54. Black and White Beauty
12 October 1976
With ‘Black and White Beauty’ we reach the midpoint of Series 6, and it’s another experimental piece at once beguiling and uncanny, comedically speaking.
The first surprise is structural. Rather than the 50-50 split we’re used to from Garden-Oddie script collaborations, the story is broken up into three roughly equal parts: Dr Garden’s Rest Home for Clapped Out Old Animals; the arrival and training of Black and White Beauty; the Grand National race. Of these, the first and third function like the usual halves, bookending a spoof of Black Beauty (in particular) and sports training/triumphant underdog stories (more generally).
But does ‘spoof’ do it justice?
The opening section is a vintage Goodies setup, replete with wordplay, visual gags and clever twists on expectation. The finish is equally distinctive in its ludicrous escalation—a Grand National steeplechase contested solely by pantomime horses, each one a 10,000:1 outsider! But what of that middle bit? The spoof is affectedly over-the-top, the only obvious subtlety being in how neatly it stitches together the traditionally madcap and incongruously disconnected Garden-Oddie script halves.
Black and White Beauty is palpably not racehorse material.[1] Tim and Graeme’s training regime is never going to make him a winner. Bill’s abject cruelty, like that of so many a storybook antagonist, serves no purpose but to establish villainy. The overtness is confronting, unsatisfying, unsubtle—but then so are the tropes themselves. It’s as if the lads are saying, ‘These types of stories are so silly already, we can’t do more than point it out.’ The middle section, in essence, spells out what the Super Chaps have done all along, only overtly bridging the usually jump-cut gap between over-the-top and outright absurd.
Of course, even amidst—within—the egregious hamming up, there are hidden subtleties, such as the parallel between Graeme’s tommy-gunning of a stick insect (itself an outrageous escalation) and Bill’s subsequent treatment of Black and White Beauty. By rights, Graeme—not Bill—should have been the ruthless villain of the piece; but this, too, is part of the critique. Characters, in this sort of story, are malleable, their actions predicated on nothing more than narrative convenience. The more overt the lads’ stilted parody, the more submerged the clever dig at deficiencies in the source material.
There are, to be sure, some uncomfortable moments for modern viewers. Tim’s naming of the horse, for example:
…seems nothing but offensively ‘of its time’—though here, too, one could construe a criticism (rather than merely an aping) of the callous, casual racist. Tim and Graeme’s dressing up as Gypsies, meanwhile, is about as culturally offensive as it comes; yet their behaviour is shown to be not only self-serving and shamelessly exploitative of cultural prejudices, but also manifestly dim-witted.
Their comeuppance is immediate, and they spend the rest of the episode consigned to a horse costume, the snickering head and much-whipped butt of the joke.[2]
The 1982 film adaptation of The Man From Snowy River would show the antagonist as having made a fortune betting his life savings on a horse race. The Goodies, ahead of their time in pushing back against such tropes, adopt a far more realistic stance (within their wildly comedic framework) and end up penniless. Forced into cahoots at the Grand National, neither heroes[3] nor villain win, the Super Chaps pulling up before the finish line (another trope) to indulge in some performative posturing. The spiral is comedically astute, the ending quintessentially Goodies in its lack of triumph… but what a poke in the eye for Black Beauty and its ilk!
As to the efficacy of the experiment, I’m going to call it a success—though perhaps not one that demands replicating? A glorious oddity more than sustainable triumph. Other viewers might disagree, but then the assessment is not, as it were, black and white.
Kenneth for the win!
Jacob Edwards, 12 October 2026
Tweets:
Previous: Daylight Robbery on the Orient Express
Next: It Might As Well Be String
[1] The fact that he’s called Kenneth is a glorious one-liner (Tim: “That’s far too common!”), but it also makes the point that, like so many protagonists in these against-the-odds stories, he is in no way intrinsically special, and that expectations of success are very much projected upon him.
[2] As with the Major in Fawlty Towers, the intent is surely to ridicule bigotry and racism, not promote it.
[3] And let’s not forget that Tim and Bill bought opportunistically into Graeme’s scheme to exploit elderly animal-owners. The training of Black and White Beauty, for all Tim’s starry-eyed wonder, is an attempt to defraud its original owners of their life savings.