Shadows - Series One (1975) pt 1

It was 1975 in my living room this Sunday gone, at least for an hour and half, as I sat and watched the first three episodes of Thames Television's spooky anthology kids show; Shadows. I say "spooky" by way of description rather than an admission.  However, even though, I'm a little too old to be disturbed by the content of the episodes now days, I can see how they would have been effective on a younger version of me.

• Ep 1 The Future Ghost by Roger Marshall (3/9/1975) 
• Ep 2 After School by Ewart Alexander (10/9/1975) 
• Ep 3 The Witch Bottle by Stewart Farrar 917/9/1975)

The series has a bit of a cult rep, which may well be deserved, although sometimes it can just take the right theme tune and opening credits to lay the foundations upon which less noteworthy content is  raised higher than deserved.  Perhaps not in this case though.

The Future Ghost was perhaps the least likely to spook (lets keep using that word) anyone as although it was sort of a ghost story, it was more about giving the concept a bit of a spin than putting its audience on edge.  Not a bad way to open the series, if only to have put any dutiful parents at ease about letting their children watch this show.  The Future Ghost made me think of a stripped down version of The Amazing Mr Blunden which is ghosts in a family friendly way.

If After School reminded me of anything its shades of Kes in its initial set up, although Gareth Thomas doesn't quite pull off sadistic football coach in quite the same way Brian Glover did.  After that he disappears leaving the two welsh school kids alone to be gently poltergeist'ed  into discovering where the earthly remains can be found and exhumed.

Now The Witch Bottle is for me the most interesting one and the first bit of old TV that I've watched with adult eyes and found myself considering - just for a moment - if it was entirely suitable for a children's teatime show.  The plot is a tried and tested formula and concerns the curse of a wronged long dead witch but its strength comes in the fact that its written very straight and is incredibly well acted by the two female leads.  At less than half an hour an episode all the stories are denied the opportunity to build the tension too highly but there are enough elements here: witchcraft, possession, curses, and cruelty to keep little Peter and Jane in nightmares for a week.  Its certainly the episode I'll be going back to for another viewing.

There is a lot of witch history and folklore casually exchanged between the characters, including mention of Matthew Hopkins, The Witchfinder General, as made famous to all by the 1968 horror film with Vincent Price.  And so. on the strength of Farrar's script, I decided to look him up only to discover that here was a writer that would have made my old English teacher proud with his golden rule of; "Write about what you know".  That's Farrar right there, standing behind the attractive naked lady.

Because, as you may have guessed by now, Farrar was the real deal.

Wikipedia introduces him thusly;

Frank Stewart Farrar (28 June 1916 – 7 February 2000), who always went by the name of Stewart Farrar, was an English screenwriter, novelist and prominent figure in the Neo-pagan religion of Wicca, which he devoted much of his later life to propagating with the aid of his seventh wife, Janet Farrar.

 

and;

 

After being initiated into Alexandrian Wicca by Maxine Sanders in 1970, he subsequently published one of the earliest books to describe this newly burgeoning religion, What Witches Do (1971). Within only a few months of being initiated, he had risen to the position of High Priest and founded his own coven in south London,

All of which is quite fantastic and goes a long way to explaining why The Witch Bottle speaks with a greater truth than the previous two episodes.  Although dramatic it is never sensational and now, armed with this new knowledge, I realise it was probably meant to be educational as well.  I suppose some might consider the most spooky thing of all.

 

 

Steve