P.R.O.B.E.: The Devil of Winterbourne and Ghosts of Winterbourne
Content warning: murder, animal killing, ritualistic killing, occultism, use of human skin.
I have managed to find a few odd episodes of this hugely rare series (honestly, *nobody* has seen it) down the back of the internet, and so it's appearing here. If you're reading this I'm sure you can find them too.
P.R.O.B.E. is not actually a TV show, having been released originally straight onto VHS, never broadcast on the telly, and then being released on DVD just over a decade ago. It has the remarkable status of being the very first spin-off series from Dr Who, and as a result is unusually well described online for a show which nobody has seen. It was created by Bill Baggs (of BBV Productions) and Mark Gatiss (of The League of Gentlemen fame), and despite subsequent developments, for the purpose of this blog post is a series of hour long dramas released at least a year apart. Regular readers and Whovians will be familiar with the name of Bill Baggs in connection with the subsequent series The Stranger. Like P.R.O.B.E. The Stranger is absolutely not Doctor Who for copyright reasons, but is absolutely what you get if you take Dr Who out of Dr Who and keep many of the same members of the cast, so there's a family resemblance, as there is with P.R.O.B.E.
P.R.O.B.E. (sometimes stylised as P.R.o.B.e. which makes it even more difficult to type) is about the investigations of the Preternatural Research Bureau, which take place on Earth in the late twentieth century. The bureau is run by a lady called Liz Shaw (and if you are reading a cult TV blog and don't know who she is, bad mark and you should have done your prep), played by Caroline John, and Patricia Haggard, played by Louise Jameson. When I tell you that Peter Davison plays the current headmaster of Winterbourne School, you will get exactly what is going on here.
The first of the two episodes begins with Liz having been called to the savage ritualistic murder of the school's retired headmaster, and also the ritualistic killing of his dog. I'm going to be very upfront here and say we've got ritual killing right in the opening scene and this play does nothing but get wilder from here on, so get ready for literally anything you couldn't broaadcast on Dr Who.
Winterbourne school (spelt with a U in both episodes featuring it, despite it being Winterborne everywhere else online) was started by an occultist called Isaac Greatorex in 1764. Ultimately he was executed for his magic and running a cult. Obviously you will gather that he was the natural person to start a school and was quite as insane as anyone else in this country. Needless to say the school has been rumoured to be haunted by Greatorex's ghost for years, because obviously. The retired headmaster and the current headmaster, Gavin Purcell (Davison) have restarted Greatorex's cult and persuaded, magically or otherwise, Purcell's nephew Christian that he is actually Isaac Greatorex. Of course what comes next is a succession of ritualistic attacks on animals, killings and some very strange rituals among the boys, including blood sucking. Ultimately the history teacher is killed and one of the boys vanishes.
Now, obviously, if his crimes don't personally affect you it is the ultimate dream of every schoolboy to have the headmaster either murdered or sent to prison, and in The Devil of Winterborne each of these things happen to one headmaster.
In truth it's a most peculiar school. It was obviously filmed on a budget on location in an actual school, and the production has solved the absence of the hundreds of pupils which would require extras, by having the sole three pupils stay in the school over the Whitsun holidays. Nonetheless there are still two teachers and a garden boy (played by Gatiss) and Davison floats around in an academic gown, which doesn't give a very holiday impression.
When we come to the second Winterbourne episode, not to be outdone it starts with the boy who vanished just turning up dead on a motorway bridge like you do. Then we go straight into Reese Shearsmith's character being surprised to discover that the new headmistress is apparently the history teacher who was murdered in the last episode, although she turns out to be her twin sister, played by the same actress, as if the show wasn't already weird enough. And so we are straight into one boy being encouraged to suck the blood of another boy, without a pause for breath. If this sounds like the second episode is just rehashing the first episode, don't worry there's some weird stuff this episode has up its sleeve. I mentioned how Peter Davison's character went to prison for...well, I'm not quite sure but possibly murder but it will come as no surprise to anyone that there is a hint of some pervy stuff going on as well, but he is released on appeal because of a lack of evidence. This is lucky to the plot, because of course he is the only one who can enact Greatorex's ritual to invoke some divinity or possibly the devil, and we have the magnificent sight of this ritual, performed using a grimoire made from Greatorex's actual skin. Needless to say this is encouraged by the Preternatural Research Bureau.
There is a problem with the casting, which is that the pupils are all supposed to be just turning 18, but the actors cast are way too old. Reese Shearsmith (also of The League of Gentleman) appears in one of his first roles, and was something like 26 when this was made, and it shows. The strange things going on and the age of the actors give a strange impression. It's really odd watching a grown man telling Peter Davison that he isn't a child, only to have Davison tell him that there's nothing wrong with him that a day in bed wouldn't put right, young man. There are also occasional hints of gay activity amongst the boys (they snog at a couple of places, which soon turns into blood sucking), and so having grown men dressed and acting as schoolboys is just wrong.
I think there's a possibly criticism that the two episodes try to cover far too much material for what is essentially a school detective story with preternatural aspects, but honestly I love it.
I recommend this show very highly.
Credit: I can't for the life of me get the first episode to download so am heavily indebted to tardis.fandom.com for much of the background information.
This blog is mirrored at
culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive (from September 2023) and culttvblog.substack.com (from January 2023 and where you can subscribe by email)
Archives from 2013 to September 2023 may be found at culttvblog.blogspot.com and there is an incomplete index to the tags used on the Tumblr version at https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/729194158177370112/this-blog
There is an index to posts on the Substack version here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/index-of-posts?r=1q6qo6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
About this blog: https://culttvblog.substack.com/about