​The Banned UK TV Show Too Bleak for Television That Left Two Dead.

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Terraces was conceived in 1984 by Mick Jackson and Barry Hines as a predecessor to the famous post-apocalyptic movie Threads. It was a bleak, hopeless drama set in a Northern English terraced housing estate during the fallout of a Soviet-US nuclear exchange. The BBC deemed the script so repulsive and anti-Thatcher that they pulled the funding halfway through production.

Desperate to finish filming, the production company allegedly took private funding from a regional meat-packing conglomerate. Part of the contract stipulated that the set, crew, and lead actor of Terraces had to shoot a promotional commercial for British Pork. That viral, unsettling advertisement is actually the only surviving footage of the Terraces set.

If you look closely at the ad, the actor isn't playing a happy father; he is still entirely in character as the lead of the show, a murderer and a cannibal. The intense, unblinking eye contact, the aggressive way he wields the carving tools, and the stilted, unnatural delivery of lines like "Fred's got plenty... Arthur's got plenty" were written as a dark inside joke by the crew. The meat on the table was heavily rumored by the crew to be a prop from the show's butchery scene, not actual pork.

The most sinister part of the ad is the repeated, menacing line: "Got what it takes, my wife." Two weeks after the commercial aired on regional late-night television, the lead actor was found dead in his kitchen. His real-life wife, Helen, was arrested at the scene, but before she could stand trial, Helen died in police custody under highly contested circumstances, officially ruled as heart failure brought on by severe hysteria.

Following the deaths and controversy, the BBC panicked, locked the unfinished master tapes of Terraces in their archives, and scrubbed the names of the crew from their records. The British Pork ad was pulled, only surviving because a few people happened to record it on VHS.