English literature is well striped with badgers: sometimes bad (Beatrix Potter’s Tommy Brock, who kidnaps baby rabbits and keeps them in his oven for his tea), but mainly good (kindly old Badger in The Wind in the Willows). In the 21st century, most of us adore them, albeit from afar. The exception is those Boggis, Bunce and Bean types – Fantastic Mr Fox lovers will know I mean farmers – who believe they spread bovine TB to cattle, and must therefore be slaughtered. And farmers, of course, are moderately powerful. Governments, especially Tory ones, sometimes listen to them. Between 2011 and 2023, more than 230,000 badgers were culled in England and Wales (the UK population is currently about 485,000).
Brian May, the animal-loving Queen guitarist, is not at all happy about this (woah, bit of an unexpected change of direction here!). In a new BBC documentary, he sets out to save them by attempting to prove they’re not guilty as charged – which would make the cull pointless as well as morally dubious. How does he go about this? In the end, it’s pretty simple. First, his friendly vet Dick Sibley radically improves testing among a single herd to isolate carriers of TB; then, having found that transmission may occur cow-to-cow via the animals’ dung, he encourages severely improved barnyard hygiene. Pretty soon, the herd is TB-free, even as the nearby badger population is still infected. Ta-dah! Case closed. Brian can now get back to practising “Fat Bottomed Girls” with Adam Lambert.
It’s my duty to warn you that this may be one of the most uneventful documentaries ever made. Splosh – here’s a cow. Plod, plod – here’s a badger sett. Brian, who wears his glasses on a string round his neck, talks vaguely of slurry, and is apt to stare awkwardly into the middle distance when farmers get teary over their lost beasts (though perhaps he texts them the chorus of “Las Palabras de Amor” later, I don’t know).
But still, I was transfixed. If there is indeed a puzzle to be solved here, it lies not with the badgers, nor even with the cows, but with our poodle-haired presenter. He plays the world’s biggest stadia! He’s said to be worth upwards of £200m! He used to wear sparkly Zandra Rhodes capes and hang out with Freddie Mercury! And yet here he is trying to avoid eye contact with a bloke from Devon while they discuss faecal matter.
I’m awed by the wondrous Pooterish-ness of Brian. The irritability, the costiveness, the fact that he always sounds fed up even when he’s being enthusiastic. It’s a stage show in itself, though hilarious for all the wrong reasons.
I once interviewed May, and on that occasion he told me that cash can run out, and he often worried he spent too much on food (truly, the mind boggles at the thought of the Waitrose trolley that would bust Bri’s Amex – how much nut butter can one vegan spread?). When I asked why, having listened to his moans about being recognised, he didn’t just disguise himself by cutting off his long, curly hair, he snapped: “Then I’d look really stupid, wouldn’t I?” Believe me, he wasn’t trying to be funny.
“I’m a rock star,” he announces to no one in particular on screen, in much the same way that someone might reveal they’re a groundsman at a golf club or the deputy head of geography at an improving comprehensive. What I mean is that, instinctively, you do not expect wild anecdotes about what Roger Taylor got up to in Atlanta, but some long-winded technical info: “Yeah, the Cologne-Zurich leg of the tour took five hours… the traffic in Mannheim was off the scale, but we picked it up after Strasbourg… sure, the bus was a Mercedes hybrid, I’ve got a photo on the phone if you want to see it…”
And now that I think about it, in the film he does indeed do a PowerPoint presentation for some sceptical farmers (if only they’d soundtracked it with “Under Pressure”, but maybe he vetoed that). What effect this has on them isn’t clear. Rural grudges are firmly held – and perhaps some of the crowd, in any case, were hoping more for an acoustic rendition of “Killer Queen” than for a deep dive into a pile of manure that may be of their own making.
Brian May: The Badgers, the Farmers and Me
BBC Two
[See also: Freddie Flintoff’s second coming]
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This article appears in the 21 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Christian Comeback