The Book of Beasts by Andrew Screen

(Headpress, 2023)

Reviewed by Stuart Carter

I was born during the 1970s, when Nigel Kneale’s Beasts was on TV, but this was long before I knew who he was. However, I became a fan of his work from a young age after seeing the Quatermass films repeated in various BBC2 science fiction seasons (usually, I seem to recall, around six o‘clock on a weekday).These seasons were mostly composed of Cold War-era US movies, so these films stood out because, well, they weren’t American; but also because they had a middle-aged scientist as the hero, and managed to be subtle yet exciting, in a way that my ten-year-old self—somewhat to his own surprise—loved.

Later, as an adult, I discovered more of Kneale’s surviving work, such as The Stone Tape, The Year of the Sex Olympics, or even, at a stretch, Halloween III. And I began to appreciate Kneale’s singular talent, not only for writing off-beat yet credible science fiction, but, perhaps even more remarkable, for getting it in front of British television audiences at peak viewing times, and making it popular! Can you imagine that happening now, when Love Island seems to be the highlight of the popular imagination?

Kneale’s Beasts is an anthology of six TV plays from the mid-’70s on ITV, rather than the BBC, where Kneale had previously worked. It was described by the TV Times listing magazine as “…a new series with the message that the most terrible and irrational beast of all, is the one that hides within ourselves” (The Book of Beasts, p.51). All six episodes were written by Kneale himself and shown during the second half of 1976. Each involved horror of one sort or another (albeit, with science fictional elements, such as mutants or “psychic” powers, which were very much in vogue around then). The only link between the six was to be “an animal element, the beast [which] could be implemented in any way at all.” (The Book of Beasts, p.5–6.)

And “implemented in any way” they certainly were! There are ghostly dolphins, unseen giant rats, psychic shop assistants, witches’ familiars, jealous “creature feature” stars, and more. They all seem to have been quite popular at the time, but have been largely forgotten now, unlike the Kneale works mentioned previously. Fortunately, Andrew Screen has written The Book of Beasts, in a bid to bring some of these lesser-known Kneale works back into the public consciousness.

The Book of Beasts looks at all six Beasts plays, as well as a pre-Beasts play, Murrain, which Screen sees as prefiguring the six actual episodes, despite not being part of the series proper. If (like me) you hadn’t seen Beasts, the chapters take you through each episode, with detailed descriptions of the action, comprehensive production notes, and copious background information. I doubt you’ll find a more complete account of this series unless you were on set when each episode of Beasts was filmed.

Each chapter has a similar layout, beginning with a look at what likely inspired Kneale’s imagination in each case: where his ideas came from, whether other works around at the time (for instance, Stephen King’s Carrie in the case of Special Offer) or the wider social events and anxieties that ground the action (Nature “going bad” in During Barty’s Party). Screen meticulously gathers his sources for each episode, giving a full background of every episode, vital to our contextualising and understanding them. I was born in the early ’70s, and still appreciated all the explanatory notes, because these are historical artefacts now, very much of their time in their preoccupations, their attitudes (of which, more shortly!) and their production.

Each episode can be found on YouTube, and I watched some of them together with my wife, whose assessment, from a purely modern perspective, was that they’re slow, ridiculous, and frequently laughable. I did sympathise with this, but my own assessment (having something of a background in Kneale, old science fiction, and old horror) was that they are very much of their time (in particular, the male characters, almost without exception, are boorish, chauvinist dinosaurs; I suspect a modern-day Kneale could write a whole episode about their behaviour and attitudes!) But while recognising that Beasts is limited by its era, each episode shows a remarkable imagination and sophistication within those limitations. A modern viewer is unlikely to be frightened by any of these episodes, but might, I think, still be unsettled by the ideas behind them, if not the execution. Much of what Kneale wrote back then still has a relevance today, and Screen’s obvious love and enthusiasm for these works helps convey this power that Beasts still has to surprise. Having read The Book of Beasts I was better able to appreciate that, despite it being slower and considerably less slick than any modern SF or horror, there’s still something relevant beneath the overacting and hideous social attitudes.

Beasts is, paradoxically, about people—even getting a bit meta, as in the episode Dummy, where the plot, nominally about a film monster, is about the man inside the monster: a metaphor that could stand for the whole series of Beasts! Kneale himself says that “…Beasts can never be understood and the most terrible of all beasts is the one that hides within ourselves.” (The Book of Beasts, p.94–95.)

The Book of Beasts takes an exhaustive look at particular era of Kneale’s work, and whether you’re a fan of either the man himself or simply the genre he largely operated within, I highly recommend it.

And a final fascinating fact for me about Kneale and Beasts was that he was married to Judith Kerr, writer of the children’s classic The Tiger Who Came To Tea—the original beast in our homes!

Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.