Northern Ireland Screen's Digital Film Archive is a free public access resource for teachers, students, historians and anyone who has an interest in moving images. Spanning from 1897 to the present day, the films in the Digital Film Archive cover all aspects of life in Northern Ireland and includes everything from dramas to documentaries, newsreels and features, animation to amateur footage.
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The Adventurous Hen
Something is giving the animals on Bella’s farm a new lease of life. Is it fairies or shoplifting that has her hen laying eggs the size of turnips?
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Overview
Bella is a farmer who is as mean as get out so her livestock find their own way to help themselves. One hungry hen improves her lot by shoplifting and starts an animal crime wave. While the adventurous hen grows fat the other livestock conspire to burgle a nearby farm. The barnyard meetings and angry mobs might trigger flash backs of the CIA sponsored 1954 animation of Animal Farm. Will crime pay or is the only moral in this tale that E.T. Green’s makes the best deep litter mash?
Granda is voiced by J. G. Devlin a character actor you might recognise from ‘Darby O’Gill and the Little People’. The dialogue is written by the shocked shop keeper Joseph Tomelty. He was a prolific writer, actor and theatre manager who strove to bring ordinary speech to the airwaves and stage. During this decade he wrote ‘The Mc Cooeys’ a popular BBC radio comedy drama about working class life. His controversial 1944 play ‘The End House’ wasn’t performed in Northern Ireland until 1993. It addressed what he saw as 'the inhumanity that resulted from the Special Powers Act', an act which allowed indefinite imprisonment without trial in Northern Ireland. This material by E.T. Green is Courtesy of Waddell Media.
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