Catweazle

Catweazle is a British children's fantasy television series, starring Geoffrey Bayldon in the title role, and created by Richard Carpenter for London Weekend Television. The first series, produced and directed in 1969 by Quentin Lawrence, was screened in the UK on ITV in 1970. The second series, produced and directed in 1970 by David Reid and David Lane, was shown in 1971. Each series had thirteen episodes, most but not all written by Carpenter, who also published two books based on the scripts. Summary The premise in the first episode is that an 11th century bumbling wizard named Catweazle (Geoffrey Bayldon) is pursued by soldiers through a wood, carrying only his magic charm and his toad familiar. He says a spell as he jumps into a pond. When he emerges from the pond he believes that he has made the wood and soldiers disappear; in fact he has jumped 900 years into the future. He arrives on a farm in rural England in the year 1969 and befriends a farmer's son, a ginger teenager named Edward Bennet, nicknamed Carrot (Robin Davies), who spends most of the rest of the series attempting to hide Catweazle from his father (Bud Tingwell) and the farmhand Sam (Neil McCarthy). Catweazle searches for a way to return to his own time while hiding in a disused water tower on abandoned Ministry of Defence land, which he calls Castle Saburac, with his familiar, a toad called Touchwood (as touching wood is believed to bring good fortune). Whenever he is spotted, he uses his magic amulet to hypnotise people into forgetting that they saw him. The second series featured a 12-part riddle that Catweazle, now in 1970, attempts to solve at the rate of one clue an episode, the solution (as he thinks) being revealed in the 13th.