Magic, Media, And Alterity In Catweazle

Abstract

Scholarship on the Middle Ages for children has focused mainly on Arthurian adaptations. This article examines Richard Carpenter's successful British television serial Catweazle (1970), which is only distantly related to this tradition. The analysis of plot structure, codes of medievalness and the treatment and use of media aims at an understanding of the imaginary appeal, which this production offers to audiences at the time of its first broadcast as well as today.

Keywords:

• Catweazle
• TV
• media
• children's literature and culture
• magic

Acknowledgment

The author is grateful to Heike Koch, remembering their childhood, and thanks her for her support in writing this article.

Notes

Although I restrict my observations to children's fiction, non-fictional accounts of the Middle Ages for children, too, constitute narratives and could be analysed in terms of their constructions of the medieval, see Klaus (1989). On historical fiction and its linguistic authenticity see Miller (1985).

The field also comprises the pedagogical and literary debate about children's literature as such. Definitions of what is to be regarded as genuine or suitable children's literature are diachronically variable and synchronically contested. It seems to be promising to inquire into the relationships construed between the concepts of ‘the child’ and of ‘the pre-modern’ in these debates, see e.g. Brockman (1982) on the construction of children's literature as a separate and inferior genre in relation to humanistic disdain for the medieval and Scott MacLeod (2000) on parallels between the conceptions of adolescence and of the medieval as ‘heroic’ at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The question of what children might have read in the Middle Ages was raised in the very first volume of the journal Children's Literature by Tilbury McMunn and McMunn (1972) and had a symposium devoted to it three years later (McMunn, 1975).

The series has been studied in monographs (e.g. Tulloch and Alvarado, 1983).

The choice of Catweazle's familiar also points to his otherness or ‘medievalness’. The magician's familiar ‘Touchwood’ is not a potentially cute, furry animal but a toad – an animal many people find repulsive (to touch) or regard as somewhat sinister.

On Robin Hood in children's media see Carpenter (2008) and Jones (2000). In Catweazle, the Robin Hood myth is alluded to in the episode The Power of Adamcos, in which Catweazle comes across some locals dressed up in fantasy medieval clothes taking part in a performance of Westwood through the Ages, which includes the parts of ‘Marian’ and ‘Friar Tuck’. If the naming of Carrot's worst enemy, Arthur, the spiteful son of a temporary housekeeper, can be taken as an allusion to the legendary king, this would imply a comical disassociation. However, an affirmative allusion to the Arthurian myth is added in the naming of the local lake, which also becomes Catweazle's passage way back to the past: ‘Kingfisher Lake’.

In the sequel, however, Catweazle is allowed a glimpse at television. The sequel was produced with a partly different crew, as a consequence of internal conflict in LWT, which resulted in resignations and a more market-oriented policy. Produced with an eye on the American market, the sequel makes use of the same formula and exploits the opposition of magic and technology for comic effect; however, its comedy is mainly supplied by slapstick. Catweazle's encounter with television has no function within the plot of the episode. The screen shows an imitation of a 1950s public service children's programme in black and white: a close-up of a man filmed in studio telling a story directly addressing the audience. Catweazle replies to the ‘demon’, calling after him when he vanishes from the screen. The self-reference to the medium does not reveal the workings of ‘televisual magic’, but rather shows off its own illusionistic aesthetics in contrast to the older style.