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Clip description
Bertie (Anthony Richards) enrages a boar, which then escapes and chases him up a tree. Cranky Frank Phillips (Martin Vaughan) unwittingly distracts the boar and becomes its next target. He and his wife Shalagh Phillips (Carole Skinner) flee to the shelter of the house, followed by the angry boar. While Shalagh can be heard panicking in the background, Frank decides he has no option but to shoot the animal.
Curator’s notes
This largely comic sequence looks simple enough but, like almost everything in A Fortunate Life, there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. Firstly, however, it is important for very young viewers to understand that most pigs aren’t really cute animals like the hero of Babe (1995). The boars in particular are strong, sometimes fierce animals with jaws equal in strength to a crocodile’s. While this pig was not really shot dead, only tranquilised under the supervision of a vet, shooting a charging boar would have been necessary to avoid severe injury or death.
The pigs used here and in other scenes were hard to find. By the 1980s white pigs were far more common, preferred by breeders because they are better producers, but it was the black kind that was needed for authenticity to the period. Experiments were conducted in dyeing white pigs black, but the dye wouldn’t stick; production designer David Copping was seriously considering a trained dog in a black pig suit as the solution. Eventually, a day before the shoot, a litter of black pigs was located 400 miles away. The owner drove all through the night to get them to the set on time.
There then was the question of how to get any pig to do what was required of it in this scene. Alan Dobson, the animal wrangler, felt sure he could get the boars at least partly trained and was successful in getting them to chase after someone with a feed bucket as bait. The first boar, Hamlet, injured himself, charging a breakaway gate that didn’t open. He was retired, healthy enough, but a bit sore – it is his stand-in, Max, who stars in the clip. In an interview with ASO, episode director Marcus Cole admitted that, ‘The pig hated us by the time we had finished, but we hated him more. I think we achieved only one shot with Bert and the pig in the same frame. No animatronics back then.’
