Wild new podcast Hooked on Freddie follows the 1990 tabloid frenzy about an animal rights activist who formed a special bond with a dolphin – only to be put on trial for it

When someone mentions the year 1990, you might think of the last days of Margaret Thatcher, The Satanic Verses, poll tax, recession and the IRA. Or, you just might think of a man in the north-east of England getting arrested for masturbating a dolphin.

The man in question was the animal rights campaigner Alan Cooper; one of the witnesses to the alleged incident was the owner of the Flamingo Land dolphinarium, Peter Bloom; the site was the North Sea. The whole intriguing story has now been turned into a podcast series by journalist Becky Milligan who, it turns out, actually swam with the very same wild bottlenose dolphin, named Freddie, back in 1990.

“I was a student at City, University of London, doing audio,” Milligan tells me over Zoom. “We were meant to do our first documentary and there was this story about people with very serious mental health problems being cured by swimming with wild dolphins.” Not in California or Florida, as you might assume, but in Amble, a small fishing port 15 miles (24km) north of Morpeth in Northumberland. “So I got on the train with my tape recorder, all the way up to Amble,” she says. She met Gordon, a friendly lifeboat mechanic, who boated her out to sea with one of his friends. “They absolutely covered me in talcum powder and put me in a huge dry suit, which blew up. I was literally like a big balloon – they had to give me lead to stop me flying off.”

Then came the bit that, for anyone who’s seen Jaws (which was almost everyone in 1990), sets alarm bells ringing. “I didn’t really want to go in the water, to be honest. I was only 22 and there was no health and safety – it was literally just a boat with a ladder in the middle of the North Sea. But they picked me up and threw me in. And then suddenly there was this black fin coming towards me.” She started screaming, of course. “I thought I was going to die. Or that I was going to explode in this dry suit,” Milligan says. “I’d put a condom over the mic to record under the water because that’s how we did it in those days. It didn’t really work but you can hear my voice as this huge animal pulls me through the water really fast. I just had to trust that it wasn’t going to hurt me.”

Freddie the dolphin was totally wild, and it is no exaggeration to say that his arrival in Amble temporarily transformed the town. Suddenly, alongside out-of-work miners and struggling fishermen, the harbour was swarmed with women in bikinis, new age hippies with dolphin tattoos and crystals, southerners who couldn’t understand anybody’s accent and, at one point, a man in a kaftan sitting on the harbour wall playing a didgeridoo for hours. “As Freddie swam into the harbour, it was like he brought in a rainbow,” says Milligan. “But it was also an influx of people with a very different culture.”

Perhaps the person who swam most regularly with Freddie was Cooper, a Manchester-born animal rights campaigner. Cooper – who had become a vegan in 1982 and was a committed member of the Northern Animal Liberation League – seemed to have a special bond with the bottlenose dolphin, and the two would spend hours together in the water.

When on dry land, Cooper devoted a lot of his energy to protesting over dolphinariums, likening the shows put on at places such as Flamingo Land to a slave trade. (He also, apparently, tried to convert the unemployed Amble miners to veganism and enlist their support in the animal rights movement, with little success). In a pre-internet age, Cooper and his colleagues used leaflets and telephone boxes, meetings and marches to try to galvanise opposition to these leisure attractions, no doubt to the consternation of their owners, such as Bloom.

The podcast, Hooked on Freddie, revolves around one particular incident, during which a boatload of people watched Cooper swimming with Freddie in the harbour and reported an incident to the police. Cooper’s legal team would later claim in court that Bloom encouraged them to make this complaint.

Cooper describes the event on his website as such: “Freddie was his usual self, sometimes hooking me with his penis to the leg or arm – it was all perfectly normal, to me at least. It was only later when I was provided with the police statements that I realised otherwise. Bloom, the ‘expert’, had been speaking to people on [the] boat. Part of Bloom’s police statement read: ‘You won’t get near, he is wanking off the dolphin.’”

There is a moment in the podcast where you hear Cooper recount how the police officers who later interviewed him couldn’t keep a straight face when repeating the accusation that he had been “wanking off a dolphin”. Did Milligan worry what listeners would make of it all? “You have to use a bit of the language of the day,” she argues. “Those words are in the court case; we’re not being salacious.”

Perhaps inevitably, the story got picked up by the Sun and suddenly rumours of a northern cetacean fancier spread across the country in an orgy of tabloid attention. It was a titillating story of alleged perversion at a time of economic depression and political uncertainty.

For Cooper, however – despite the fact that he would eventually be found not guilty at a trial in the crown court – the effects were hideous. As Milligan puts it: “His whole raison d’etre is helping people and looking after animals. He’s from an area that’s two up, two down, he left school at 16 – there weren’t many opportunities. But Alan had a reputation in the northern animal rights movement and to be accused of that was the most damaging thing. It’s difficult to express what that did to him, to be accused of abusing the very thing you’re trying to protect.”

When it comes to undermining someone’s reputation, accusing them of having an indecent or sinister fetish, particularly involving an animal, is just about the most textbook move there is – just ask Catherine the Great. As a listener, it’s hard not to wonder about the motivation behind Bloom’s alleged involvement and his boat mates’s accusations. Did it spring from revenge or genuine concern? Was Bloom an onlooker or an aggressor?

Was it difficult for Milligan to persuade Bloom to talk on tape? “With Peter, I said I wanted to talk about Freddie and I wanted to talk about the court case,” says Milligan. “He didn’t want to talk about the court case, particularly. But he said: ‘OK, come up tomorrow.’ So I did. We talked about dogs and I put a few questions to him. I knew I had to make it balanced. This isn’t a polemic. I’m just telling the story and there are characters who need to be in it. What he says is quite surprising, though.”

Milligan had carried around those tapes – in a bag with hundreds of other unmarked cassettes – for 30 years before approaching producer Rosie Pye with the idea. So, what makes it relevant to modern listeners, decades after the last UK dolphinarium closed and when the number of dolphin tattoos on British ankles appears to be on the wane?

“It was the tail end of Margaret Thatcher. It was very depressing and there were lots of people marching and protesting, that kind of era,” says Milligan. “Doing this podcast put me straight back in that time and it’s relevant to today. We’re having it so hard. The cost of living, people not being paid enough, job losses. I think we all feel a bit unanchored at the moment and it was the same then. It felt like a shifting time.”

Listeners, Milligan tells me, will have to make up their own minds about what happened out at sea that day. It’s a wild story about a wild animal during a wild time. But it’s one that still feels relevant today. After all, while the dolphin rides and didgeridoos may have now disappeared from Amble, our interest in sex, scandal and a very public scrap certainly hasn’t.

• Hooked on Freddie is now available on Wondery+, Amazon Music and other podcast platforms.

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