https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOdbvrGLIDk&feature=youtube_gdata
Early draft but short story novelisation, early draft, more characters.
The Zets are unfamiliar with age, believe different ages are different species. KERRICK is pompous, bosses VALOHR around and KLOYT to a lesser extent, think DAVID WARNER in TIME BANDITS - against idiotic minions. NERMAN, similar, fussy, but prefers to work alone, sees KLOYT, as the hunchbacked lab assistant/cook VALOHR - thick but violent, a barbrian, bows, arrows, flames, head-butts.
KLOYT - eats cat alive, animates GRAN's stuffed parrots, aliens ride horses at the end.
Seething tension in the MCBAIN family, rows over furniture, GRANDAD crushed by the ship, trying to get a chicken out of the coop. His body is sucked into the exhaust, and is studied/dissected. Zets unfamiliar with age.
GRAN is a permanently funereal woman, has a collection of stuffed parrots, long afters her husband, talks to his "ghoulish ghost".
EDDIE - DAD is a beef-swiling, country music loving ex-trucker, returned to the family farm.
BRIGID - MUM is a ceramic freak, caring, argumentative, watches LOVEJOY.
JOHNJOE - Beer-swilling sex-obsessed, newly home from Australia, lazy, sleazy, watches softcore cable.
SHONA - 19, City slicker, comes home for weekend from university, snarky, boyfriend dumped her, wishes she went to Australia and becomes a "punk princess alien midget fighter".
TRISH - 15, the screamy, childish girl in pink, has cat "Kitty-Bell", eaten by KLOYT.
GRANDAD - Built the COOP, his life's work.
ground floor - Horses at front, fowls at back.
First Floor - pigs.
Second Floor - Sheep/goats.
Third Floor - Cows and bulls.
Fourth Floor - tools and farming equipment, the main design flaw.
Portcullis gates, lifts, pipes, drainage for water for animals, straw.
LIGHTNING FIRED FROM SPACESHIP ENGINE.
In the sky, within the black cradle of the stars, its silver lining glistening, there was a ruby light shining. Above it was a luminous green disc, a thin, spinning spacecraft with a silvered edge. It seemingly had no doors or windows. It did not even seem like a physical object. It was floating and ethereal, almost supernatural in its ghostly being. It had taken a thousand years time to reach its destination. It was the craft of a race known as the Zets. They were the dominant species of Zeta Galquanta, a planet poised at the very tip of the back of the Milky Way. It was a world that had become known for its dark and savage history. The Zets were humanoids with skin like rhubarb and faces that were at least partly green. They had large claws for hands and long slim thin legs, four or five in all. They were a race of hunter-gatherers who roamed the galaxy looking for species to hunt and kill that they would then eat, as they were a species with predatory instincts. There were many species of animal that they could kill on their home planet. However, they believed that killing other animals on their world, and indeed killing their own kind would eventually lead to war. And war, they believed would cause their planet to die of sadness and disrespect. However, for seventeen generations, they had become lazy. They had retreated to a peaceful existence, and the main food that they ate was vegetation such as fog weed. Fog weed was weed created by immense foggy weather conditions. However, the weather had become increasingly erratic due to pollution, and because of this, what fog that there was left had become poisoned, and thus this was affecting all plant life and vegetation. Zets could live forever without food, but they reproduced asexually by eating, as they were sexless creatures. The fat in their stomach would become a life form. It would become a child. The only thing to do was to go to a planet full of animals. However, all of the planets in their quadrant had been removed of their tasty animals, as they had been made extinct by the excessive hunting of the Zets. However, the Zet High Council duly sent a small crew of four in the aforementioned luminous green disc to the other side of their galaxy, known by us as the Milky Way.
The leader of the expedition in the aforementioned luminous green disc craft was Kerrick. He was a tall, pompous creature with a long, mostly green face that in the Zet culture, passed as handsome. He elected himself as the boss, because he had been to space before, as an intergalactic dustman. He collected waste from the now disused colonies that had been built by the Zets on the planets that they hunted on. These planets were the same planets that they no longer needed. His scientific advisor was a vivisectionist and master surgeon by the name of Nerman. Nerman was cold and callous and he was ever so desperate to bisect a human. He so wanted to slice the flesh in half around the torso. The fleshy, wobbling stomach was something that he was obsessed with, as it was a detail of anatomy that the Zets lacked. From televised satellite messages, the Zets believed that different ages equalled different races of human, as the Zets reached adult form in three seconds after birth, and stayed with the same appearance until death. Nerman's assistant was Kloyt, who due to his muscular and skeletal structure, looked fat to human eyes, but this was not the case. He was all rhubarb skin, all over his little rotund body, except that covered by his chef whites and his large white toque hat. He had modelled himself on human chefs, as he was desperate to eat the flesh of a human. The final member of the group was the least intellectual. Valohr was short but muscular, his mostly green body (due to tanning within the irradiated fog and the black sun that orbited Zeta Galquanta) was covered in tattoos that he had drawn himself. He was tough but with no brain at all. He was the ship's bodyguard and a living weapon in his own right. They would be a dysfunctional bunch, but they would have to work together to survive.
Their ship spun clockwise as it skittered towards the blue planet that was locally known as the Earth. Its shining exterior got lighter and greener, as it entered the atmosphere of the Earth. The ship's scanner came into view of pylons crowding miles and miles of fields in full blossom, in sections of countryside somewhere in Europe. The aliens were puzzled by the sight of vegetation without lashings of fog pouring out of it. They were also confused by the pylons, which they believed to be the metallic skeletons of giants that had been strung up and held upright to show the glorious victory that the humans had claimed: a dead giant. They bowed in awe at this most unusual sight. The Zets' electricity was conducted by huge pins that were placed in rows horizontally in massive underground reservoirs/bunkers, so they were unused to the sight of overhead electric conductors. They then found themselves flying over a large, fat channel of water. They had never come into contact with seas before. Well, Kerrick had, as he had been the only one who had been to other planets, and had seen large areas filled with water. As had Nerman, as he had served abroad. However, as the Zets did not need water, and because it rarely rained (it had last showered fifteen generations earlier), the other creatures were unusually amazed by the sight of water as they had never seen natural water. They had drank beers and washed themselves, but they had never seen any coastline before. They lowered their ship down, and saw a farm, with a few sheds, barns and dominated by a pretty little farmhouse. Their scanner identified this coastal retreat as being somewhere in the state of Ireland, commonly known as the Republic of Ireland.
The luminous green disc landed upon a chicken coop. This chicken coop was wood, with metal mesh covering the holes. A chicken was caught in the mesh. Grandfather Brett McBain, a grizzled Irishman of seventy five years of age, dressed in denim cap and messy overalls that had lost their buttons and color long ago tried to get the chicken out. He wrestled with it constantly, and swore under his breath in revolt.
"Fecking cocks necking at each other!" Brett McBain muttered, seemingly unaware of the double entendre that he had created. He was unaware of the huge green disc slowly crushing him down. Within a few moments, he, the chicken and the otherwise empty chicken coop had been flattened by the landing of the Zet flying saucer.
The rest of the McBain family did not notice, as they were inside, doing their hobbies, as they watched the little metal television that was slowly dying out in their living room. It was a small family. Brett's son Eddie was a fat, swollen man, in his fifties, balding, tufts of gray hair on each side of his otherwise bald pate, with his eyes obscured by big black-rimmed glasses held together with hairy elastoplasts. He was rigidly but comfortably sat in his big armchair, as if it were a throne. He was the one in control of the television remote, on the right arm of his chair. His wife Maureen was a Jekyll and Hyde sort of character. Her mother had died recently, and the once friendly ceramic freak who was obsessed with reruns of "Lovejoy" had metamorphosis into the woman who had birthed her. She was now almost permanently funereal, dyed brown hair in a bob, but clearly showing streaks of gray.
"Eddie," Maureen moaned, "what are we watching?"
"The Irish Country Music Show, live from Meath," added Eddie McBain, "it's good."
Eddie would have been the man in the cap. Mum and Gran having been previously combined, this way continues, being the mother in the law with the trolley, while the unwritten teenage daughters formed the inspiration for the short's young wife.