What we can say with a fair degree of certainty is that traditional television does not play the powerful role today that it once did, be that for adult viewers or younger ones. Older children are more likely to seek their entertainment via YouTube, social media, or streaming platforms, rather than from terrestrial television. If there was a golden age of Children’s TV, it is certainly buried in the past, not unlike the ‘shared TV’ experience, where a popular programme was discussed excitedly at school the following day, the playground version of office water-cooler or coffee machine moments.
There is no doubt that the period covered in this volume – the mid-60s to the late-80s – was a rich one in terms of innovative British children’s fiction, with many of those novelists – such as Alan Garner, Leon Garfield, and Helen Cresswell – then coming on board to advise and/or adapt their books into television drama. In addition, there was a creative stream of original TV entertainment flowing, from Supermarionation to stop-motion animation, live action fantasy – time-travel, dystopia, ghost stories, reinterpretations of ancient myths, etcetera – and a new breed of uncompromising contemporary series, such as the landmark Grange Hill (1978-2008) and Press Gang (1989-93) which dared to tackle a wide range of real-life social issues.
This book covers the following series: Thunderbirds; The Herbs; The Owl Service; Catweazle; Ace of Wands; Mr Benn; The Changes; Children of the Stones; Midnight is a Place; Shillingbury Tales; The Box of Delights; Robin of Sherwood; Knights of God; Tube Mice. In addition, general essays explore: foreign language drama; BBC drama of the 1980s.
Catweazle: wizard pranks and timeless fun
I only have to see the name Catweazle to be magically transported in time, just as our hero was. Instead of being propelled from the 11th century to the 20th, however, I am catapulted backwards to the same destination from hi-tech 2025. I think of a tatterdemalion in monkish robes, darting hither and yon like a startled leveret, I think of spells and potions, a croaking toad, a metal castle in the sky and a cobwebby train station.
Played with consummate craft and impish guile by Geoffrey Bayldon, the character lived and breathed for just two series and 26 episodes between 1970 and 1971, though I remember repeats continuing well into that decade. He was the majestic creation of, and a deserved hit for, actor-turned-screenwriter Richard Carpenter. And this was to be no lightning (or sun) in a bottle. He went on to further success with The Boy from Space (1971), The Ghosts of Motley Hall (1976–8), Dick Turpin (1979–82) and Robin of Sherwood (1984–6), all of them remembered with warmth and fondness by an entire generation.
Catweazle was such an apt name: like a cat the protagonist always landed on his feet, like a weasel he wriggled his way out of any scrape – usually by a whisker. Famously, Carpenter came up with his idea for the show after seeing the name on a gatepost in the Sussex countryside, then he decided who that character was after seeing a “little old man” in a picture by Hieronymus Bosch. The subject of time travel fascinated him, specifically someone journeying forward to the present. “The only person who could make some sort of sense out of what they saw would be a magician who believed that he was in a world of new magic,” the writer once explained.
So it was that on 15 February 1970, ITV viewers first caught sight of a frightened, bedraggled, 11th-century wizard, evading Norman soldiers by uttering a spell before jumping in a pond. His emergence in “present-day” England would introduce him to a strange, sometimes terrifying but frequently wondrous world of sights and sounds. All of it, every last second, was captured on film, and that meant Catweazle preserved its spell from that moment on. There were many other reasons for this, which I’ll list, but chief among them for me was because…
HIS WORLD WAS MINE
Catweazle was filmed largely in fields, farms and forests – on location in Surrey for the Carrot era then Hertfordshire for Cedric’s. And much of my own childhood was played outdoors, in gardens and woods, climbing trees and constructing dens. Catweazle’s elevated home, Castle Saburac, fashioned from a disused water tower, was a step up, mind you. What my friends and I would have given for one of those!
From a distance of 55 years, the wizard’s quixotic capers in the great outdoors have almost become inseparable from mine. “Outside” was one giant playground, as far as I was concerned. Youngsters then had a freedom to roam that seems unthinkable now. As long as we were back in time for tea, we seemed to have carte blanche.
All that location shooting meant that Catweazle had a richness to it. Another series that comes from the same mould is the BBC offering, Lizzie Dripping (1973–5). Come to think of it, that show had much in common with Catweazle – a listless teenager has many bizarre and humorous encounters with a witch. (Lizzie was played by future Blue Peter presenter Tina Heath.) But largely, these were exceptions to the rule and studio-bound offerings were the norm… those or series that blended location work with video, such as Doctor Who. (The switch from film to V/T never bothered me at the time but the jump is jarring to a grown-up’s eyes.)
So those sylvan glades of Catweazle’s strange new environment, at their best under summer sunshine, still look wonderful today. But all that would be for nought if it weren’t for the star…
TEAM GB
I totally believed in Catweazle as a person and that’s down to Geoffrey Bayldon’s immersion in the role – and not just in the sense that we see him ducking under the water at the opening and close of season one. Those wild eyes, expressive hands and hunched, scurrying runs through woodland described his character in bold capitals before he had even uttered a word. Or indeed made a noise.
For in this larger-than-life role, Bayldon was the King of Noises. His moans and whimpers, squawks and splutterings, were eloquence itself. There were many variations on his “Sa-sa-sa!” exclamation (“Say-say-say!”; “Sha-sha-sha!”) – the crew called them “fizzes”. And legend has it that first-season director Quentin Lawrence loved this early improvisation so much that he actively encouraged Bayldon to repeat it.
To me in my pre-teens, Catweazle seemed physically ancient, but with the kind of wisdom that was often ascribed to the character of The Sage in fiction. In truth, actor Bayldon was only 45 when he played Catweazle for the first time, and this gave him an alertness, as well as a capacity for comedy pratfalls. Think Clive Dunn as Lance Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army (48 when he first appeared in that show) or Gudrun Ure in Super Gran (58).
With childlike manners, and a tendency to be the butt of jokes, Catweazle was wonderfully appealing to his young audience. But to me he was a hero for his anti-authoritarianism. Whether by accident or design, he managed to make fools of soldiers and sculptors, photographers and fortune-tellers, police officers and property developers, the clergy, conjurors and Colonel Blimps. The bumptious, the pushy, the self-important, all were taken down a peg or ten with equal aplomb.
This wide rebellious streak put him on an equal footing with my other childhood champion, over on the other channel: fellow time-jumper Doctor Who. Coincidentally, Bayldon had been considered for the role of the Doctor, just as the Catweazle producers had wanted Jon Pertwee for their leading man. The pair were fated to work together on another teatime serial and countryside classic, Worzel Gummidge (1979–81), thus extending the legacy of superior TV treats for the family.
That’s not the only thing linking the wizard and the Time Lord, in my mind. When Catweazle had a fanatical gleam in his eye or intoned a bizarre incantation (“Salmay, Dalmay, Adonay!” was something of a catchphrase), I found he could be quite scary. There were times when the Doctor unnerved me, too, never mind the legion of galactic monstrosities that he encountered. There was always something about his alienness, his otherness, that was closely bound up with the whole behind-the-sofa vibe.
I was even a bit disconcerted by one image in the opening credits. To me, the upside-down cartoon of Catweazle didn’t quite resemble a human being, so I wasn’t sure what it was meant to be. The “howl-around” distortions of successive Doctors’ faces also helped to create an unnerving atmosphere.
But it truly was a masterclass by Bayldon in this magician’s guise, and props were a gift to him: opening a window became comedy gold; a television set generated pure terror; and attempting to turn on a light by pulling a toilet flush made me laugh 50 years ago. As it does today. There is a complete logic to it that makes it both funny and endearing.
Catweazle was a triumph of characterisation. And it’s no surprise that Bayldon told a reporter in 1971: “Catweazle does exist and sometimes I'm terrified that he's going to take me over for keeps. Do you know, I find him coming to the surface even when I'm my normal self, and out of these ragged clothes!”
His work ethic was no surprise. The 6ft-tall Yorkshireman had a hugely impressive CV that kicked off in 1952. On TV he guest-starred in such landmark series as The Avengers, The Saint and Z Cars, while his film credits included To Sir, with Love, the 1967 Casino Royale, the Porridge and Steptoe and Son films and The Pink Panther Strikes Again.
The casting directors of Catweazle certainly weren’t mucking about – Bayldon was joined by the cream of British acting at that time. To name just a few individuals: Hattie Jacques, Brian Wilde, Aubrey Morris, Patricia Hayes, Bernard Hepton and Hilda Braid in the first season; Paul Eddington, Peter Sallis, Ronald Lacey, Kenneth Cope, Graham Crowden, John Ringham and Tony Selby in the second.
This is to say nothing of the supporting cast. Charles “Bud” Tingwell and Neil McCarthy were superb foils as Mr Bennet and Sam the farmhand respectively in the first 13 episodes; Moray Watson, Elspet Gray and Peter Butterworth were a tight unit as Lord and Lady Collingford and Groome in the second. But the juvenile leads were cannily chosen, too…
BROTHERS IN CHARMS
Edward “Carrot” Bennet (Robin Davies) and Cedric “Owlface” Collingford (Gary Warren) were very different from each other. One was a scruffy, happy-go-lucky farmer’s boy, the other a bookish, slightly anxious aristo, but both were effective touchstones for the young viewer, the point of identification for the audience, if you will.
In Catweazle’s discombobulating new realm, both youngsters were his aid to understanding, and became his “brothers in magic”, accepting of his eccentricities if initially disbelieving of his sorcery. Not that the friendships were always harmonious, and the manic magus conjured many juicy epithets when they caused him irritation – maggot, mugwump, frogspawn, and so on.
The show seems to have rubbed off on all its regular cast, and the young leads were no exception. Davies later told Simon Wells of The Official Catweazle Fan Club: “The likes of Catweazle were designed to entertain children. Why this series works so nicely is because there is a naivety to it. There’s no bad language, no violence. Everyone gives a little gem. They were good performances. We cared about how we did it.”
Warren, of course, was a familiar face from one of the greatest children’s films of all time, The Railway Children. To follow that with the beloved Catweazle in the space of a year is quite a feat. In a 1971 Look-in interview, Warren sounded no less enthusiastic about the show than Davies had: “The cast in Catweazle were super,” he said, and although at the time he often played boys younger than himself, he added: “I don't mind as long as the script is good. You don't feel soppy if you can believe in the words you are saying.”
And the script was not just good but sublime. As roll calls go, the Catweazle cast list is hard to beat, but they are all “merely players” without the words, and thankfully, those were crafted and refined as if on a lathe…
ACCOMPLISHED CARPENTRY
Countless examples of the fish-out-of-water scenario have played out in popular culture. Everything from Adam Adamant Lives! to The Flipside of Dominic Hide, from Trading Places to Ted Lasso and Big to Barbie. But thanks to Richard Carpenter, Catweazle remains one of the best. It’s a format that serves him so well that he seems to acknowledge it in first-season episode The Wisdom of Solomon, when a mournful Catweazle confides to his faithful “familiar”, Touchwood the toad, “I choke in this unknown world. A fish out of water…”
Bearing in mind Catweazle was “Kip” Carpenter’s first TV commission, it shows an astonishing way with words, loved by me as a child through the protagonist’s awareness of the world and frequent annoyance with it, and admired all the more by my adult self. He gives Catweazle a language that can be seen as shorthand for 11th-century, with its “thee”s and “thou”s and “mayhap”s, but there’s so much more to it than that. It’s his attitude that belongs to another time, and his thinking aloud informs us of both his state of mind and his way of comprehending his new surroundings. Carpenter was given help and encouragement with his early scripts by his producer, the great Joy Whitby, and the director.
A light bulb, then, is like a “great fire in the air” or a prime example of “electrickery”, cars are “chariots”, a tractor “roars like the damned”, a vinyl record is a “black wheel”, a telephone is a “telling bone”, and so on. I know people who say “telling bone”, to this day, when referring to their landline.
The plotting was intelligent, too. Many instalments leap out of series one. Not just its bookends but also The Curse of Rapkyn (with its witchcraft, tortoise and Stuffy Gladstone the librarian); The Telling Bone (a tale of clerical errors), The Power of Adamcos (our hero’s confusion over a historical pageant – a perfect idea, if you think about it) and The House of the Sorcerer (murder most mistaken and Catweazle being baffled by recorded sound). Although series two is weaker – and for that we can lay the blame at impositions made on Carpenter – its overall structure is a thing of beauty. There are only 12 signs of the zodiac, but why can’t there be 13?! Catweazle’s weekly challenge to assemble his zodiac-jigsaw is mirrored by Cedric’s hunt for “The Lost Treasure of the Collingfords”, which enables him to save the estate.
If the occasional diversion into Chuckle Brothers territory is bothersome for us, it must have been doubly so for the writer. As he told Simon Wells for the 2010 DVD release, “I wasn’t experienced enough to withstand this complete change of direction the show had. There was an element of slapstick in the first series, but they took it further in the second series. And they didn't do it properly, so it stands out as slapstick because it wasn't quite so strongly character-based.”
Yet the overall design of the sorcerer’s odyssey is incredibly neat. And the fact that the show went on in 1972 to win the Writer's Guild Award for the best children's television programme speaks for itself. Like the hot-air balloon that conveys Catweazle to his destiny, the series travelled all around the world. A TV superhero, then. And for mini-me, he was a…
TEATIME SAVIOUR
Sundays in my teenage years were not always the happiest, tainted as they sometimes were by pre-school gloom, but they were enlivened by Catweazle, Thunderbirds repeats and many other shows in the London Weekend Television area. But then, this was a shining epoch of children’s programming, and distractions from the tyranny of school were rich and varied. Concurrent with Catweazle we also had Timeslip (1970–1), Ace of Wands (1970–2), Follyfoot (1971–3), and thereafter Escape into Night (1972), The Adventures of Black Beauty (1972–4) and The Tomorrow People (1973–9). And that was just on ITV!
These were my happy place. Half-hours (including ads) of escapism where I could mentally run around and be free in fresh and exciting worlds. They generated such a cosy ambience that even the frightening moments were OK – and something to talk about in the playground! “Did you see?” would always be one of the most important questions to ask friends on a Monday, and these were the kinds of shows that would populate such questions. I still ask people about Ace of Wands and Escape into Night to this day!
Among them all, however, Catweazle holds a special place in my heart. It’s a feeling best articulated by Carpenter himself when interviewed by Time Screen magazine in 1990: “I've always been interested in the person who is outside society and in fact if you look at all my stuff from Catweazle onwards it's all to do with loners and people who are outside society. In a sense that is the hero; the heroic figure is the man who takes on the world alone.”
Adults loved him too, but it wasn’t just my parents who had the good sense to allow me to watch it. Geoffrey Bayldon once heard tell of the Beatles… “All of them had children and would drop everything on Sundays to watch the series.”
But my mental images of Catweazle and all the shows of that era are often fused with the sounds that accompanied them…
WHAT’S THE SCORE?
Things that stay long in the mind aren’t always visual, of course. When I was young, I used to enjoy playing the “theme tune game”. Themes were earworms that buried themselves deep in my brain and Catweazle’s – Busy Boy by Ted Dicks – triggers a Proustian rush if I hear it now. Coupled with the ingenious opening titles, showing our hero passing down the centuries in his jump through time, it was very effective for setting the tone. I loved it, but I loved incidental music, too. And it seems Catweazle leant heavily on the library-music button. Some people have a problem with this. I don’t. If the music is carefully chosen, it can add greatly to the atmosphere of a programme. This may seem like getting off the beaten track, but many episodes of Space: 1999’s first series, for example, benefit from the work of the music editor.
The same is largely the case with Catweazle, where a mood is scary one moment, jaunty, pastoral or “lost-England”-ish the next. In the second series, choices tended to reflect the broader comedy of the shenanigans on screen, or to underline the gags in an unsubtle, Carry On manner. The Enchanted King – the sculptor’s episode – I’m looking at you! Other pieces – Day Trip by Mike Vickers, used in Duck Halt – scream out “early 70s”, and I do remember hearing it elsewhere. The estimable Lisa and Andrew Cartman of Round the Archive Podcast remind me that it was used as the theme for the BBC Schools programme Read On! – as well as in the Grandee Hotel episode of Budgie.
Occasionally, however, the music was employed to bring out an underlying melancholy. The season finales have both stayed with me for this reason, their poised and reflective harp-and-flute vibe managing to be both beautiful and sad.
The theme tune has yet another function in the show’s mythos: to tie together all the disparate elements – and episodes – of the second series. When Catweazle starts putting lyrics to the music in a way that would now be described as “meta” – “Twelve are they that circle round / If power you seek, they must be found / Look for where the 13th lies / Mount aloft the one who flies” – then you have to doff your cap to the mastery behind it all.
So those were some of the sounds. But the pictures persisted, too…
THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES…
The joy of the early 70s – when there was no such thing as video, let alone DVD and Blu-ray – was that it was possible to find many of your favourite series in one place. Such a place was the superior children’s comic Look-in. Here you could enjoy escapades that were different from those in the series – sometimes they were believably canon, at other times laughably outlandish. But when they were done well, and when the “voice” of the programme was preserved, you invested in them.
The comic stories associated with Catweazle began appearing on 21 February 1970, just after the show had made its debut on most ITV regions. In their pen-and-ink lifetime they were drawn by Bill Lacey (who also drew Skippy), Gerry Embleton (Dan Dare) and Alan Parry (Man About the House).
Here the eponymous time traveller got confused by the traffic, was thought to be a waiter and mistook a pub sign for the literal truth – all plotlines you could believe might appear in the show. And to begin with the characters of Carrot, Mr Bennet and Cedric did appear in strips following ITV transmissions of the first and second series, but they were soon edged out.
I only ever remember the strip in black and white, but the “colour” emerged in Catweazle’s dialogue. “Hark ye, Touchwood”; “Ingrate! Frog-belly!”; “Has thou his skills, prawn?”; and so on. Not that his charms were always hidden within the magazine’s pages. As I write I’m looking at a January 1972 issue with the character painted accurately and in full colour on the cover, looking typically mesmerised and holding aloft his magic wand Adamcos.
That distinctive portrait speaks to me down the decades, and reminds me how powerful and timeless a creation he was. And though the show’s predominant tone was light, I’d argue that the reason it’s etched on our hearts is down to the more serious interludes…
FINDING THE DRAMA
Our hero’s plight is an amusing and fantastical one, but if we put ourselves in his shoes… er, cloth bindings, it’s an identifiably poignant one, too. “I belong nowhere,” he laments in only the second episode, “and I have the bone ache.” Much later, as he prepares to return whence he came – and via the same watery method – we worry for him as he says, “I fear it… so cold, so deep… The great unknown.”
His catchphrase “Nothing works”, often uttered when a spell backfires, has more than a tinge of melancholy about it. There are even times when Catweazle becomes depressed and angry – in series two he gets in a strop when he can’t find a particular sign of the zodiac and starts kicking and shouting. His loss of faith in magic and temporary spurning of Touchwood are frightening because they are quite unlike him.
For above all, Catweazle has a questing, childlike spirit that makes him irresistible to his junior viewership – as well as an underlying optimism that always wins out. Consider his final exchange with Carrot as he starts to fade from the 20th century: “It’s impossible,” says the disbelieving boy. “A foolish word!” replies his mentor.
As Carrot and Cedric both discover, even as their lives are about to change forever, there is magic in the world – if you look for it. You can lose your sense of wonder as you get older, but Catweazle is a beautiful reminder that you don’t have to. Recapturing his faith in the marvels of life is an important lesson for him – and for us all. “I fly!”
The shots of our sorcerer delighting in his aerial predicament, his balloon just clearing the manor and heading over green English pastures into the sunset, are gorgeously captured by DoP Arthur Lavis, and stay with me to this day from that very first viewing.
There’s real poetry in the last episode, which opens with autumn leaves falling around Collingford Manor. Both series were like an English summer: glorious, sunny and warm, but sad when it’s over. Schooldays beckon for Carrot and Cedric, but all good things come to an end. Or do they…?
A LASTING LEGACY
I had immense fun showing my kids the prized telly of my own youth, and Catweazle was a firm fixture of those screenings. So the magic definitely lives on.
Could the series have continued? Well, Carpenter once told Look-in, “I think that shows have a lifespan of their own, whereas with Catweazle we could easily have done two more seasons.” As it stands, the programme is small but beautiful, and doesn’t outstay its welcome, like many outstanding shows down the years, including one of my favourites of recent times, Detectorists. Speaking of which, wouldn’t Mackenzie Crook be great as Catweazle?!
So is it ripe for reinvention? I’m torn on this question. The world has moved on. We still have tractors, cars, aircraft and light bulbs, but we also have computer screens, smartphones and countless other hi-tech distractions. Catweazle’s bafflement would be permanent in 2025! Also, it wouldn’t be Geoffrey Bayldon… The fact that the 2021 German film version didn’t catch fire perhaps suggests that we should leave it be.
But fandom never dies. Carol Barnes, secretary of The Official Catweazle Fan Club, tells me: “Catweazle was and still is so well loved all over the world and we have just added The Catweazle Fellowship, which raises funds for kids’ charities. We think our lovely cast and crew would approve.”
Sometimes in television, all the elements are right: casting, scripts, direction, music, locations… all components coalesce to create screen alchemy. And with Catweazle, everything works.
T’was magic… t’is magic still… t’will remain magic for all time.
