"Murrain" (1975)

Kill a cat in the name of magic and then go home and watch your colour telly!

When BBC staff writer Nigel Kneale was asked to come up with an idea to fill a gap in the 1953 schedules, he just so happened to change television for the better. That idea was The Quatermass Experiment, a six-episode half-hour serial that not only scared the bejesus out of anyone watching, but also pushed what television could be. No longer “radio with pictures,” The Quatermass Experiment was home cinema, a deeply unsettling sci-fi tale of alien mutation/invasion. Quatermass would spawn a film sequel, The Quatermass Xperiment, in 1955 (which Kneale wasn’t particularly keen on¹), as well as the television sequel Quatermass II (1955), which the BBC commissioned to put the boot into the newly established commercial network ITV.

After a sojourn in films – where Kneale wrote two screen adaptations of John Osborne, Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (1960) for Tony Richardson, as well as an adaptation of HG Wells’s First Men in the Moon for Columbia – Kneale returned to the BBC as a television playwright determined to shake his audience, first with The Road (1963), a terrific time-echo chiller, then The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968)², a terrifyingly prescient look at reality television, before he ruined everyone’s Christmas in 1972 with The Stone Tape, a ghost story with a scientific bent that saw Jane Asher menaced almost as horrifyingly as poor old Sarah Greene would be twenty years later.³

But by 1974, Kneale’s relationship with the BBC was rocky, if not downright contentious. His fourth Quatermass serial looked too expensive for the notoriously spendthrift Corporation, and there was an abiding worry that Kneale’s work would be too grim for your average viewer, featuring as it did a dystopian future defined by martial law and youth cults.⁴ Kneale’s other work, a play titled Cracks, was commissioned for the Play for Today slot, but ultimately dumped. With the BBC no longer a viable option, Kneale began to look elsewhere for a sympathetic producer. And he found one in Nick Palmer.

Against the Crowd was one of many anthology series knocking about in the 1970s,⁵ including The Wednesday Play and the aforementioned Play for Today, and its theme was simple: plays that showed one voice against many. Unfortunately, Palmer was struggling to find quality work: “We live in a consensus period, where writers are turning out material which always fits into conventional thinking. It proved to be difficult to find people who were out of step with popular thought.” There were plays about parents of a child with Down Syndrome (“Poor Baby”), interracial affairs (“Carbon Copy”), and larceny turned murder (“We Are All Guilty”), but the only play that stands out now is Kneale’s “Murrain.”

“Murrain” – an archaic word that loosely translates to “plague,” one usually attributed to witchcraft – fits nicely into the folk horror resurgence of the ‘70s. A vet with the wonderful surname of Crich (David Simeon) arrives in a small Peak District village to check on the ailing pigs of Farmer Beeley (Bernard Lee). Turns out the porkers aren’t suffering from hog fever or swine vesicular disease. This isn’t news to Beeley, who believes something else is to blame: namely, black magic courtesy of the local weird woman, Mrs Clemson (Una Brandon-Jones). To make matters worse, a local boy has been stricken with a mysterious disease resembling that of the pigs. Crich naturally refuses to believe such superstitious twaddle, and further investigation reveals that Mrs Clemson is the subject of a village-wide conspiracy to cut off her water and starve her to death. When Crich buys Mrs Clemson food, her supposedly tainted money causes the shopkeeper to fall ill, and it’s only when the villagers march on the old woman’s shack that they find out her true power with one screeched affirmative.

“There’s dreadful strengths in land … always has been and there still is,” says Beeley. And what might seem to Crich to be nothing but thick-headed prejudice against a batty old woman is given power purely through circumstance. Crich might think the villagers are living in the past – “and we don’t go back” – but he’s given every opportunity to explain the murrain in scientific terms. His failure to do so means the villagers have no option but to believe the folk wisdom, especially now the lives of a boy and his mother hang in the balance. The beauty of “Murrain” is that it refuses to confirm either viewpoint: Beeley suffers a fatal heart attack as he approaches Mrs Clemson’s house, and she cries out “Yes!” in answer to an unspoken question, but is this admission of witchcraft or a general cry of triumph? Or is it a simple case of the woman pretending to be what they accuse her of being – you call me a witch, I’ll take the credit for your sorrows, and don’t you dare try to mess with me again.

Reviews for “Murrain” were mixed, with some critics calling it “threadbare material” that insulted the talent of the cast, while others noted the sinister undertone of the play, even if they weren’t particularly effusive otherwise. And “Murrain” might seem desperately tame by today’s standards – it’s more worrying than frightening – but it does work beautifully as an updated folk horror, a genre which had to that point been primarily set in the past.⁶ This being the 1970s, the exterior footage is muddy, and the village looks like it stinks of pig shit and stagnant water. The cast have “character” faces, even if many of them had enjoyed long careers on television and film before this. Bernard Lee in particular looks ravaged – no doubt partly down his ongoing struggle with alcoholism⁷ – so his final heart attack looks less like black magic than nature catching up with him. And Una Brandon-Jones, probably best known to modern audiences as the suspicious farmer’s wife in Withnail and I, turns in a shockingly ambivalent performance, one minute the victim of a conspiracy, the next hugging and pulling at a doll a little too much as she rambles on about her desire for children – “And I’d have held ‘em and suckled ‘em and grown ‘em thick and strong ‘cause I’d have put all my strength in ‘em, every bit!” Yeesh.

Even today, there’s something uncomfortable about “Murrain.” There’s no music to speak of and the outside sound is frequently garbled, not helped by thick accents. But rather than alienating the audience, it’s designed to make us lean in. Despite some obvious studio shots, the style is realistic and the performances rough enough to be plausible. This is emphasised by the story’s structure. One-off plays of this era didn’t tend to be heavily plotted; they were more slices of life. And so “Murrain” presents us with the dramatic problem, then leaves us to our own conclusions. In many ways it is the perfect synthesis of the standard Play for Today format and something altogether creepier. Crich is a standard professional with a social conscience, the kind of man who’d help Cathy come home if he could; instead of battling an unsympathetic bureaucracy, he’s unwittingly kickstarted a chain of events that will end up with a man’s death and a village in terror.

Even if “Murrain” hadn’t been a huge success, it did represent a key moment in Nigel Kneale’s career. With Palmer, he’d found a producer who believed in and supported his work, and ATV were keen to work with both again. So when Kneale proposed a new anthology series, one which promised to rattle an audience with six tales of animal-themed horror, both ATV and Palmer jumped at the chance. But that’s for next time, my beastly chums.⁸ In the meantime, be kind to your elders …

(“Murrain” isn’t available on physical media as far as I know, but you can watch it on YouTube here.)

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Next Up: “Put it on, Roger. They go for the eyes!”

1. Mostly because of Brian Donlevy’s performance as the eponymous professor. Per Kneale: He took very little interest in the making of the films or in playing the part. It was a case of take the money and run. Or in the case of Mr Donlevy, waddle.” (Table for one, saucer of milk …)

2. If ever a play didn’t live up to its title, it’s this one. So simmer down, perverts. It’s still a great piece of telly with sterling performances from Leonard Rossiter and Brian Cox.

3. Of course was going to mention Ghostwatch, one of the most terrifying experiences of my youth, and very much a Kneale-influenced script.

4. This idea would end up becoming Quatermass (or Quatermass IV) in 1979, with the much more agreeable Sir John Mills taking over the role.

5. There were so many. Other than those already mentioned, there were the various Armchairs (30, Cinema, Theatre, Thriller), Supernatural, Dead of Night, Late Night Theatre, ITV Playhouse and The Frighteners (which we may come to at some point, just for the Mike Hodges episode). And you know what, I miss every one of them.

6. Yes, yes, I know. The Wicker Man. But Summerisle exists almost out of time, so I don’t really count it. The most obvious modern-day folk horror prior to “Murrain” would be John Griffith Bowen’s “Robin Redbreast” (Play for Today) from 1970.

7. According to contemporary reports, Lee was very much on the sauce at the time. He’d be dead within five years. Which is a shame, because he was a powerful presence even at his lowest ebb.

8. One final note: I am deeply indebted to Andrew Screen’s superlative and exhaustive look at this part of Nigel Kneale’s career, The Book of Beasts. And I will continue to be deeply indebted to him as we move ahead. For a wider look at Kneale’s career, I recommend Andy Murray’s definitive biography Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale.