They Dared (a trailer)

ESTABLISHING SHOT: the galaxy. Stars, planets.

DEEP-VOICED NARRATOR: In a seemingly utopian future, one force was all it took to tip the balance to chaos.

Slowly into shot crawls an enormous space-pod - ancient, pockmarked, and somehow extremely ominous.

DEEP-VOICED NARRATOR: Temptation.

CUT to: PRINCIPAL RIVETS, head-and-smokestacks shot, upon a flickering school tele-broadcast monitor.

PRINCIPAL RIVETS: As you are no doubt all aware, a relic of Planet Earth's long-buried past has strayed into our system, bearing potentially catastrophic cargo from a less conscientious and less civilized age.

INTERCUT to the interior of the space-pod. Heaps upon heaps of cryogenically-frozen tinfoil trays, each with a cellophane lid. We hold just long enough to see what they are:

Supermarket ready-for-roasting honey-glazed gammon joints.

Then back to:

PRINCIPAL RIVETS: You will also have heard the shipment fell into the hands of organized crime, before the proper authorities were able to dispose of it.

INTERCUT to a warehouse interior, piled from floor to ceiling with gammon joints in their tin trays. Shady-looking space-gangsters busily surveying. Then back to:

PRINCIPAL RIVETS: All pupils are herewith warned this forbidden product, now saturating the black market, is strictly out of bounds.

Zoom in closer to his grim robotic visage.

PRINCIPAL RIVETS: Unhealthy.

Zoom in closer still.

PRINCIPAL RIVETS: Unacceptable.

His optic sensors fill the screen.

PRINCIPAL RIVETS: Un- (clank) Un- (clank) Unpardonable.

DEEP-VOICED NARRATOR: Yet try as law and order might, a younger generation was heedless.

CUT to: the school cafeteria.

Deserted. On the long tables, untouched trays of colourful food-paste and liquidized food in bottles with built-in straws.

DEEP-VOICED NARRATOR: They had to have it.

CUT to: a secluded corner of the schoolyard.

Two boys, in regulation white uniforms with miniskirts, looking furtive. Galactic credits quickly change hands. Then, just as quickly, a packaged gammon joint is passed the other way.

DEEP-VOICED NARRATOR: No-one was safe.

CUT to: NECTAR's private suite.

The usually neat and tidy room is in disarray. Littering the surfaces and floor are dirty plates, bearing dark honey-glaze stains, unwashed knives and forks sticking to these. On the chaise-longue lie OUR HERO and NECTAR, both looking distressed. Not to mention quite stuffed and greasy.

OUR HERO: We mustn't, Nectar. Not five teatimes in a row. It isn't good for us. Even I'm supposed to have vegetables too, and as for your digestion...!

NECTAR is tearful beneath her six eyelids.

NECTAR: I cannot help it. It's the honey-glaze. All I know now is that if I do not have it...

NECTAR and OUR HERO hold each other, helplessly, both knowing full well that before another minute has elapsed, they'll have switched the electric oven on.

CUT to: a girls' reform-home on Planet Lepidoptera.

Interior of the cold cavernous hall. Several long files of butterfly-winged girls, including NECTAR, all wearing identical sackcloth shifts and standing rigid as if afraid to move. The MATRON, spindly and grey and terrible, with towering moth-wings of black, stalking among them.

MATRON: Wicked little larvae with your weakness for appetitive gluttony. Thankfully such faults can always be thrashed out!

CLOSE-UP of the MATRON smacking her cane into the palm of her hand.

CLOSE-UP of NECTAR's face, lips quivering.

CUT to: a school corridor. FOUR-EYES and PETAL SMELLIS proceeding to class.

FOUR-EYES: Whatever they're doing to her right now, my guess is she's not having a spanking good time.

CUT to: the launch-bay.

OUR HERO, throwing on a black leather jacket over his tennis whites and skirt, a space-motorcycle waiting beside him. FOUR-EYES, TORTILA FLATS and PETAL SMELLIS look on, desperately imploring OUR HERO to reconsider.

FOUR-EYES: Step back from the brink of this! Even if you spring her, what then? Oh sure, maybe you'll have your next fix. But ride off now on that hunk of steel and there's a part of you that'll never come back!

TORTILLA: Yeah, what she said.

OUR HERO: You don't understand. None of you could. This isn't about gammon anymore. It's about society - nutritious, vitamin-enriched, pasteurized sanitized space-society! Perfect pure bodies and perfect pure minds! We're the first generation in eons to discover there's more than that! And it's out there, Four-Eyes! Nectar and I have tasted it!

CUT to: the universe.

Bright lights of inhabited colonies, far off in the distance. Stretching into the foreground, galactic badlands. OUR HERO on his space-cycle, broaching these desolate dangerous wastes, roars towards us until his determined expression fills the screen. Then:

CUT to black.

DEEP-VOICED NARRATOR: This holiday season.