British Woodlands Brushing up on...

If you go down to the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise.

If you go down to the woods today, you'd better go in disguise.

When Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote that, sometime in the Middle Ages,

such an ominous warning was understandable.

Woods covered most of what we now call our forested areas,

and they were seen as mysterious, dangerous locations

full of mists, magic, and dragons - decidedly off limits.

We like to think that today, in this age of iron,

we've moved on from such ignorance and superstition.

But tonight, this show looks at the modern TV evidence and asks have we?

Have we really?

WOLF HOWLS

This show may not be for those of you with a nervous

or discerning disposition.

Stay together, everyone. We're going in.

-Have you got five minutes to show me where the best bluebells are?

-Yes.

It's impossible to dislocate the jaw of a badger.

If we keep quiet and very still they might come through here.

Come through...

Pick whortleberries and all that kind of thing.

-You know, they could be lying anywhere in this gorge.

-Yes.

This pine tree is very fat.

Let's move on.

Now, having grown up in inner London, I'll confess

I knew very little about woods as a kid.

I'd heard of Hollywood, Knock On Wood, Natalie Wood

and Edward Wood...wood.

However, these days you'll rarely find me more than a few feet

from somewhere damp, dark, overgrown and musty.

And I know this much - clothes are key to the entire experience.

And if you think I talk poppycock, you wait till you hear this bloke.

No-one can disagree that the invention of the gumboot was

an important advance in resolving a problem which has baffled

countrymen ever since one old sportsman up here in Norfolk

devised a hat for himself out of a dead hedgehog.

The problem of what to wear in the country.

I wondered if you could help me a little bit

cos I want to go walking in the country, you see,

but I'm not really quite certain the sort of thing that I might need.

-I'd like the full gear now.

-Right, yeah, that's no problem.

So what you need's things like shirt, erm, good quality breeches.

This is your tweeds, which you could use in...

It's wool, so you can use that in the wintertime.

Summertime obviously you can use something a little bit lighter.

You've got your moleskins and your corduroy.

Now, there's your corduroys, which are nice and light.

Double seated for the back. Give you plenty of protection

if you're scrambling and things like that.

These breeches have become fashionable now, haven't they?

I mean, you never had them before.

Used to have trousers that went right down to the ground.

Well, your corduroy, they get very dirty and if it's raining

or the grass is wet then obviously the bottom half's going to get wet.

But with these, the rain's just going to run down your naked leg.

Well, you've got your socks on as well, don't forget.

-They come up to your knee.

-I'd feel a bit...

-You wouldn't look down.

-You need good calves, don't you, for these?

Well, it's adjustable. You've got a Velcro fastening.

-Aah.

-Right?

-But I'm going to need some over trousers, aren't I?

I'm going to have some...

You're going to need some, erm, some waterproofs, yeah.

-Some trousers over these trousers?

-No, no, no.

You don't need anything over that unless the weather's bad.

-But if the weather's bad...

-You can get a waterproof.

OK, let's have a look at those and see what else I need.

Yeah, it seemed like our salesman there was herding him

towards one particular type of fabric, didn't it?

Corduroy.

Though be warned, if out camping, never use your corduroy breeches

for a pillow - you'll wake up having made headlines!

Armillaria mellea. Yes, the honey fungus. There it is.

There it is you see. The ring with a yellow edge, darker stem.

Uh... And it's an edible species.

Of course, we always taste them. Always taste the fungus.

It's all right as long as you spit it out.

It's better not to taste some...death caps and things like that.

The erm... I mean, these things have quite a pleasant taste.

This is Lepiota procera.

-You found that in the grass field, I expect.

-Just on the edge of it, yes.

Ah, a stinkhorn. Very nice. Yes.

It's only just begun.

-In a short time all the flies will come.

-It's a beautiful specimen.

Yes, it's a very good one.

It's just at the beginning and the flies haven't come yet.

-They were on it up there.

-All the spores will be taken away.

-Ever tried eating it?

-Oh, yes.

-You can eat it...

They're not very nice, but...

-I can't imagine why anyone possibly could.

-Well, oh, yes, yes.

It's not, I understand, particularly palatable,

but it's certainly a thing you can eat.

When that programme was first aired, it received over 7,000 complaints

from outraged viewers all saying the same thing.

And that is - you wouldn't get a honey fungus

and a Letiola fostella growing in such proximity to each other!

Did the BBC really think they'd get away with broadcasting

such an enormous a cock-up?

A few added that you also shouldn't disturb the undergrowth like that.

But then again, country folk - they have their own ways.

David Lilly is 14 and lives in Suffolk.

He has a very unusual hobby which has to do with dead birds,

which he finds mostly by roads and lakes.

Well, the strange hobby that David has is collecting birds' wings,

which is something I've certainly never heard of before.

David, how did you first get interested?

I started off by collecting feathers

and one day I was given a complete wing.

The person who gave it to me intended me to take the feathers out

and stick them in my scrapbook with the other feathers.

But I liked the wing with all the feathers in it

so much that I decided to keep collecting wings.

-And you've never gone back to just collecting the feathers?

-No.

-Have you got the bird that you first collected here?

-Yeah, it's a jay.

It's this one here.

You can always tell the jay because of these bright blue

and black bars along the wing there.

-These are beautiful colours, aren't they?

-Yeah.

In fact, all of these wings have got incredible colour schemes on them.

-And this one...

-Yes, this is a kingfisher.

-Beautiful blue.

Blue on the top and then underneath it's bright orange.

Yes, it's very wonderful.

-And they've also got an incredible variation of size.

-Yes.

-That one, what's that?

-the heron here, it's a fairly large bird.

And then here you see Britain's smallest bird, which is a goldcrest

-and it's a really tiny wing.

-It really is. And what's this one?

This is a lovely colour. It's very light, too.

That one's the barn owl.

It's light because all the bones are hollow inside the wing.

Oh, it's all quite fascinating.

Much more to wings than I ever thought there was.

-Thank you very much, David.

-Thank you.

Well, fascinating it may be,

but thanks to his macabre collection over two-thirds of the birds

in Suffolk were flying round in circles.

Or perhaps I'm being too much of a townie.

It's very possible that that kid, diligently dissecting ducks,

was much more in touch with nature than I will ever be.

Or ever want to be.

This fella quit his day job in Jethro Tull to begin a new life

under all natural fibres.

He began with his hat but soon expanded the idea.

You have to learn how...

..to live in a tepee.

But once you've learned how to live in a tepee,

then the work involved in keeping the whole of your tepee together

need not be more than about one hour a day.

THEY GIGGLE

You find them out in a field with a packet of space dust playing

Six Million Dollar Man. Um, you know, it's...

They're not missing any of it.

What they aren't doing is constantly exposed to it.

So the Six Million Dollar Man and space dust is a very,

very minute part of their lives and looking after baby lambs

and playing with the horses and digging in their gardens

is a much, much larger part of their lives.

And that is the balance.

Space dust and the Six Million Dollar Man.

I don't think his kids are missing those,

but I think somebody in that whacky wigwam is, don't you?

That's because you can't take to the woods

and keep one foot in corrupt old civilisation.

It's not enough to merely be in the trees,

one must be completely of the trees.

In the lush green fields that surround Powick,

a tiny village near Worcester, there is a dustman who lives up a tree.

He is Mr Frank Gunnell

and he has lived very happily up this tree for 28 years.

He calls his home Little Dene.

Good evening, Mr Gunnell.

Thank you very much for inviting me into your nest, as it were.

Tell me first of all, when did you decide to live in the open air?

-When I was 14.

-Really?

And what made you live up a tree, for goodness' sake?

-Well, you see one thing with the flood.

-Hmm.

And when it starts coming out it gets about five foot high,

five and a half, five inches. Like five foot five inches.

And I decided, well, I had my little place down there

-and I came up here, you see, out of the flood's way.

-I see.

-That was a very good and practical reason.

-Yes.

And does the river here, it's the Teme, isn't it?

-Does it flood very often?

-Sometimes three times a year.

-Really?

And aren't you frightened that you're going to get caught short

one of these days and get flooded out?

Well, not particular cos there's nothing to scare me, you see.

-I've been flooded out once for a fortnight.

-For a fortnight?

-For a fortnight.

-You were marooned up here?

-Yes.

-Marooned up here for a fortnight.

-Did you have enough food?

-Yes.

Straight to the village and went and got about a month's grub.

And comes back and I had to walk through the flood. You could tell.

It was that much over the top of the garden.

This platform that we're standing on now,

which, with a stretch of the imagination, we could

-call your terrace, it's built on the trunk of the tree, is it?

-Yes.

How old is this tree, by the way?

-Well, I reckon to meself he's about 500 years old.

-I see.

During the 28 years that you've lived up this tree, have you ever

-spent a night in a house?

-No.

-You never have?

-No.

Finally, don't you ever find it desperately lonely living up here?

-Yes.

-Thank you very much indeed, Mr Gunnell.

And I hope you'll spend many, many more very happy years up your tree.

Frank Gunnell. Visit him in branch today.

I must say his woody waterside retreat did look rather idyllic.

But it's not just in timber-lake areas where we find the lone wolves.

No, others tirelessly roam the loamy interiors hoping to record

the forest's fascinating legends for us all.

Kenneth Whitehead is not a man who finds his deepest

satisfactions in the company of his fellow human.

Kenneth makes films of wildlife

and stalking for films is even more difficult than marksman stalking.

You have to get the whole of the animal in shot and for long periods.

He's crazy about deer. He's in love with deer.

What about this thing?

Well, I bought this when petrol started to go up.

I thought if I had to give up my car

I would at least have some transport.

The only trouble is now I've got to buy a horse to pull it.

I thought it might be a little more economic to use

than perhaps my Jaguar.

Must have been rather fun riding in the back of this sledge

with perhaps your girlfriend in the seat and the only trouble is

I haven't got a horse or reindeer to pull it.

Where did you get it?

I bought it in Alderstone of all places in the Lake District.

I like it.

And at last we know what happened to the Ice Queen's charabanc

after Aslan's final victory.

Actually, on that, Narnia is just one example of the persistent

mythology that surrounds even the meanest of dells.

Britain's rich in all that, you know.

Plant a few ferns on a Monday

and by Wednesday the fairy-folk will be revelling all over them.

Even the very trees themselves hold within them ancient secrets...

Can you tell me where your wishing cork tree is, please?

Where it was.

-It's dead, my buddy.

-What, there's no wishing cork tree?

No, it's dead. It's dead now.

The man who would know is 77-year-old Leslie Fisher

who told me that he was still cutting off slivers with a bacon slicer

and selling them to the superstitious for 37½ pence a time.

There, above his head, he said, was a picture of the tree in all its glory.

At one time, sales of the cork became a major export industry

bringing in a quarter of a million dollars.

In his Torquay offices, he employed 26 girls packing and posting

and replying to letters of thanks from people all over the world

that had won the pools or found a long-lost relative after

buying a piece of the cork tree.

Now Mr Fisher is down to a one-room office

and goes alone each morning to deal with the mail.

The tree is still there but it's only a trunk.

Don't you think that from seeing your leaflets some people

may have the impression that the tree is still standing three?

Er...

Well, that is possible. Yes, that is possible.

-Well, do you believe the cork is lucky?

-No.

You seem to be very carefully playing it both ways, cos even in your

-advertisements at the top of it you say, "I don't believe it."

-Yes.

Then at the end you say, "Even I won £6,057 on Vernons Football Pool

-"a short time ago, so there must be something in it."

-That's right.

So there must be something in it, yes.

-But just now you said you didn't believe it.

-Yeah.

Well, there must be something in it but I don't think it is.

But if you don't believe it, then why do you do it?

Isn't it a bit dishonest?

Well, no, it's not dishonest. No, no. I wouldn't say dishonest at all.

If people believe a certain thing, it's hardly for me

to say that they're wrong if they think they're doing the right thing.

-But is it right for you to encourage them?

-I don't encourage them.

No, I don't encourage them

because I start off by saying I don't believe it.

The great cork tree con.

Incidentally, you do know what to do

if you suspect trees of fraud, don't you?

Call the COPSE! I'm absolutely on fire tonight.

Somebody throw me a hedgehog. Why?

Despite their shuffling gait,

hedgehogs are actually quite good climbers.

They can also swim rather well.

They've got poor eyesight, but a very acute sense of smell

and hearing. Now, in the past,

gypsies used to roll these guys up in clay and bake them to eat.

Yes, a very famous face there

dishing out the arboreal survival tips.

In fact, too many of you breathless teens waste your time

hanging about the big cities' nightclubs and red carpets

looking for celebrities when all the real action

is over among the badgers and bluebells

of nature's own Ivy Restaurant.

MUSIC: "Bergerac Theme"

'Jim Bergerac, of course, alias actor John Nettles.

'And this is his favourite place.

'This is Dover's Hill in the very heart of Shakespeare country.'

I like it because it's just the time of year.

Summer's almost gone. We're going into autumn now.

And it's beautiful. The colours start to change,

the sheep, as you see, the lambs have all grown up,

they're crouching under the trees over there.

Actor John Nettles on his favourite corner of the British countryside.

Conkers conquer all on the village green at Ashton in Northamptonshire.

The 14th World Championship brings together conker crackers

of all parts of Britain and overseas.

Conker king Vic Owen presides.

With a house crowd of spectators watching for foul play,

the world championship reaches a climax.

Showbiz joins in - actor Eddie Yeats of TV's Coronation Street.

Proceeds of the day go to help blind people in the area.

This year's target is £1,000.

Les Treliving's the winner. The champion of the world.

Eddie Yeats presents the cup.

This year an English victory, so Eddie offers Les

his conker-atulations from all at Conker-a-nation Street.

"Conker-atulations"? "Conker-a-nation Street."?

Behold the rightful king of the comic voiceover.

That was top drawer stuff.

Too bad he repeatedly confused actor Geoffrey Hughes

with the character he played on TV.

Eddie Yeats presents the cup.

The undisputed show business king of the countryside was always

Mr Percy Edwards, a man who could imitate wildlife

so perfectly he was routinely quarantined

when he attempted to come back into the country.

HE IMITATES A DUCK

To say he had his fans is an understatement.

Peter Sellers kicks off the tributes here and... Well, you'll see...

I don't think anyone had the guts to tell him.

I'd known lots of bird impressionists and lots of whistlers

and ventriloquists and everything.

But there's only one Percy Edwards and Percy Edwards is...

in my estimation, my humblest of estimations, a true star.

HE COOS LIKE A PIGEON

You ask him to do a hippopotamus or anything.

You give him a dormouse to hippopotamus, I mean, he can do it.

HE TWEETS LIKE A BIRD

That slightly amateur feeling, which - I don't use

that in a disparaging way,

on the contrary, it's a compliment.

HE WHISTLES LIKE A BIRD

It must've taken him years to get that right.

HE WHISTLES LIKE A BIRD

Even birds think it's the real thing.

How do you know if they're accurate?

Well, I decoy them and if they come, you know, for instance

if I go out and imitate a robin, almost immediately robins answer.

And the one in the area that's his territory will come

and try to see this other robin off.

They ignore me, but they're searching for this other robin.

And I feel if robins will answer, I don't need any human being to

say, "That's not quite right, old man,"

because I'm quite happy with a bird.

Percy spends his time off at a farm down the road.

HE SQUEALS LIKE A PIG

THE PIGS SQUEAL AND SNORT

I love every one of them.

Orwellian stuff.

Percy Edwards down on Animal Farm. Although Esther Rantzen,

closest to the pig shrieks,

probably thought she was in the Room 101 scene from 1984.

What isn't debatable is that Percy was the king...of that,

and proved that while all animal impersonators are created equal,

some are more equal than others.

I went along to meet bird expert Andy Chick.

I wonder why people like owls so much.

If you look at these long-eared owls,

they've got two really large eyes which have been developed

so that they can look for prey during the night, and these eyes

are close together and they make them look really like human.

OWL HOOTS

And it has an amazing call.

It's like the sound of a person blowing over a milk bottle

a sort of a hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo.

Tac-too-coos, Taffy. Tac-too-coos.

The song of the wood pigeon. And here's its picture.

Hello. Do you know the name of the bird that says,

"A little bit of bread and no cheese"?

There it is. A yellowhammer.

Hello. Today's bird of the week is one that's quite common in many

country districts and often in the outskirts of towns as well.

But you don't often see it in the day time.

Anyway. Here's its call.

OWL HOOTS

And here's its picture. Yes, the tawny owl.

Chiff-chaff. Chiff-chaff. Chiff-chaff.

Well, today's bird of the week tells you its own name, doesn't it? Yes.

The chiffchaff.

When I hear the first chiffchaff I know that spring is

really on the way.

Spring.

Delightful. Dr Primrose Camp,

who talked to birds throughout most of the '60s until served with

a breach-of-copyright writ by Dr Doolittle PLC.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

You think I've forgotten that at the top of this programme I claimed that

the woods were malevolent, wicked locations fraught with danger.

Well, the time has come to let all the poisons hatch out.

Three examples of why all of the most chilling fairy tales

have forestry at the centre of their dark hearts.

One - the hunters.

As Oscar Wilde said, "The unusual in pursuit of the unsavoury."

GUNSHOT

Deer hunting is apparently a confused occupation.

WHISTLE BLARES

WHISTLE BLARES

Whooooo!

WHISTLE BLARES

Whooooo!

Ladies and gentlemen, Haysi Fantayzee.

-Four couples.

-On his own?

-Yes.

-Yes, on his own.

And there's four couples on

-in front of the others.

-Right. Thank you.

Keep on whistling.

We haven't seen them so much through here.

There was a motorbike in front of us.

The riders have come out of Padham

and come out and gone on...

Did they come up across the field or just ride on?

They keep coming here but why the hell

the hounds don't come, I don't know.

So they must be going out up by the farm.

People up there on the road, weren't there?

Up top. Up on the road.

-The cars haven't gone out then?

-Well, there's a lot of cars gone out.

SPEECH INDISTINCT

Hee-hee. The guy's in.

I know. It's a powerful argument they're putting forward there

and the debate continues to rage.

That meet actually carried on like that, without a kill,

for three days until it was invaded by a combined attack

from hunt saboteurs and the Plain English society.

But then...night must fall.

This area around us is the traditional haunt of witches,

of Satanists, of the occult in general.

Around us as we stand now, we've probably got about 30 covens

in the area.

A little over that hill, we have another 20 in the Preston area.

DRUMS AND CHANTING

In a time of economic recession, more and more people have more

and more leisure time.

They're either very poor and on the dole, in which case they'll have

plenty of leisure time, or they're every rich

and therefore have plenty of leisure time.

If you're poor and have plenty of leisure time, occultism is

something that you can pursue

because basically you need only your own consciousness to pursue it with.

Doreen Valiente is a witch

and she believes that witchcraft should never be approached lightly.

By means of our imagination we can make a real contact

with these cosmic forces.

The forces of nature, the forces of life.

And in a wood at midnight on the night of a full moon,

Doreen Valiente carried out her ritual hoping that

in this experiment, never before tried in front of cameras,

some psychic manifestations might appear on the film.

SHE BLOWS A HORN

Diana of the rounded moon. The queen of all enchantments here.

The wind is crying through the trees...

And I'm looking a bit of a berk, I fear.

In fact, no such manifestations did appear.

And this is Mrs Valiente's final comment.

Well, it was very difficult to get the spirit of the old ritual

knowing that you were surrounded by cameras and technicians

and things like that.

But when the ritual was almost at an end,

I began to feel the atmosphere building up,

and I think other people did too.

Shame that. Plainly she didn't have enough time or enough supporters.

Whereas conjuring up spirits can take up to six hours

if you're alone, it can be as little as four in a fan-assisted coven.

OVEN TIMER DINGS

Absurd though that may have looked, can you think of anything worse

to stumble on while you were lost late at night in the undergrowth?

Well, yes actually.

BACKGROUND CHATTER

Why are some of you wearing clothes?

Cos you're supposed to when you play sports.

-What do you mean, "supposed to"?

-It's best to.

-Under whose rules? Club rules?

-Well...

It's for your own personal safety.

Well, the others don't seem to think much of their own personal safety.

This raw pioneering spirit is very much alive with ditches to be dug

and clearings to be cleared so another convert can pitch his tent.

But life for nudists in particular can become a bed of nettles.

Isn't that a dangerous job?

Er... It could be if you didn't know what you were doing.

Isn't that rather dangerous with no clothes on?

-What about the splinters?

-Oh, splinters.

One has to keep an eye on the job, of course.

Wow! Talk about being circumspect!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I will sign any petition

that seeks to cordon off even local commons to all

but magistrates, vicars and veterinarians. Why?

Well, tonight, think about it. We've witnessed witches, wild men,

weapons, winkles - could I offer a clearer warning?

I mean, have you seen the Wicker Man?

what do you need to be a successful lumberjill?

-Good health.

-Good health?

-Yeah. Bags of energy.

-Yeah, I can see that.

How do you tell when it's about to come down?

-Well, I try and watch this part here.

-What happens there?

Well, it's about to go down. I hope it does. That way.

That's the best way.

-It starts to sort of teeter a bit, does it?

-Uh-huh.

Oh, careful.

Jolly good.

Yes! More power to the lumberjills!

I think it was Erma Bombeck who said, "Some people like to go

"back to the land. I like to go back to the hotel."

You said it, sister.

And we're nearly out of the woods. Let me see...

It's all right. You can go.

I'm just checking myself for ticks.

Hee-hee. The guy's in.

PLAYED ON KAZOOS AND COMB AND PAPER: "Teddy Bears' Picnic"