...and Other Strange Tales From Bodmin Moor
Of course you are going to find strange people on Bodmin Moor, they are all blaadin batsh*t up there even by cornish standards. Its norhing to do with living on the moor. Thats why they built a psychiatric facility in Bodmin.
This eclectic, observational documentary series has been quite a hit with the critics. Described as "fascinating" and "brilliant", tonight's episode - about residents on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, is especially noteworthy.
To most people, the A and B roads scored across the bleak and lonely grassland of Bodmin are a way of getting from one side of the Moor to the other, but, to Arthur Boyt, they are more like a chain of exotic delicatessens. Unlike most meat-eating Britons, Arthur never goes into a butcher's shop. He gets his meat by scooping up the carcasses of animals crushed under the wheels of passing traffic. It is a diet as varied as it is strange, and he boasts a taste for the meat of cat, barn owl, squirrel and hedgehog, as well as badger.
It was when he went on about loving 30 day old badger that got me (the fat on the one he was hshowing at the time was already turning an interesting shade of green..
However, after years of harvesting the Cornish tarmac, his lifestyle is suddenly under attack. His wife - a vegetarian - is not impressed. And Arthur has started receiving abusive and threatening nuisance calls at their isolated moorland cottage. But, as the bizarre phone siege of their property mounts, it is clear there is one thing Arthur will never contemplate: changing his diet.
I could be mistaken but I think he actually released a roadkill cookbook at one point.
As well as Arthur, film-maker Daniel Vernon meets Clifford (the self-appointed guardian of the Moor and a man who spends much of his life following up reports of panther sightings); father-and-son farmers Peter and Simon; and local detective Barry. Vernon finds surprising patterns in the lives and behaviour of the men who have chosen to live in such a remote outpost of Britain.
