As the programme slowly winds up we see one badger. Rapidly cloning himself
into ten badgers, the badgers urge us to regard the mushroom.
"Mushroom, mushroom!" they cry.
But the moment we are treated to the succulent delights of the mushroom, in
this be-badgered Garden of Eden, the Tempter arrives.
The cry goes up from the badgers, "A snake! A snake!" and we realize with a
growing sense of foreboding that what had appeared to be a perfect
post-modern world, open to our enjoyment and free from moral dilemmas, now
contains the twin dangers of manic badgers and arthritic snakes. We cannot
partake of the mushroom. It disappears almost as soon as we see it, and
like the hungry dinner party guests in Bunuel's "The Discrete Charm of the
Bourgeoisie" we are suddenly plunged into a world of discontinuity. And
indeed, a world of dancing badgers, so much the worse.
As Marcel Proust discovered, the artist must capture the past still alive
within us, and as we glimpse the mushroom, recoil from the horror of the
snake, we are forced to constantly re-live the past, as the badgers reappear
and allow us no escape from the original experience. We are plunged back in
time and the sense of deja vu becomes oppressive as we sense that there is
no ultimate escape from this world of badgers, mushrooms and snakes. Indeed
there is no climax to the badger dance: as if this is a world in which the
sexual ecstasy promised by the mushroom and the snake is constantly held out
as the goal but never to be attained by the majority, even the voyeur badger
behind the bushes.
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy