Ofcom Upholds Prehistoric Animal Cruelty Complaints In Bizarre Case

Record Complaints

The BBC has confirmed that naturalist and wildlife presenter, Nigel Marven, was investigated after wrestling a Tanystropheus during the filming of the Walking With Dinosaurs spin-off, Sea Monsters.

The regulator, Ofcom, said that it had received a record number of complaints after the episode was first aired in 2003, which showed the presenter grabbing hold of the reptile's tail as part of an underwater sequence. When the animal failed to shake him off, it performed caudal autotomy, severing its tail at the base and swimming away in a cloud of blood.

Nigel Marven grabs Tanystropheus's tail. (©BBC)

In the original narration, the presenter who was 42 at the time, told viewers that the animal would recover and regenerate its tail, and that he was familiar with lizards losing their tails when he had handled them as a boy. However, in unaired footage, the unit comes across the mauled body of the same animal whilst filming filler footage during their final few hours on temporal location. Director Jasper James can be heard off-camera, speculating that bite wounds might match the Cymbospondylus with which Marven previously had a tense encounter.

Cymbospondylus considers the nutritional value of Nigel Marven. (©BBC)

A Question of Timing

Ofcom has itself come under criticism for taking fifteen years to come to a decision, but said in a statement that the lack of precedent had made things difficult:

"There are no rules governing 'Temporal Location Filming', with Sea Monsters being the first documentary series ever to use it. Mr Marven's actions would ordinarily have fallen under contemporary animal cruelty laws, namely the Animal Welfare Act 2006, but since the filming took place in the Triassic period, it predated that law by approximately 230 million years."

Devolved Responsibility

When viewers brought up Marven's previous experience of lizards dropping their tails and pressed him on why he had repeated his actions on camera, Marven responded:

"Well, technically, although those actions were in my past, my past was still in the future, therefore none of those lizards had even been born, nor had they evolved. I hadn't even evolved, so none of those lizards had dropped their tails yet. How was I to know that Tany–... Tannis–... thing would drop its tail in my hands? I'm not a flippin' expert!"

Happier times: Nigel Marven tripping on spider venom.

Marine conservation group, ConSEAvation, which is monitoring the case, said that whilst Ofcom's statement raised some important points about when a crime is committed versus when the law is written, these are minor technicalities, and that Marven, and indeed the production companies BBC Natural History Unit and Impossible Pictures, were in breach of the spirit of the law, if not the law itself.

In an email to Beware!, ConSEAvation's press officer Andy Kentish said, "I honestly thought those things were digital."

(For those who can't tell the difference between satire and the other thing, this isn't the other thing.)

Beware! Micro-Tales: Doctor Who and the Rusmoff of Disappointment

This roughed-out Doctor Who synopsis was rescued from a skip in Cardiff, and makes for disappointing (if familiar) reading... Don't worry: not long 'til Chibnall.

The Doctor and his over-confident and generally-very-rude companion encounter the Daleks for the fifth time this season. All of the other aliens from the previous series (the expensive ones) have pointless cameos. A same-sex relationship receives much attention, despite its irrelevance. A character uses a minor swear word, and another makes a pop-culture reference, perhaps to something relating to the Harry Potter universe.

The Dalek's leader turns out to be Davros, who has survived his last encounter with the Doctor, which is left unexplained.

Davros looking wrinkly.

Davros tells the Doctor his plan to destroy everything in unnecessary detail, and demonstrates the enormous power of his Rusmoff device by killing a couple of people who we met five minutes earlier. The Doctor is powerless to stop him. Davros has the means to destroy everything immediately, but dithers. The Doctors reiterates the extent of the problem to people who have also just heard Davros's explanation.

Rather than killing the Doctor and his assistant and destroying everything, he begins a timer. This gives another character from a previous episode time to use a special power they'd never had before to stop the timer and press a couple of switches, which kills all of the Daleks except Davros. Something on the ship goes critical for no reason, but not that critical. Doctor and co. have time to escape.

Davros shouts obscenities at the Doctor as he makes his escape. Davros's ship is shown to explode, but we're left to presume that Davros dies, even though we know he's alive, even though he can't be. The Doctor mourns something which he didn't seem to care about earlier, in order to make the victory seem hollow, because even killing all the Daleks goes against the Geneva Convention.

Roll Next Time and credits.

Beware! Micro-Tales: Sherlock Holmes and the Grim Old Chair

Beware! the Zine cares about your literary consumption. Accept this micro-tale into your lives and know true ecstasy.

Sherlock Holmes and the Grim Old Chair

Freelance sleuth and social disaster, Sherlock Holmes, upsets Dr John Watson.

It was late afternoon and the winter sun was giving up on London. London, and Londoners, were used to this, and both city and folk continued to live to death as greyness swept through the capital like a river of unadulterated misery. It washed over Baker Street. Baker Street was immovable.

At 221b, Sherlock sat with his back to the window. He was naked, except for his deerstalker, and every few seconds he pushed back hard with his legs, causing his chair to creak. The chair was unusual, like one of those wicker frame chairs, but this one had a thin, beige material stretched over it. Umbrella-like, but with a broader, skeletal quality to it.

The door swung open noisily, its handle hitting the wall and continuing its excavation into the battered plasterwork.

“What the bloody hell is that thing still doing here? I thought I told you to get rid of it!”

Sherlock looked up and, having failed to notice the bang from the door careering into the wall, was now surprised to see Watson stood in front of him.

“Ah, Watson.”

“Yes? Is that it? I asked you a damned question!”

“You know very well why it’s still here. The case remains open.”


“What more can be gleaned from a chair made from human skin? You should have given it to the Yard when you discovered it.”

“The killer is at large and I need to make my deductions before the police are made aware. You know the pattern, Watson: the police learn of events and then the press gives the murderer a stage name. I detest stage names… They cloud everything.”

“You mean to tell me that you’ve kept this from the police? Lestrade will gut you… like a damned cat!”

Watson’s inelegant threat riled Sherlock enough to break the remainder of his concentration.

“Now, listen here, Watson. You know full-well that - wait, what did you say?”

“I said that he’ll gut you.” Watson wasn’t about to repeat the embarrassing ending.

“No, no, no. Human skin. How do you know it’s made from human skin? I’ve not told you that.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Sherlock. I’m not a complete idiot. That bloody chair’s got more tattoos than a merchant seaman.”

Station of Critical Review by Kennedy Hiscox-Wormegay with Dex Diabolo: The Hunt for the Ptero-dactyle Apostates by Former Doctor Peter Davison

A Note From Beware!

Long-time subscribers to Beware! The Zine will note a different tone in today's article. Unfortunately our full-time reviewer, Kennedy Hiscox-Wormegay, is currently receiving treatment for the effects of marsh fever and opium abuse. Whilst we are pleased to report that he is responding well to treatment, it will be some time before he is able to pen reviews again. Until then, we'd like to introduce our guest reviewer, Dex Diabolo, who is on loan to us from crappy ufology conspiracy blog, The Silver Disc - which we're not going to link to. You know the kind of head-case who sits next to you on the bus and insists on telling you how and why 9/11 was an inside job? They almost certainly subscribe to The Silver Disc. And as much as we didn't want to hand over the reviewer reins to Dex, he's all we could get. And, unlike Kennedy, he can string a sentence together.

From Timelord To Fringe Scientist

Up until the mid '80s, Peter Davison was best known as the fifth incarnation of The Doctor, titular character of the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who. However, since surrendering his position as 'gorgeous, young thing' to Colin Baker, Davison has cultivated an unhealthy interest in alternative-scenario palaeontology, penning several books on the subject and maintaining several blogs dedicated to the rapid publication of his unusual ideas. He has attracted much criticism, with dinosaur and pterosaur workers claiming that he is simply bi-passing the peer review process, though he has, on occasion, achieved in this area. Davison has also capitalised on his popularity with his legions of Doctor Who fans in order to force his unusual ideas out into the mainstream; after all, if they'll buy it...

Trash Fiction

The Hunt For The Ptero-dactyle Apostates is Davison's first foray into fiction and, if we're honest, it's mind-blowingly odd. We at Beware! HQ wouldn't have been too surprised if Davison had penned a story about oddly-proportioned aerial reptiles, zipping around the skies of an alternative-timeline Great Britain during the 1940s, but what we got was something entirely different. Davison offers up what can only be described as a semi-autobiographical medieval thriller, where he occupies the role of 'Witch-Finder General', tasked with rounding up those pterosaur workers who fail to adopt his take on palaeo research, putting them on trial and torturing and executing people as he sees fit. It's something of a bloodbath: his constantly-updated findings - and his certainty that each update is correct - mean that it's difficult for other workers to keep up with what is palaeontologically 'legal'. Many of them fall foul, and are subsequently put to death. Adorning the pikes of 'The Tower Of Lagerstatt', we find the heads of notorious traitors and heretics Marcus Wittleton, Bishop Darryl Gnash, Sir Michael Harb-Beeb and the mad monk, David Aherne. It's very much like Game Of Thrones, but with more violence and the flying reptiles are less convincing.

Thinly-Veiled Recruitment Literature

The pace falters about halfway into the first chapter as the tone shifts from trashy novel to political manifesto. One anonymous reviewer remarked that The Hunt For The Ptero-dactyle Apostates was "reminiscent of Cornwall's Camelot Castle Hotel. People book into the hotel for a bed for the night, are subsequently forced to endure terrible, terrible artwork by one of the hoteliers, and are then bombarded with Scientology recruitment literature. Castle Camelot Hotel and Davison are two baby legumes from the same troubled pod."

The Hunt deviates so violently from B-movie-esque storyline to paranoid rant that it's as if two different books have been spliced together, almost mid-sentence. Unfortunately, it remains stuck in this pseudoscientific rut for the remainder of the book, painstakingly dissecting every remark, email, blog article and manuscript ever released by conventional scientists, naming and shaming throughout. It's a long and tedious effort; Peter Davison clearly suffers from some serious science envy. Maybe it was his years as a sci-fi poster boy which led to his inability to distinguish fact from lunatic fiction, or that he had spent every waking moment surrounded by legions of fanboys and yes-men. Whatever the reason, the former-Timelord-turned-internet-pest has been the scourge of conventional science for the last decade, and The Hunt appears to be one last ditch attempt to discredit professional rivals and win over those who hadn't already declared their unconditional love during his stint in Doctor Who.