ANDREW SCREEN goes back to the long, hot summer of 1976 and the original broadcast of Nigel Kneale’s Beasts, a horror anthology series with a rich background of fortean themes and influences.
Ididn’t realise it at the time, but 1976 would be an exceptional year, both historically and personally. The summer was the stuff of legends, the standard against which all subsequent heat waves have been measured. Between 23 June and 7 July temperatures reached 32°C each day, and on five days exceeded an uncomfortable 35°C. For the nine-year-old me it was a time of warm squash, space hoppers, chopper bikes and cut-off denims set against a backdrop of drought, biblical ladybird swarms, melting motorways and water rationing. It was also the year that Nigel Kneale’s ATV anthology horror series Beasts was broadcast (both the weather and the programme are lodged firmly in my memory), although by the time of transmission the heat had broken and the rain fell.
Having cut ties with the BBC, Kneale had written an episode of the anthology series Against the Crowd in the form of “Murrain” (broadcast 27 July 1975), a tale of a modern day rural witch hunt with deadly consequences. The production cemented a firm working relationship between Kneale and producer Nicholas Palmer and together they pitched the idea of a horror anthology with an umbrella theme “of the mystifying influence of animals, usually malevolent and menacing, in eerie circumstances.” 1 After being given the green light the pair would originate one of Kneale’s most outstanding creations outside of Quatermass, a series that had a profound impact on many who saw it at the time, including me. For the past six years I have been researching the production background and the cultural and fortean influences that fed into the stories, and have discovered that it has a rich heritage.
DURING BARTY’S PARTY
The first episode in front of the cameras, “During Barty’s Party”, taps into the wave of murophobia that was gripping the nation, fed by sensational tabloid newspaper headlines. Kneale crafted an increasingly claustrophobic tale of a couple trapped inside their home by a swarm of hungry rats, though the viewer never actually sees any of the rampaging rodents. Kneale later recalled: “What was interesting to me was it was like making The Birds with no birds – in this case it was rats with no rats. The rats were purely sound, you never saw one, and it was only through the superb acting of the two principals that the thing worked. I
