferrari off as a live but perpetually tired rabbit is obviously doomed to failure, a facile attempt to mask over a painful reality. How doomed, however, comes as a bit of a shock. As the PIF ends, we see the end-results of Ronnie's real-life taxidermy session, revealing a pronounced difference between himself and his Hitchcockian counterpart. Norman Bates was, among other things, a skilled taxidermist. Ronnie is anything but. The body of poor Ferrari the rabbit gets absolutely desecrated in his hands. In death, the creature is afforded no dignity.

Unfortunate, because it's right at this point that Blenkin reappears at the door, wanting to get Ferrari back in the same condition in which he left him. He seems much more agitated than on their previous encounter, having learned from speaking to a neighbour that resident taxidermist Mr Oliver is a man in his 70s, and he might have entrusted his daughter's pet rabbit to an imposter. Naturally, he's horrified on seeing what's become of Ferrari. While he's absolutely right in asserting that any child presented with Ronnie's "Franken-Rabbit" would have nightmares, it's hard to imagine how his tactic of giving his daughter a preserved rabbit hide would have worked out any better in the long run. Ronnie, then, is only an amateur taxidermist, and he is not the regular occupant of this particular no. 9. That is one of the story's twists. It is not made explicitly clear why he accepted Blenkin's job and attempted to stuff the rabbit himself, although it seems that he does, at heart, only ever want to do the right thing and please people. His disinclination against interacting with strangers was potentially overridden by the knowledge that the innocence of a small girl, not much younger than Joanne, was hanging in the balance. But he isn't able to protect her from the bleakness of the world, any more than he was Joanne.

Later that evening, the regular seventysomething Mr Oliver returns home, having been away on business for the weekend. He is of course Ronnie's father, Wilf, and he's played by Ron Cook, who is also the voice of Wise Owl. That is yet another of the story's twists. Just as Ronnie and the animated boy are one and the same, so too are his father and Wise Owl the exact same entity. Wilf really was the voice of Wise Owl in the series of public information films that existed in-universe, and Ronnie has never been able to separate them in this mind. Wilf was not expecting to see Ronnie. "You'll have to give me money for that window", he states, indicating that Ronnie has forced his way into the property. He speaks with a distinct lack of affection for his son, dropping the first casual reference to Ronnie's having been institutionalised for much of his adulthood ("Did they have a telly in...where you were, or were you not allowed?") and unrepentantly acknowledging that he maintained no contact with him within that time. He never visited Ronnie; when asked if he received any of Ronnie's letters, he takes the opportunity to berate him: "I couldn't read half of them. Your handwriting's shocking!"

Even before Wilf shows up in the flesh, his animated counterpart has undergone a significant degeneration, transmuting from the benevolent voice of reason to an increasingly sinister being with each new appearance. Take that moment in the second PIF where he bites the stranger's outstretched hand. Within context, it's ostensibly framed as a heroic action, but it calls attention to the owl's potentially vicious nature, underscoring that central irony that Ronnie is receiving advice about avoiding predators from an animal that is itself a predator. True, you could lay the exact same charge against Charley the cat (in his own "Strangers" PIF, he reduces a fish to a skeleton in the blink of an eye), but a cat's domesticated, and not a critter it seems particularly unusual to depict hanging around with small children. An owl's a creature of the wilderness, which is suggestive of a whole myriad of unknown and hidden dangers. His instruction on not talking to strangers seems like sound advice to give to a child, but has a darker echo in a later sequence, when Ronnie recalls being asked by his distraught mother why he lit those matches, and is again visited by Wise Owl, who simply tells him, "You mustn't say anything." The message Ronnie is being fed is that silence is his only recourse. Even Wise Owl's catchphrase, "Don't be a Twit You!", while sounding amusingly plausible as the kind of trademark saying a character from a public information film would have, takes on harsher tones, in mirroring Wilf's evident tendency toward bullying and rebuking Ronnie. Cook's dual performance is terrific - as the owl, he's hauntingly convincing as an authoritative voice from yesteryear. As Wilf he's spookily mean, but not to a point that precludes the character's discernible wretchedness. When they merge together, the results are both unhappy and uncanny.

Since the "Wise Owl" series ended, Wilf (whose name is, incidentally, only a letter away from that of another predatory wild animal) has gotten intermittent gigs playing to the nostalgia crowd (most recently an event at a toy museum, which had him in the stellar company of "Ray Brooks, Nigel from Pipkins [and] one of the Bungles - not the scary one") but taxidermy is now his bread and butter. He tells Ronnie, "You'd be surprised how many people want to preserve something of the past, keep a memory alive. Freeze-frame of a happy moment." The taxidermy motif serves a string of purposes throughout the narrative. It is, most obviously, an allusion to Psycho, that classic tale of an abusive parent and their damaged offspring, but on that score it is also something of a misdirect. On our first viewing, knowing the series' predilection for gruesome and disturbing endings, we might suspect that this is building towards the shocking revelation that one of our two taxidermists, be it the professional or the amateur, has applied that same process to a human subject (as Norman infamously did with his mother), most likely the body of the long-deceased Joanne. But that revelation does not come. Instead, the taxidermy is used fundamentally as a metaphor for what Wilf has done to Ronnie, in keeping him perfectly preserved, forever a child under the Wise Owl's rule, only a shell of what he might once have been. With hindsight, the macabre instructional film on stuffing Mimsy the cat becomes a grisly allegory for the violations Ronnie has endured at his father's hands; in the aftermath, it would be a flagrant pretence for either Mimsy or Ronnie to be described as "good as new", with Ronnie's botched job on Ferrari the rabbit signifying a more honest representation of the ugly realities. And intensely ugly they are too. Ronnie reminds Wilf that Monday will be the 44th anniversary of Joanne's death; if she'd lived, she would have been turning 50. He's come to Wilf because he has questions regarding what really happened on that fateful day. There follows a replay of the earlier "Matches" PIF, only this time the live action Ronnie is intermixed with the animated Joanne, suggesting a puncturing through of the illusion. Ronnie recalls that she'd received a doll, a tea set and a kite (there's another predatory bird). "Wise Owl" is revealed to have been present after all, only now he is depicted as the abusive and negligent figure that Wilf was in real life. Joanne wants to light the candles herself. Ronnie tells her that she shouldn't, but is shouted down by Wise Owl, who mocks Ronnie for needing to ask permission for everything and tells him to grow some balls. Joanne is left without supervision while Ronnie is ominously ordered to follow the predatory bird upstairs into the bedroom, with the reminder that "Wise Owl knows best". Ronnie was conditioned to always follow his father's instructions, much as he was conditioned to always follow the teachings of the Wise Owl. Wilf abused both of those authorities at once, creating a climate in which the innocence of both of his children was prematurely snuffed out.

With that in mind, we can see how the scenario in the earlier "Strangers" PIF was really being turned completely on its head. The danger lay with the supposedly safe authority figure all along. The message never to talk to strangers becomes an admonishment against ever reaching out to the outside world for help, against Ronnie being able to vocalise what he was going through. This is a chilling inversion of the alleged purpose of a public information film, in which the authority's words are clearly designed to protect its own interests and not the subject's.

The story climaxes with a reversal of this dynamic, as Ronnie holds his father at knife point and forces him to accompany him upstairs. As he goes, he has one more flashback to Joanne, now a flesh and blood child (the girl who plays her is not credited), cheerfully lighting the candles on her cake, the last time he ever saw her alive. He takes Wilf to his childhood bedroom, and confronts him on why he allowed him to take the blame for the fire. Wilf responds that he had his career to think about, morbidly observing that for a renowned PIF voice-over's daughter to die in a fire of his causing was "not very on brand". Ronnie insinuates that Wilf betrayed his trust in him, and the Wise Owl, to which Wilf responds, "That was only a game. You enjoyed it." He then attempts to subdue Ronnie by evoking the lexicon of the Wise Owl: "Don't be a Twit You. Give your old man a hug." Ronnie looks as though he might comply, but instead raises the knife and slashes through an adjacent pillow, causing feathers to violently spill. Wilf hits back with the threatening reminder that such behaviour could potentially get Ronnie reinstitutionalised, assuring him that if he stops now then he won't say anything. Ronnie responds, "But I will", and goes his own way, clear in his mind over what he needs to do next. He's going to go to his mother and tell her everything. Wilf makes a further effort to dissuade him, by slipping back into the persona of Wise Owl ("Wise Owl won't let you...and we must always do what the Wise Owl says, mustn't we?"); in a deliberately on the nose detail that straddles the border between the unsettling and the just plain absurd, he does so with several feathers still hanging off of his body. The spell is broken, however. Ronnie no longer answers to the Wise Owl, having seen him for the wretched fool that he is.

It's tempting to conclude that "Wise Owl" was conceived as a measured response to criticisms of how the series had previously depicted trauma victims and characters with mental illness, which is to say, as ready to kill their abusers and liable to hurt others; for examples, see "Tom and Gerri" (which is a really good, really tense little character piece, although the ending might not please everyone) and "Thinking Out Loud" (for myself, the low point of the series, for a myriad of reasons). In that regard, Shearsmith and Pemberton aren't necessarily offering up anything more egregious than any number of horror-based media, which has an ingrained tendency towards treating the psychologically troubled as outcasts and objects of fear and suspicion (for all of its merits, Psycho is absolutely included; the film's title alone is a dead giveaway) ^[1] - although, correct, by the 2020s we really should be doing a whole lot more to challenge those preconceptions, and "Wise Owl" feels like a refreshing step in the right direction. To an extent, it is another exercise in rug-pulling from a series smart enough to use its own perceived formula to its advantage. In establishing Ronnie as an obviously mentally ill protagonist and coding him according to such a familiar archetype, it engenders a deliberate set of expectations, only to subvert them - in addition to the aforementioned misdirect with the taxidermy, there's also a fake-out moment where it looks as though Ronnie intends to stab his father, when in the actuality he's going for the pillow. But more than merely surprising, it reaches a genuinely affecting and cathartic resolution, one that eschews brutality and shocks in favour of conveying a sincere sense of Ronnie finding a way forward from his traumas. The cycle of horror and despair does not ultimately claim him. As he walks away at the end, we have every reason to believe that a more hopeful future lies ahead.

"Wise Owl" concludes with one final animated sequence, in which Ronnie the boy leaves the house and, freed from his father's toxic influence, takes his first real steps toward adulthood; in doing so, he visibly transforms from a boy into a man. The traumas that have dogged him for most of his life have not entirely receded; Wise Owl continues to follow him, and to berate him with the usual cry of, "Twit You! Twit You!" But he's merely an irritating speck at the back of Ronnie's head, not the dominating figure of the past, and Ronnie is fully capable of dismissing him. "Get stuffed!" Ronnie retorts, and keeps on walking.

 [1] For an example of how persistently accepted such ideas still are in the modern horror landscape, you might look to film critic Mark Kermode's rather tone-deaf response to a listener's charge that the 2022 film Smile perpetuated those very stigmas. I'm only bringing this up because I was somewhat taken back at how he brought Psycho into the conversation, to make the case that Smile shouldn't be singled out, without acknowledging that Psycho was made a whopping 62 years before Smile. You might very reasonably have expected attitudes to have moved on since then.