A Shadow Of Its Former Self
Shadows Series 3 on DVD
Children love to be scared, and television used to love scaring them. Shadows, the Thames anthology of the mid-Seventies, undoubtedly delivered a few memorable episodes, but it really does seem to be a series whose excellent reputation is based wholly on the strength of its first series.
The second series which was obsessed with portentous curses and restless folklore, felt very much a product of its age; one could imagine it being written while listening to a soundtrack of Comus or Heron, but that alone wasn’t enough to make up for its flat atmospheres and lack of surely the most essential ingredient in a series called Shadows and with a title sequence promising scares: scares themselves.
Series three, sadly, is even lighter fare. A fluttery and magical woodwind theme tune and a more mild-mannered title sequence means what we are about to receive is likely to be even further away from anything likely to have kept a child in 1978 up at night.
Once you’ve stopped waiting for anything chilling to occur, there are moments here and there to pass the time however. The opening story, ‘Eleven O’Clock’, is almost entirely a one-room two hander between Ronald Hines and Tina Heath as a father and daughter holidaying in France. It’s a by-numbers ghost story: quite literally too, as the signs that there is something spooky going on are chimed on a stopped grandfather clock in correlation to scores on a dartboard. Dartboards aren’t really the most malevolent thing that could undergo possession in a house, but the play actually is pleasant, and passes rather like a sigh. Nothing very much happens but what does happens in a very calm and pensive style, and for this it does deserve appreciation because it isn’t easy to hold the imagination so gently for that long so successfully. It’s occasionally a rather obviously educational play, with the scores on the board being added up rather emphatically for instance, and at one point seems to have been designed purely to teach children a little history, but then to be fair ghost stories are by definition about the past intruding into the present, and so make a rather convenient vehicle for informing children. Although it has an air of it though, be warned, Sapphire and Steel it ain’t.
After a slightly promising start, all integrity goes for a Burton in ‘The Rose of Puddle Fratum’. The opening moments suggest we are about to see something quite inventive, as the three main characters appear as cardboard cutouts while a voiceover introduces them, before being replaced by three-dimensional actors. Sadly they never make the transition to three-dimensional characters, and this intriguing pop-up book opening is then abandoned, making it within a few minutes seem weird and irrelevant. The story itself is utter codswallop, with Christopher Lillicrap, who delivers his lines as if he is guesting on Jackanory, shacked up in darkest mummerset with a shit talking computer that wants to be R2-D2 or K-9 but is more like the love child of Metal Mickey and the Green Cross Robot. The supporting cast, such as the token surly landlord and bovine village blacksmith, say things like “there be many witches in these paaarts…” and make one wonder how a series that got writing and acting for children so right at the start could have started making such basic mistakes three years on.
We’re in safer hands for the third story, ‘And Now For My Next Trick’, since it’s written by the wonderful P.J. Hammond. It’s not the best piece of work he’s done, thinly and rather haphazardly plotted, feeling padded at the start and rushed at the end, but it is the only episode that really shows an interest in character and is also acted properly by its cast, especially Clive Swift in the lead, who, like Ronald Hines, doesn’t go in for that condescending type of children’s drama acting where people sound like they’re talking to someone who doesn’t speak much English. The story concerns a middle-aged children’s magician who finally admits that he is a failure after his audience walk out half way through his act at a birthday party. He feels out of touch with a fast moving generation (who are later seen reading Planet of the Apes comics and listening to E.L.O), and lives a lonely life in a scruffy boarding house where he has befriended the landlady’s daughter, who just could be his only friend. Although he does call one of the children’s parents (Jacqueline Pearce) a “first-class bitch”, (yes, on children’s television!), he’s a kindly and sad old soul and so the ending is a genuine surprise.
Although that contemporary tale works well, the series is still ill-advisedly hung up on Arthurian legends and the like, and despite it launching its own series, ‘The Boy Merlin’ feels like a school play, flat, dreary and totally lacking any sense of crisis. Another very tepid historical story, ‘The Silver Apple’, is even blander, despite Olaf Pooley turning up as a wizard blessed with a voice that is virtually identical to Ian McKellen’s.
‘The Man Who Hated Children’, starring George A Cooper as, well, just that, is largely actors making arses of themselves, but the final story, ‘Honeyann’, is at least quite well populated and busy. With Fay Weldon in the writing chair one should expect more, but then again maybe one shouldn’t, since as well as writing the brilliant opening episode of Upstairs Downstairs she did also write one of the worst, and she also gave us The Life and Loves of a She Devil, which to my mind isn’t saying much. ‘Honeyann’ plays a little like a mad combination of the two with a dash of The Nanny (1965) thrown in, but before you get your hopes up too much, it has to be said that even with a spirited cast including a very honeyed Gwyneth Strong and a loutish Paul Angelis, this still feels flat and polite, a story with potential that is wrapped in cotton wool.
It’s hard to decide who, by 1978, the makers thought they were aiming the show at exactly. Any child old enough to follow the plots of some of the episodes would feel patronized by some of the writing and performances in them. There’s also an irony in the fact that in ‘And Now For My Next Trick’ the programme is picking up on how children are changing and need stronger stuff to engage them, at the very same time as it itself was doing the very opposite. Although it wouldn’t be fair to
say that Grange Hill, which began in 1978, was a totally new way of making children’s television, (the first series of Shadows was way ahead of it), watching this series one can certainly see why it was so welcomed.
Shadows Series 3 is available on DVD from Network.
