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' characteristically morbid tone, and with the unrelenting pessimism and freakish misfortunes 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 (not always, though - "We Have Put Her Living in The Tomb" does exactly what it says on the tin, and is truly a nightmare to behold); titles often contained winking nods to popular culture (eg: "In Luton Airport No One Can Hear You Scream") or were 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 segment of dialogue in which the meaning behind the title was touched on more openly, with the suggestion that its analogical intentions were perhaps broader and more complicated than simply forming another cosmic joke at Victor's expense.
In its early stages, the arrangement could be said to come more at the expense of the audience than of 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 noted 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've been 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 sun).
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. Later developments would appear to confirm that we are all 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 the two twenty-something girls, Lisa (Louise Duprey) and Carol (Tish Allen), 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 a defence against getting sucked into the ferocity of the world outside. Victor, though, counters 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 Salmon is revealed to have affixed to his 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 nieghbour who was a professional artist had painted an unflattering pub sign in Victor's likeness, pointing out that he would have stayed up all night just to get it done. But maybe these boxed-in beasts really do have nothing better to occupy their time.
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 sad recognition that it is now too late on in the day for the Meldrews' to accomplish anything on 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 by the acknowledgement that the Meldrews wouldn't have achieved anything more productive by staying at home, 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. 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 yearning for a cool refreshing ginger beer.) 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 running 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 - 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.
"A 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.
