Silence of the Lambs (2002)
A four-part docusoap about farmers affected by the 2001 Foot-and-Mouth Disease outbreak captured both a strong sense of pride in family and community, and fierce hostility to the government.
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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history. It is available in full only to paid subscribers.
Content warning: Animal death.
The period between the late 1980s and early 2000s was a challenging one for British livestock farmers, to put it mildly. First came the long crisis in the sector public image and economic fortunes caused by Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), aka Mad Cow Disease, and its failed regulation. Then came the 2001 Foot-and-Mouth disease (FMD) outbreak, which though far shorter in duration, met with drastic and controversial government intervention, including mass culling of animals.
North Yorkshire-based film production company Cheeky Monkey filmed a four-part series for ITV Yorkshire about the local impact of the 2001 FMD outbreak, entitled Silence of the Lambs, which was screened the following year. In its style and tone, the programme really I think captured something of the cultural and political zeitgeist of its period, and the place of the countryside in national life, in a way that I think makes it worth revisiting. Helpfully, all four episodes are available via YouTube.
The 2001 Foot-and-Mouth outbreak
The 2001 outbreak was first detected at an Essex abattoir in February. By early March, over 60 individual cases had been recorded across 18 separate counties, and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food (MAFF) had implemented a travel ban on livestock and began culling animals on infected premises. At this point, prime minister Tony Blair and his Downing Street staff took far more assertive control over the issue. They introduced a more draconian policy whereby, in the event of a new case of FMD being discovered, all livestock on those premises had to be killed inside 24 hours, and all livestock on neighbouring premises killed inside 48. The Army were also brought in to assist in the culling. Recognising the negative economic and political repercussions of these actions, and with a general election looming, the government dialled back the rhetoric and partially relaxed its measures. The final new FMD case was reported in Cumbria at the end of September, with the last culling of animals occurring on New Year’s Day 2002.
There were a number of factors involved in the outbreak and its severity. It was in part a matter of contingency, including the initial inaction of the Waugh brothers, owners of Burnside Farm in Tyne & Wear, where the disease was sourced back to. There was also the nature of the livestock industry in the UK itself, involving storage of large numbers of animals on single farms and their long distance transportation, increasing the likelihood of disease spreading. There were multiple failings on the part of the British state, including organisational failings within MAFF, New Labour’s susceptibility to public and media opinion, and the disconnect between the data the government was working with and acting upon on the one hand and the situation on the ground on the other. More broadly, the European and wider international regulatory framework was also flawed, rewarding countries that managed to remain FMD-free without the use of vaccination programmes (and thus making occasional more severe outbreaks more likely).1
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Unlike BSE, FMD cannot generally be transmitted from animals to humans. Yet the 2001 outbreak had severe ramifications in a number of other ways. According to government estimates, over six million animals (particularly sheep) were culled during the epidemic, often in inhumane ways, while its cost to the UK economy was calculated at £9 billion. Research conducted among farmers revealed a deep sense of often concealed trauma over the high loss of animal life, and significant resentment over the marginalisation of their expertise by the state. Other studies demonstrated considerable concern in rural communities more generally about the economic implications of the epidemic, and disapproval of the government’s handling of it, while the general tone of press coverage evoked a strong sense of fear. The government itself responded by replacing MAFF in June 2001 with the new Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra).2
Silence of the Lambs
Cheeky Monkey Films was set up by film producer Paul Edwards and his wife Karen in the North Yorkshire village of Eshton in February 2000. They recorded Silence of the Lambs in villages of the surrounding Yorkshire Dales between May and December of the following year as the crisis unfolded and then receded. It was made with the agreement of local farmers upon whom it primarily focused, with some featuring throughout the course of the programmes, following them in their farming work as well as in aspects of their home and social lives, and capturing their reactions to developments, such as new outbreaks and the killing of livestock, as they unfolded.
There is a striking contrast between this miniseries and the earlier coverage of BSE by long-running current affairs programmes such as World in Action, with their usage of on-screen graphics and text, and credentialed talking heads. Silence of the Lambs was in one sense much more naturalistic, with its focus on the ordinary and everyday, absence of any overarching expert voices, and reliance entirely on footage of rural life in-situ. Yet this was knitted together in such a way as to emphasise the personal highs and lows of the different farmers, whom we are invited to view as characters in a small-scale drama, albeit ones who routinely break the fourth wall. Their stories were narrated soberly in a voiceover by Lancastrian-born news presenter Christine Talbot, as well as sometimes through non-diegetic use of their own voices, while the morose tone was also captured through the usage of downbeat contemporary pop music, such as Coldplay’s piano-driven ballad ‘Trouble’ on the introduction to the first episode.3 This fly-on-the-wall docusoap approach was very much of its era, capturing an ostensibly authentic ordinariness and striving for a grim disaffectedness, yet achieving this mood in subtly manipulative ways.
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