Peter Baynham’s I Am Not an Animal arrived on BBC Two in 2004 with a premise built to offend almost everyone and a cast built to survive it. Six talking animals live like guests in a four-star hotel. They drink fine wine, read magazines, wear specially designed clothes and speak in a pseudo-intellectual fashion. They do not know they are the fourth batch of Project S, an experiment at the laboratory Vivi-Sec UK designed to create talking animals. Outside their rooms, other animals are tortured with horrific experiments.
That is the joke, and it is not a kind one. The series ran for one season of six episodes, from 10 May to 14 June 2004, produced by Baby Cow Productions. The title comes from the famous quote in The Elephant Man. It has also aired on ABC in Australia.
Trailer, via ppotter.
Six Animals and a Truck
The cast is the reason to watch. Steve Coogan voices two roles: Philip Masterson-Bowie the Thoroughbred horse and Mark Andrews, also known as Glen Belt, the sparrow. Amelia Bullmore plays Winona Matthews the pit bull. Kevin Eldon is Hugh Gape the Japanese macaque. Julia Davis is Claire Franchetti the rat. Simon Pegg is Kieron the cat. Arthur Mathews is Niall the rabbit, rescued from an earlier batch of Project S, who can only speak computer advice. John Shrapnel narrates.
The plot turns on a break-in. Animal rights activists storm the laboratory to rescue the animals. Kieron is left behind, his head removed from the rest of his body and kept alive by machines. The others are boarded into the activists’ truck with no idea what is happening. When one of the animals asks if they will be stopping for a toilet break, the activists panic and crash the truck into a tree.
The animals escape and go their separate ways. They meet humans who are shocked by them, and other animals who cannot speak as they do. From there they deduce they have somehow been transported out of the only world they understood.
Why the Luxury Is the Point
The best decision Baynham makes is the setting. The animals are not prisoners in a cage. They are guests in something similar to a four-star hotel, run by computers, with gourmet food and books. Their intellect was the product being tested, and their comfort was the apparatus.
That inversion gives the comedy its bite. The animals are cosseted, vain and fluent, and they have no idea what they are for. When the activists free them, the rescue is the catastrophe. The truck crash is not a setback on the way to freedom. It is the moment the show’s real subject starts.
What the Show Gets Right
I Am Not an Animal is an animated black comedy, and it earns the label in both halves. The animation carries the luxury and the horror without letting either cancel the other. The vivisection unit and the hotel are the same building.
The voice cast treats the material as farce rather than satire, which is the correct call. Pegg’s Kieron is the cruelest thread in the season, and the show does not soften it. Davis and Eldon play their animals as people who have read too much and understood too little. Coogan’s double duty lets the series contrast two specimens from the same experiment.
The six-episode run is the right length. A longer season would have required the animals to learn something, and the premise does not want that.
Where It Sits
Ranking the season’s strongest elements:
- The central conceit: a vivisection lab disguised as a four-star hotel, which does the satirical work before a single line lands.
- The voice cast, particularly Pegg as Kieron and Coogan across two roles.
- The truck escape and its aftermath, which turns liberation into confusion rather than triumph.
- Niall the rabbit, whose computer-only speech is the strangest and most original piece of the design.
The show’s weakness is that it is more interested in the idea than in the animals. Six episodes of pseudo-intellectual chatter can wear thin, and the series never quite decides whether its targets are the experimenters, the activists or the animals themselves. That ambiguity is deliberate and mostly effective, but it leaves the season with less emotional weight than its premise could carry.
What matters most is the timing. I Am Not an Animal aired in 2004, and its view of animal testing, activist rescue and manufactured intelligence has not aged into comfort. If anything, the gap between the luxury inside the experiment and the suffering outside it reads sharper now than it did then. The show is not asking whether the animals deserve freedom. It is asking what freedom means to creatures who were built to be studied. That is a better question than most comedies attempt, and Baynham commits to it.
I Am Not an Animal is not a warm series, and it does not want to be. It is a six-episode argument dressed as a cartoon about talking animals in nice clothes, and it holds up.
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