The Trauma of Farthing Wood

Two cute 'n' fluffy cartoon creatures, about three minutes before being horribly killed.

Whitney and I have recently been talking about children's TV we used to watch, and one of them that stuck in my memory was the animated version of "The Animals of Farthing Wood", which was shown by the BBC in the early nineties. I have mentioned it before as one of the most traumatic programmes to have ever existed. Despite looking innocent, it dealt with some unusual issues for a children's programme, including at least one unplanned pregnancy and a situation dangerously like miniature gang wars in the later series. But there was one recurring theme that sticks out about all the others. There are children's programmes that occasionally kill off their people, but nothing can possibly come close to this for the sheer number of central characters that Colin Dann had no trouble with shooting, mauling to death or flattening under lorries.

The mention of the programme a couple of nights ago was enough to inspire me to look it up on the Internet, and I found that like most programmes with a reasonably large fanbase, it is blessed with a fan-written set of Wikipedia pages considerably more extensive than the information on less important things such as the telephone, Mozart or Western culture. It's a sign of the tone of the series that most of the entries on the character list have a note detailing how they died, and that each individual page has a separate section entitled "Demise" where you can relive the moments where the author repeatedly scarred thousands of children for life.

The example that I remembered the most personally was the death of the pheasants. They are killed off in two consecutive episodes, the second one just after returning to the farm where the first died and (using a direct quote from the Wikipedia page to point out that I'm not oversensationalizing this) "seeing his wife's now cooked body cooling down at the farmer's window".

But the most infamous of the scenes is the hedgehogs' failed attempt to cross a three-lane motorway. Strangely enough I don't remember most of the programme having much of an effect on me, but that section gave me nightmares for days. Apparently, the scene was intended to explain the realities of the effect that human life has on the natural world. That's right - it not only killed off two of the characters that you had got to know and love over the series, but then blamed you for it as well. And no one explained to Colin Dann that horribly upsetting things like this don't happen on CBBC. They'd never get away with it now. Even looking at this last night, I found it vastly distressing to find out from the extensive death list that many of the characters that I had been relieved as a ten-year-old to see survive the initial series were mercilessly eliminated in the later episodes after I'd stopped watching it.

As a side note, I've noticed as a result of writing this that Wikipedia provides a handy list of fictional hedgehogs should you ever need one to hand. The Internet contains all the information you could ever want and some you don't. Interestingly, there is no list of characters who survived the Farthing Wood series. I have a feeling that it would be rather short.