Quality television that I missed out on

Apparently there used to be this television show called The Animals of Farthing Wood, about a whole bunch of animals that, um, all lived together in a place called — yeah, there’s really no need to finish this sentence. Anyway, so these animals, they are in danger because the wicked evil men (you never see their faces. They are just wicked) are cutting down trees and filling in ponds and generally making the hitherto beautiful Farthing Wood totally unliveable; and the animals must find a way to survive or else, you know, they won’t survive.

I discovered this because my flatmate Sarah used to watch this show religiously when she was a child, and she was reunited with it last night, to her immense excitement. We watched the first part of episode one, and Sarah kept emitting little squeals of joyous recognition and filling me in on what all the characters were called and what they were like. (The naming system is pretty basic, really: the fox is called Fox, the badger (voiced by Ron Moody!) is called Badger, the weasel is called Weasel, and, you know, so on. They mix it up a little in the second season when Fox mates (with Vixen) and they have pups, which cannot (a la George Foreman) all have the same name as their parents.) And when I asked her how come the animals of Farthing Wood didn’t eat each other, she said, with enthusiastic interpretive gesturing, “They all make a pact not to eat each other and if anybody breaks it they get thrown out of the Quest to get to White Deer Park!”

Turns out this was a pretty brutal television show and a whole bunch of characters die in it — the little happy animals! and they just die! — and Wikipedia says that unlike most children’s television shows this one relied on strong plot rather than comedic elements. British children’s TV, it doesn’t mess around. You get attached to those hedgehogs, and BAM they are GONE.

(Hedgehogs are really cute. I want a little pet hedgehog of my own one day. I would call it Fuzzypeg and it would be my favorite creature in all the world.)