tits and terror, or: Nigel Kneale's Breasts
Beasts was a series Nigel (Quatermass) Kneale wrote for ATV in the late 70's, a series of supernatural stories themed around animals. I just bought it on DVD and it was worth the £20 just to see the ATV ident again. The other night I watched Buddyboy, in which Martin Shaw plans to convert a former dolphinarium into a porn cinema. The current owner is suspiciously eager to sell, however. What's bothering him? Is he being squeezed by the heavies? Is it the decor in his flat (ghastly)? Or is he being haunted by a vengeful ghostly dolphin?
Well, we never actually see a dolphin clanking its chains and walking through walls, but, yeah, it does seem to be the latter, sort of. That's a bit of a problem, since it is very hard to make a dolphin, or even the idea of a dolphin, sinister. Buddyboy (this is the name of the vengeful dolphin) doesn't manage it. But as it's Nigel Kneale, there is an idea behind the whole thing, with the exploitation of dolphins being used as a metaphor for the exploitation of women. A feminist subtext then, although I can't see Germaine Greer being overjoyed. Watching it at the age of eleven (?) I didn't notice. In true post-feminist style, what I noticed back then was tits, as if Beasts was really Breasts.
Of course I am so desensitized to such sights by now that they are a matter of supreme indifference to me; they were not so common then and, and to add to the trauma, I was watching this with my Grandma, who was babysitting. The biggest surprise I got watching it again came from the fact that I'd misattributed the breasts. I remembered them small and pale on the body of the girl (spoiler alert) who drowns in the bath at the end. But she is fully-clothed: the half-remembered breasts turn out to be enormous and tanned and sprouting from the body of a wannabe porn star who pops them round the door of Martin Shaw's office for assessment. It's one of the few instances in which something recalled from childhood actually turns out to be bigger than previously thought.
Also oddly familiar in that they belong to actress Marianne Morris who, in the 1974 film Vampyres (which I saw for the first time only last week) plays one of two lesbian vampires who reside (squat, really) in an English country house. Here they lure unsuspecting and lust-addled male motorists in order to drain them dry. It happens.
But what really must have addled my childish mind was that Stuart McGugan, a former presenter of Play School, is Martin Shaw's sidekick in this. So he's gone from having Little Ted and Humpty whispering in his ear to boasting of having weighed Marianne Morris' tits on the kitchen scales. I am now recovering long-suppressed, and possibly false, memories of Play School episodes in which he presided over orgies involving Big Ted, 'evil' doll Hamble, and Floella Benjamin.
Well, we never actually see a dolphin clanking its chains and walking through walls, but, yeah, it does seem to be the latter, sort of. That's a bit of a problem, since it is very hard to make a dolphin, or even the idea of a dolphin, sinister. Buddyboy (this is the name of the vengeful dolphin) doesn't manage it. But as it's Nigel Kneale, there is an idea behind the whole thing, with the exploitation of dolphins being used as a metaphor for the exploitation of women. A feminist subtext then, although I can't see Germaine Greer being overjoyed. Watching it at the age of eleven (?) I didn't notice. In true post-feminist style, what I noticed back then was tits, as if Beasts was really Breasts.
Of course I am so desensitized to such sights by now that they are a matter of supreme indifference to me; they were not so common then and, and to add to the trauma, I was watching this with my Grandma, who was babysitting. The biggest surprise I got watching it again came from the fact that I'd misattributed the breasts. I remembered them small and pale on the body of the girl (spoiler alert) who drowns in the bath at the end. But she is fully-clothed: the half-remembered breasts turn out to be enormous and tanned and sprouting from the body of a wannabe porn star who pops them round the door of Martin Shaw's office for assessment. It's one of the few instances in which something recalled from childhood actually turns out to be bigger than previously thought.
Also oddly familiar in that they belong to actress Marianne Morris who, in the 1974 film Vampyres (which I saw for the first time only last week) plays one of two lesbian vampires who reside (squat, really) in an English country house. Here they lure unsuspecting and lust-addled male motorists in order to drain them dry. It happens.
But what really must have addled my childish mind was that Stuart McGugan, a former presenter of Play School, is Martin Shaw's sidekick in this. So he's gone from having Little Ted and Humpty whispering in his ear to boasting of having weighed Marianne Morris' tits on the kitchen scales. I am now recovering long-suppressed, and possibly false, memories of Play School episodes in which he presided over orgies involving Big Ted, 'evil' doll Hamble, and Floella Benjamin.
posted by martin at 3:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home