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. 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 inadvertently 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 expression of 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.
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