Happy Days: The Children of the Stones

Radio 4 broadcast a great documentary on the 1977 children's TV series Children of the Stones yesterday presented by Stewart Lee, who seems to have become a cultural curator of all things weird and esoteric, having made a programme about British pioneers of electronic music a short while ago (A Sound British Adventure) and appeared on the radio 3 arts programme Night Waves with Iain Sinclair to talk about the Welsh author of eerie and occult tales Arthur Machen. These are all things which evidently loom large in his own inner cultural landscape. He talks of how watching Children of the Stones as a youngster chimed with his own concerns with non-conformity and a mixture of fear and fascination with a great numinous unknown. He also credits it with sparking a lifelong interest in stone circles and long barrows. That other modern explorer of megalithic sites and the mindset which created them, Julian Cope, is on hand to provide a singular dissenting voice. His objection centres around an unease with the either/or paradigms found in post-war stories, including Children of the Stones and The Wicker Man, which feature some sort of cultish leader – usually pagan, as he notes. He has not time for the idea that the viewer might feel sympathy for Iain Cuthbertson’s Hendrick, the controlling magus of Milbury, the village in Children of the Stones, or for Lord Summerisle, the aristocratic squire and religious revivalist of The Wicker Man. For him, they are authoritarian figures who perpetuate a religious conflict which has no part in his worldview, which seeks to transcend such divides.

Touching the stone - Adam and Margaret (Gareth Thomas and Veronica Strong

Lee travels to Avebury and meets people who were strongly affected by the series when they were young, and also talks to members of the cast. Veronica Strong and Katharine Levy, who played mother and daughter Margaret and Sandra, are both on hand to recall the making of the series in the burning summer of 1976, and Gareth Thomas, who played the astrophysicist Adam Brake, who comes to the village with his son Matthew to make a scientific study of the stones, is present via a studio interview. Levy recalls working with the marvellous Freddie Jones (whose performance as the spluttering, irascible and impressively muttonchopped Victorian spirit General Sir George Uproar, presiding over his old manor house in Richard Carpenter’s The Ghosts of Motley Hall, I am currently hugely enjoying), who played the poacher Dai, the keeper of secret knowledge who lives in the sanctuary of the long barrow, and is resistant to Hendrick’s mesmeric influence. She remembers that he at first appeared a little strange to her and her fellow child actors, before she realised that he was keeping in character throughout. Lee makes the point that the series treated children as equals, and didn’t in any way talk down to them. This can certainly be found in the two relationships between single parent and child which are central to the story, Adam with Matthew and Margaret with Sandra, which have the sense of twin halves waiting to be joined to form a completed whole. The female on the inside of the circle and the male coming in, via the avenue, from the outside.

Evil magus - Iain Cuthbertson as Hendrick

Children of the Stones was written by Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray, and Lee interviews Burnham, who is still proud of it to this day. He also reveals that he is writing a sequel, set 25 years after the events of the original. Normally, I would greet such news with a groan, seeing it as yet another example of the obsessive recycling of the past which obstructs the creation any new and innovative work. But there was something a little unsatisfying about the conclusion of Children of the Stones, which was a little throwaway. The cyclical nature of time which it seemed to propose would make a return entirely plausible, and perhaps allow for Margaret and Sandra to assert their independence from Hendrick and the ‘Happy Day’ ethos of bland, unquestioning contentment which he propagates, once more. I certainly don’t insist on happy endings, but I’ve never liked the fact that they are abandoned at the end, ossifying into pained and contorted megaliths. Veronica Strong certainly expresses a willingness to return to her role in the programme, and perhaps Katherine Levy’s participation in Lee’s documentary and her fond memories of the past indicate that she too might be willing to take part. Rather more oddly, Burnham also reveals that the American composer Robert Gross is working on turning the story into an opera – perhaps influenced by the time he spent studying in the West Country at Bristol University – which sounds as unlikely as Tod Machover’s adaptation of Philip K Dick’s strange late novel Valis into modern, electronic operatic form. I wonder whether Gross will draw on Sidney Sager’s superb, modernist vocal score for Children of the Stones, as performed by the Ambrosian Singers, who were well used to performing avant garde compositions. Drawing on the soundworlds of Berio and Ligeti, Lee talks of it as being ‘the most inappropriate children’s TV theme ever penned’, and all the better for it.

Jeremy Deller's Sacrilege - the bouncy 'enge

Lee also talks to Avebury museum curators past and present, talking about current views on the meanings of the stones for ancient people, and on the sort of people who come to the village. He puts it to one of them that ‘presumably, as the curator of the Avebury museum, you don’t feel the purpose of the circle was to harness an evil ray from space’. He also talks to James McGowan, who created a website for the programme, and who moved down to the area from Scotland. I can certainly empathise with his memories of visiting the sites in the programme. I remember going to Avebury as a child and re-enacting the scene in which Adam touches one of the stones and is filled with troubling vision before being violently thrown back (a scene presaged by one of my favourite bits of dialogue from the series, in which Margaret asks him ‘would you do something for me…touch one of the stones…I just want to see if you’re the kind of man I think you are’, to which Adam replies ‘and what kind of man is that!’) I was recently able to do this once more, in a rather more wholehearted and, I like to think, spectacular manner, when Jeremy Deller’s mobile sculpture ‘Sacrilege’, better known as the bouncy Stonehenge, came to town and provided me with 15 minutes of unbridled joy before the heavens opened.

Lee traces the influences on the programme and those which it has had on subsequent generations. He cites The Wicker Man, The Village of the Damned and Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit as being in a similar vein, with the eccentric and bizarre goings on in rural settings which recurrently featured in episodes of The Avengers (some written by Burnham, who also occasionally appeared in them as an actor) also setting the scene. Burnham also quotes Thomas Tryon’s 1973 novel of modern day Paganism in a rural American town as being an influence, and there’s also something of the spirit of Charles Williams’ novels such as War in Heaven and The Greater Trumps in there. Avebury is rechristened Milbury in Children of the Stones, which might have had an influence on the naming of Ghost Box artist Jim Jupp’s musical project (and the imaginary rural town which it inhabits) Belbury Poly. Certainly, the Ghost Box ethos, with its blending of post war modernism with ancient Pagan echoes, and its recasting of the graphic art and soundworlds of 60s and 70s British television programmes in the Children of the Stones mould (‘twenty minute splurges of psychedelic madness’ as Lee characterises them), is very much of a part with the spirit of the times, as viewed from a contemporary perspective. Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz is seen as exhibiting a similar sensibility to Children of the Stones, as is Gary Spencer Millidge’s comic Strangehaven, set in a Devon village which is the centre of occult activity, and from which it is difficult to leave. Its author retrospectively acknowledges the coincidental similarities, having subsequently viewed the programme. It’s an indication that the themes and concerns of Children of the Stones, as well as the power of the ancient British landscape, continues to exert a fascination. Happy Day!

70s Children's TV Fantasy - Part Two

Sky (1975)


Sky, like Catweazle, is a children’s fantasy series whose title comes from the name of its central character who, again like Catweazle, is a visitor from another time who falls inadvertently into the present era, although Sky’s trajectory is from some ill-defined space beyond time rather from the past. The setting is, once again, rural, with a farming background, although this time with a West Country locale. The series was produced by HTV West and written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who had met and now worked in Bristol, where Baker was born and raised. There is a definite sense that they have a feel for the area, and this grounds the more fantastical elements of the story. The countryside is here painted in a very different light from that in Catweazle. We are no longer in a summer idyll. It is winter, and the trees are bare, the skies overcast and the tracks and fields churned and muddy (the children wear wellies throughout).

Roy, Jane and Arby, with Landy at the ready

The story begins with a pheasant shoot, which is observed in almost documentary style. There is a clear division established between the young protagonists, with the brother and sister Arby and Jane (a variant on Darby and Joan?), the former of whom acts as a beater and fetcher of the shot pheasants, seen as being on a lower social scale than their friend Roy, who participates in the shooting. Arby is something of an outsider and is considered to be an untrustworthy delinquent by those on the shoot. Suspicion is cast on him by default when things go slightly awry, and it is assumed that he is bagging the odd pheasant for himself and his family. Roy is the son of the retired army man Major Briggs, who runs the shoot from his manor house. The Major is another single parent bringing up his son on his own. But unlike Carrot’s father in Catweazle, who was a well-meaning if somewhat dazed and bemused man doing his best to keep his life and business afloat, the Major is seen as a pompous military buffoon. With his African masks on the wall suggestive of old school colonialism and his pom-pom-pomming of marching tunes while he pours himself another solitary gin, he seems lost in his own world. Actor Jack Watson’s familiar granite features help to physically convey the sense of a man who won’t listen to anything which falls outside of his narrowly defined view of the world and its workings. Roy seems only too happy to hop onto his trailbike and join his friends in their escapades alongside their dad’s landrover.

Sky is a mysterious stranger from another time who is almost literally unearthed by Arby during the pheasant shoot. It’s as if he himself has been shot down in a hunt in some parallel dimension. He is the boy who fell to Earth, his Icarus-like crash an accidental visitation, as opposed to David Bowie’s Thomas Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, who arrives with deliberate purpose. Marc Harrison, who plays Sky, has many of Bowie’s vocal mannerisms and does in many ways seem like a junior version of his Starman. The Man Who Fell To Earth seems an obvious model, but Nicholas Roeg’s film was in fact released a year later in 1976. Sky appears a nature boy, buried beneath a drift of leaves and naked to the elements save for a covering of cottony fibrous matter such as might be found packing a seed case. This would seem to make literal his own later metaphorical account of his arrival as being akin to a seed landing in a medium in which it cannot germinate. His eyes are an unbroken blue, all iris, which adds to his air of unearthly detachment and inscrutability. He possesses supernatural, or in the context of his possible origins in a fundamentally different universe, perhaps supranatural powers. When he speaks, it is with an echo of aural shimmer, as if it is not a physical sound at all but a direct communication with the mind. Indeed, he is able to communicate telepathically with Arby, the outsider, and through patterns of colour with the mentally disturbed hospital in-patient Tom, whose madness is perhaps a result of his sensitivity to such processes.

Like Catweazle, Sky is in many ways an unsympathetic character who does nothing to disguise his feelings of superiority to those around him. The idea which he suggest at the beginning that he is like an as-yet ungerminated seed whose undiscovered powers are still growing makes him vulnerable and in need of help from those upon whom he calls, but such help is taken almost as a matter of course, the obeisance of acolytes. Unlike Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, he is not remotely seduced by the temptations of the consumer society or the technological pleasures of the present, all of which he considers and declares to be the product of a primitive culture which has chosen the wrong path. He brings a message of impending doom, issuing a curt jeremiad which condemns humanity for its disconnection from and destruction of the natural world. Whilst Catwazle is overawed by the differences between his world and this one, Sky observes everything with an overarching knowledge and draws his conclusions with a studied and emotionless neutrality.

Tor skies and prophet robes

Sky’s overview of the pre-determined pattern of time suggests a semi-divine omniscience. He resembles a Blakean figure from one of the artist/poet’s prophetic poem. The link with Blake is explicitly made by the episode titles which are derived from his verse: ‘Burning Bright’, ‘What Dread Hand’ and ‘Chariots of Fire’. During a quiet moment of refuge in a church hall, he notices a copy of Holman Hunt’s ‘Light of the World’, his depiction of Christ, the original of which hangs in St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘Is this the lord God?’ he asks. Arby equivocates, trying to tell him that this is the son of God, to which he immediately replies ‘which God?’ and ‘when did he arrive?’ Sky’s suggestion that he is one of a series of travellers who come to impart wisdom to mankind, and is therefore in the lineage of Christ and other religious prophets, takes us towards Erich von Daniken territory. Such ideas were very much in the air at the time, promulgated through mass market paperbacks which exhibited little regard for the basics of science, history and archaeology. Here, however, they are part of a fiction, and are not dressing themselves in the shabby garments of ‘hidden’ or occult knowledge. Having likened himself to Christ, Sky goes on to berate his helpers and by extension humanity (it is an all-inclusive ‘you’ to which he refers) for their repeated failure to live by the wisdom which has been granted them time and time again. His authority is enhanced by the fact that he is by now wearing a white robe very much like Christ’s in the painting. Sky does in fact go through an evolution of costume, which seems to transform after he has undergone several deaths and resurrections. These reflect his growing power and his bridging of various religious traditions. At first, he is covered only in the leaf matter of the wood, a pagan cloak. From his white, Christ-like robes he graduates to a vaguely Indian fashion of dress, a modern manifestation of Hindu deities or gurus appropriate to an era which tended to look eastward for mystical inspiration.

Accessing megalithic technology

Sky is not a particular compassionate or empathetic aspect of whatever godhead he claims kinship with, however. He uses the three children whom he calls upon for help, leaving them with nothing in return (the ‘healing’ of Arby and Jane’s mother aside). Even their memories are taken from them. He exploits his connection with the intuitively sensitive mind of Tom, a mentally disturbed patient in the hospital in which he is stranded, driving him beyond the routines which have become the stable centre of his life to possibly harmful long-term effect. Arby is left to disconsolately remind him ‘we did a lot for you’ as they are unceremoniously abandoned at Stonehenge. It is a moment of religious doubt, the realisation of a false messiah.

The series shares with much children’s TV fantasy of the early to mid-70s a fascination with the ancient landscapes of the West Country, and the idea of a latent power manifested through their megalithic structures and chalk hill figures. English science fiction writers exhibited a similar preoccupation at the time, as typified by such books as Keith Roberts’ Pavane and The Chalk Giants, Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex and Richard Cowper’s The Road to Corlay, part of his White Bird of Kinship trilogy in which the West Country has been transformed into an archipelago by rising sea levels. Programmes such as Children of the Stones, The Moon Stallion and Raven drew on the potent magic of such sites as Avebury, the White Horse of Uffington and Wayland’s Smithy. Nigel Kneale’s wearily apocalyptic Quatermass, a belated return to his famous creation, seemed to be an emblematic end to the cycle as the 70s drew to a close. It was a drama originally written during the hippie 60s, casting a sour shadow over its euphoric mysticism, and ended up as a belated marker stone to its dissolution into violent chaos. Kneale invented his own megalithic site, Ringstone Round, which had its own local mythologies and folk rhymes attached. Quatermass was a pessimistic piece of adult SF which may have rung a bell in the minds of those who’d grown up watching children’s TV earlier in the decade, and Sky in particular. In Sky, the young protagonists drive their enigmatic charge to both Glastonbury Tor and Stonehenge. The latter, unfortunately, features in one of the two episodes which have had to be sourced from off-air recordings, although these are of sufficient quality to render them perfectly watchable. It’s evident that one of these sites will be the all-important ‘Juganet’ about which Sky makes urgent enquiry as soon as he first encounters his helpers, and which will serve as the gateway through to the time in which he was intended to arrive. These megalithic circles and earthworks are markers, as they are in Kneale’s Quatermass, bearing witness to long silent alien technologies.

Disillusioned hippies

As for those who are drawn to the mystery of these places, their fumbling towards whatever truth they may reveal is blankly dismissed. The hippie couple living in a caravan in a field by the Tor, who await the return of a grail king figure foretold in ‘The Green Book of Myrddin’ (a made up tome, I assume) see him embodied in Sky. But he tells them in no uncertain terms that they are misguided, although it is good that they are seeking. He unwittingly draws the onslaught of the destructive powers of nature down on them and leaves them abandoning the physical, emotional and philosophical debris of their lives. They are seen walking along the road like refugees, with their meagre possessions on the chassis of a pram, the books which had previously inspired them left behind, their glimpse of transcendent truths now merely reminding of years of hollow hopes and wasted time. Not all revelation is welcome.

Dark force of nature

The cause of Sky’s crashing into the wrong time is never fully explained, but his presence is like a viral infection in the body of the world, and its natural forces gather themselves to reject and eliminate his unnatural presence. These forces are embodied and made manifest in the implacably malevolent form of a man who refers to himself as Goodchild. As played in an appropriate monotone performance of unnerving stillness by Robert Eddison, he is like a black-cloaked anthropomorphised raven, with pointed beard and piercing, fixed stare. Just as Catweazle is a creature of the woodlands, Sky is physically repulsed by it, pushed away. He is attacked by earth, root, leaf and branch, and the story becomes a pursuit narrative in which the children must help him get away from the Earth before it and its chthonic agents swallow him up. His violent treatment by these Gaian gangsters is somewhat ironic given the ecological messages which he brings. It’s as if his presence is an emblematic demonstration of the fate which awaits man. At one point, Roy is seen leafing briefly through a copy of The Last Whole Earth Catalogue. The Whole Earth Catalogues were the essential manuals and ‘how to’ guides of the early ecology movement. The symbolism of this being the last one would seem to affirm Sky’s gloomy prognosis. It is alarmingly prescient of our growing state of pessimistic despair and sense of personal powerlessness in the face of ecological catastrophe some 35 years later.

Post-catastrophe swamp dwellers

The future time which was Sky’s originally intended destination is briefly visited by a hapless Arby, who, unwilling to be just left by Sky without any further explanations, passes through the juganet gateway with him. The pattern of the previous episodes is inverted as he becomes the reviled stranger in a strange land, telepathically hounded and threatened with ritualistic sacrifice. The inhabitants of this future are first encountered huddling around fires in the mire of a woodland hollow, a cheerless locale which reminds us of the swamp from which Sky claimed his fellow travellers had raised humanity in the past. Sky hails these people for having regained a simple way of living and direct connection with nature that the society of Arby’s time had lost through its over-reliance on technology. And yet, their world is a depressingly grey place. They are organised around a primitive cult which worships before the shrine of a ramshackle mock-up of a rocket capsule, to which their priest intones nonsense words devolved from the language of the Apollo moon missions, which were reaching their golf-drives on the craters fag-end at this point. The chant with which all join in is a monotonously repeated NASA, with its sibilant S turned into a buzzing z, a transformation which pushes it half-way towards nazi-fication. This is perhaps appropriate given that one of the chief architects of the Saturn V launcher was Werner von Braun, who cut his teeth on German V-2 rockets before graduating to IRBMs in the USA. These scenes are reminiscent of those in Beneath the Planet of the Apes in which the mutants who live in the subterranean ruins of New York worship the atomic bomb, the progenitor of their fallen state. Sky is the demi-god of this post-catastrophe world, pledged to lead its people into a brighter future. ‘They will follow my prophecies’, he predicts. He is like a Gnostic deity whose ultimate aim is to encourage the rejection of the idea of gaining control of the world of matter, rather to transcend it altogether. Moving outwards to the stars without the use of rockets, as he puts it.

hippie facist of the future

Sky is essentially a harsh, unsparing angel, although mad Tom points out that he is ‘not on fire’ in the traditional sense, as the angel in the picture to which he points is. His visitation brings no comfort or consolation, however, no annunciation of immanent salvation. His is an unpitying insight into the final days of humanity, for whom he offers no hope. It is a vision to which those who meet him may wish they had never been exposed, and the forgetfulness which he grants them is a mercy, the bliss of continued ignorance. Only Arby is given the possibility of remembering after he has followed Sky into the future, inviting him to become his John the Baptist in the face of the coming storm. Perhaps understandably, he seems to shy away from this burden, for the time being at least. He agrees to join Roy and his sister Jane on the next pheasant shoot. Like the game hunt in Renoir’s La Regle du Jeu, this now seems to be a symbolic precursor to a wider catastrophe. The memory of his encounter with Sky remains latent, but the possibility of it being re-awakened is there.

Ultimately, Sky leaves many questions unanswered, but its air of ambiguity, of mysteries left unpenetrated, and of free-floating pessimism are strengths rather than weaknesses. It is the kind of intelligent, challenging (but also exciting and scary) children’s TV fantasy with which the 70s seemed to be so richly strewn. Eric Wetherell’s score is notable too, and also indicative of the way in which these series provided and introduction for young ears to modern classical and electronic branches of music. His Bartokian theme and his harsh electronic evocations of the wintry outdoor environment both add much to the atmosphere. The electronic sounds seem to come from the EMS synthesiser, the same variety which was nicknamed the Delaware at the Radiophonic Workshop HQ, and from which Malcolm Clarke had wrenched alien sounds of the deep in the Doctor Who serial The Sea Devils. The opening scenes of the first episode, with the swaying branches of bare trees and the wind-like wash of synthesiser noise reminded me of the Julian House film Winter Sun Wavelengths as soundtracked by Broadcast on their recent tour. The duo have indeed talked about the series as an influence in recent interviews. The young amateur cast is a bit awkward at times, but this creates a hesitancy which fits in with the natural wariness of their characters towards the events which are unfolding. It’s nice to see characters with West Country accents as protagonists, too, rather than providing background yokelry signifying rural backwardness and village idiocy. Again, Bob Baker’s Bristol childhood probably ensured that such stereotypes were given a wide berth. Baker and his writing partner Dave Martin would leave the countryside for their next non-Who fantasy, heading for the city where they would plunge their troubled young protagonist into the symbol-strewn corridors of inner space in their piece of ‘Kafka for kids’, King of the Castle.

70s Children's TV Fantasy - part one

CATWEAZLE (1969)



I’ve recently been watching some great children’s TV fantasy series from the late 60s and 1970s. Diverse as they are, they seem to share a certain spirit, a delight in the play of the imagination which nonetheless remains anchored in the experiences of the children who are the protagonists. The programmes in question are Catweazle (1969), Sky (1975), and King of the Castle (1977), the former written by Richard Carpenter, and the latter from the writing partnership of Bob Baker and Dave Martin. They feature two visitations to rural communities from other times (one from the past, one the future) and one journey into inner space launched from the lift shaft of an urban high-rise.

First up is the 1969 series Catweazle, the titular character of which is a highly eccentric magician from the 11th century whose spell cast to evade some hostile Normans propels him rather further than he’d bargained for, landing him in the twentieth century present day. The series plays out in classic timeslip fantasy style, with the disjuncture between worlds causing a catalogue of mishaps and misunderstandings. Catweazle is a disruptive force in the quiet and uneventful village in which he arrives. He fails to observe the social mores of the time and finds everyday experiences perplexing and nonsensical. His outsider perspective leads us to look at the behaviours and assumptions we take for granted and view them as if unfamiliar. Catweazle is particularly awestruck by twentieth century technology, which he views as magic, and there is much delightful wordplay as he linguistically recasts everyday appliances and devices according to his own perception of them. It is like the Martian poetry of Craig Raine and others; looking at the familiar as if it were strange. So electricity becomes ‘elec-trickery’; a light bulb holds ‘the sun in a bottle’; matches are ‘little fire sticks’; a camera is an ‘enchanting box’ which enslaves him by capturing his image; and the telephone is a ‘telling bone’. The delight in language extends to Catweazle’s wide repertoire of arcane curses, which generally invoke the baser creatures of the woodland floor. Hence, ‘thou legless lizard, thou wriggling grub, thou soft-backed beetle’ and my favourite ‘saucey snail’. All easily adaptable for the playground (and beyond).

Wild man of the woods

Catweazle himself is a strikingly wayward central figure. He is a self-styled ‘master of the black arts, follower of the secret path’ and can be heard chanting demonic names which could equally have been solemnly intoned by Christopher Lee in Hammer’s The Devil Rides Out a couple of years earlier. Hardly the typical loveable children’s character. He is frequently unlikeable, being self-pitying, selfish, scheming and greedy, and looks convincingly grubby and grime-encrusted (and foul-smelling with it). As marvellously played by Geoffrey Bayldon, he is also an animalistic creature, with a diverse range of semi-vocalised yelps, hisses and whines, alongside a series of bodily tics and twitches. He is most at ease (and most honest) when addressing his familiar, Touchwood, a toad (for whom he provides a personal chariot in the form of a discarded roller skate). He finds his retreat from the fearsome noise of the modern world in a water tower in the middle of the woods, and it becomes his keep, which he grandly names Castle Saburac. Thus he returns to being a solitary hermit of the woods, a creature of the old forest, not quite human. He is fortunate in having arrived in a rural corner of England which has remained largely undeveloped. Catweazle in the city would have been a different story altogether. Already in the time from which he had come, he was being rooted out, hunted and harassed by the Normans. Perhaps the writer, Richard Carpenter, is hinting at the origin of our modern society in the control of common land exerted by the Normans. He did go on to write Robin of Sherwood, after all.

Castle Saburac

The domestic setting into which Catweazle stumbles is nicely written and observed by Richard Carpenter. Catweazle was Carpenter’s major writing debut after his previous existence as an actor. The boy who befriends Catweazle (if that’s the word) is called Edward, but is known to one and all as Carrot, due to his red hair. He’s played with great ease and humour by Robin Davies, who’d previously appeared in If…, knocking together a very unappealing fry-up with the lower orders downstairs. He would also later appear in another rural setting as one of the children of a woodland village who fall under the devil's spell in ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’ (a film well worth looking beyond the lurid title for). There’s a lovely line when they first meet. Catweazle, still fearing his pursuers and unaware that he has left them far, far in the past asks him ‘art thou Norman’. Carrot, addressing him as if he were an idiot, replies ‘no, I’m Edward’. This exchange is later reversed when Carrot tells him ‘you’re crackers’ and he replies, with a look of confusion, ‘nay, I am Catweazle’. Davies had to have his hair dyed for the role, which trouble suggests that the red hair is an indicator of Carrot’s difference, his sense of being apart in the world which makes his companionship with Catweazle so important to him. Catweazle calls him ‘brother’ for his apparent mastery of the ‘magic’ of the age, but for Carrot, this brotherhood serves a different need. He lives on Hexwood Farm with his dad, who is pleasant but has an air of distraction, seeming slightly dazed at times. It’s never directly stated, but we get the feeling that Carrot’s mum has died in the recent past, and his dad is struggling to cope. Reading the introduction to the character in the novelization affirms that this was the background detail that Carpenter had in mind.

The Catweazle family

The hired hand on the farm, Sam Woodyard, is a gentle giant of a man, simple and open-hearted, played with sensitivity by Neil McCarthy, whose large stature usually reduced him to playing the heavy or the lumbering comedic simpleton. There’s a little of the latter here, but there’s much more to his character than being the head-scratching object of Carrot’s increasingly desperate attempts to keep Catweazle hidden. He spends a good deal of time with Carrot and is alert to his changing moods. With his guileless good nature and lack of self-aggrandising ambition, he is the heart of the farm, and both Carrot and his father are dismayed when he declares that he wants to move on and see more of the world. Much farcical to and fro is had in the early episodes around Sam’s almost coming across Catweazle. The two are such opposites, and yet play such similar roles in Carrot’s life that for them to meet would be unthinkable. Some sort of matter/anti-matter reaction would ensue, and both would disappear in an implosion of smoke. Sam continues to play an active role throughout the series, and we get to see his awful, tyrannical mother, observe his enthusiastic preparations for participation in the local pageant (as a Norman, of course) and his optimistic attempts at running a vintage car. Sadly, Neil McCarthy, whose performance here is of such kindly good nature that its difficult to believe that it doesn’t reflect something of his own personality, was struck down by motor neurone disease in 1985.

There are great cameo opportunities for a series of instantly recognisable British character actors. Hattie Jacques plays Madame Rosa, a fag-smoking ‘seer’ for whom the magic arts are part of the daily grind, an overfamiliar act of routine charlatanry. Until Catweazle turns up to gaze into her crystal ball, of course. Another Carry On stalwart, Peter Butterworth, puts in a marvellous turn as Colonel Upshaw, a completely barking retired colonial who lost his marbles in the African heat some time ago. Brian Wilde, better known as the nervous screw Mr Barrowclough in Porridge, puts in a similar turn as a befuddled vicar who rescues Catweazle from his church steeple and introduces him to the ‘telling bone’. John Junkin, familiar from the Marty Feldman show and A Hard Day’s Night, is the overly officious new police officer from the city, Sergeant Bottle, who is like a precursor to Simon Pegg’s character in Hot Fuzz, looking for village covens and seeing signs of witchcraft at every corner. Sergeant Bottle is uncharacteristic in his suspicion and readiness to persecute the eccentric and weird, and as such is seen as a fair target for Catweazle’s bewitchments, an ironic victim of the non-existent witchcraft he sought to uncover amongst the villagers.

Indeed, the village of Westbourne in which the series is set seems to be a haven of tolerance. The owner of the local antique shop is a character called Leslie Milton, played by Aubrey Morris, a face well known from films such as The Wicker Man, A Clockwork Orange and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb. He is fairly evidently gay (although I tend to be wary of the automatic camp=gay equation) but this is an incidental detail of characterisation, and he is not subjected to the usual ridiculing remarks and belittling asides. Similarly, there is a couple who could well be interpreted as being lesbian (the photographer and her sighing partner) but nothing is made of this. By not drawing attention to these details, it offers the utopian possibility of a world in which it really doesn’t matter. Not even on a prurient ‘ooh, are they or aren’t they’ level. In the last episode, Mr Bennett (Carrot’s father) is lying up in bed waiting for his GP, an old fellow approaching retirement. When he is in stead visited by his stand in and eventual replacement, a woman in early middle age, there is no spluttering ‘b-b-but you’re a woman’ disbelief which would have been the default reaction in other comedies and dramas of the time. After a brief initial expression of mild surprise that she is not who he expected, her authority is accepted immediately and without fuss. There really does seem to be something of the bucolic eden about the surroundings, a pocket garden paradise only tangentially connected to the modern world. Perhaps Catweazle would do better to remain here rather than return to his time and be hunted down once more by the knights of the Norman barons.

Robin Davies as Carrot

Catweazle is the opposite of Sam; treacherous, unreliable and always seeking a way to return to his own time. Carrot’s relationship with Catweazle reflects the context of the relationships within the family farm. Catweazle takes on various different guises, and Carrot has to adapt accordingly. He is father when Catweazle acts with unruly childishness, supportive brother when conspiring in his schemes, and boss in his assertion of superior ‘magic’ in order to enlist the truculent wizard’s reluctant aid. Carrot learns something of the adult world and how to act within it through his acquaintance with Catweazle. He grows in character as a result, whereas Catweazle remains essentially a child in adult form. For Carrot, he is half-way between an imaginary friend and a pet. When he does eventually succeed in returning to his own time, we watch Carrot wander disconsolately back towards the farm along the edge of a lake. But for all his sorrow at parting, we sense that he has grown out of his need for a magical friend and is ready to meet the world on its own terms. For Carrot, Catweazle’s return to the past is like the end of a long dream of summer after which, in the manner of such tales, life will never be the same again.