The Haunted Generation

(This review first published in Fortean Times No 432, dated June 2023)

CHILDREN’S FILM FOUNDATION BUMPER BOX VOLUME 4
Dir various, UK 1953-84
BFI, £26.99 (DVD)

“The Children’s Film Foundation films are like those weird Public Information Films from the Central Office of Information,” says BFI archivist and producer Vic Pratt. “You carry them with you. They provide high watermarks of your childhood that you really treasure later in life. A frisson of excitement that it’s hard to match when you’re an adult.”

Between 1951 and 1988, the CFF produced over 400 films for children, an eclectic body of work that became woven into the fabric of the late 20th century childhood. For many of us, the increasing, all-pervading weirdness of these films provided a crucial gateway into grown-up horror and even, perhaps, a wider interest in all matters fortean. Vic Pratt himself – who has spent the last decade curating the BFI’s DVD releases from this giddy archive – cites 1971’s Mr Horatio Knibbles as a major watershed moment. As an impressionable young boy, he was so traumatised by this tale of friendship between a young girl and a six-foot talking rabbit that he had to be physically removed from a screening at the Camber Sands Pontins. “They had to call my dad,” he recalls. “And he apologetically took me back to our chalet”.

The fourth Children’s Film Foundation Bumper Box acts as a perfect microcosm of the CFF’s slide into all-out weirdness. And although the earliest features on this nine-film set are rooted more in the everyday, they still provide glimpses of a fascinatingly grimy past. The Dog and the Diamonds (1953) sees a jewel robbery foiled by filthy-faced London kids, all freshly rehomed from bombed-out Victorian slums to concrete council flats; Blow Your Own Trumpet (1958) is a foray into kitchen sink drama, with a teenage Michael Crawford desperate to join his local colliery band. In The Missing Note (1961) we’re afforded further tantalising glimpses of post-war London, with well-heeled kids chasing a wayward piano around the streets of Twickenham. Only 1955’s The Stolen Airliner hints at more ambitious adventures: written and directed by future Hammer stalwart Don Sharp, it is tinged with the earliest rumblings of Cold War-era paranoia.

Exploding into colour, The Big Catch (1968) is a beautifully-shot depiction of class conflict in a Scottish fishing village. But it’s the wonderful Blinker’s Spy-Spotter (1972) that proves the real turning point of this collection. A delicious gear-change into what Vic calls the “total post-psychedelic splurge” of the CFF’s imperial phase, it stars David Spooner as the titular Blinker, a boy inventor in jam-jar glasses whose bedroom is a riot of home-made, automated gadgets. His mission? To prevent the revolutionary “Crystal X” invented by his deerstalker-wearing father from falling into the hands of dastardly criminal mastermind Bernard Bresslaw. Fans of Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who will delight at the presence of a scientific research complex with conveniently lax security and a sprightly yellow(ish) roadster being driven at breakneck speeds along treacherous country lanes. 

From here, the brakes are off. The Flying Sorcerer (1974) is knockabout comedy, with The Vicar of Dibley’s John Bluthal discreetly inventing time travel and subsequently transporting his flare-wearing nephew David (Kim Burfield) to medieval England. Here, hapless wizard Astrolabe (Tim Barrett) is being menaced by perhaps the slowest-moving dragon in Christendom, and – with an unmistakeable whiff of Catweazle in the air – all three of them are catapulted back to the 1970s. It’s great fun. More considered, however, is 1978’s Mr Selkie. Tapping into stories from genuine Celtic folklore (with Rentaghost’s Molly Weir adding authentic Scottish gravitas), it stars Peter Bayliss as a disgruntled sealion adopting human form to campaign against mankind’s relentless pollution of the oceans. It’s a thoughtful and prescient fable, and an interesting insight into the earliest days of eco-awareness. As Vic Pratt points out, “the CFF were way ahead of the curve”.

The long-lost gem, though? Gabrielle and the Doodleman, from 1984. Never granted a cinema release, it centres on the miserable existence of the wheelchair-bound Gabrielle (Prudence Oliver), a young girl whose mother has been killed in a car crash caused by her now terminally depressed father (Gareth Hunt). Her only respite from this bleakness is the Space Invaders-style game she plays endlessly on a BBC Micro computer in her darkened bedroom. But her plight is noted by the denizens of an Elysian realm of mythical beings, themselves concerned that the relentless march of home computing is eroding their potency in the imaginations of 1980s children. It’s a concern stridently voiced by gangly “Agent Seven Double O” (Matthew Kelly). “Who in their right mind is going to send for the fairy godmother nowadays?” he ponders. “Or Merlin the Magician? Children down there have got better tricks of their own…”

Nevertheless, he is despatched by Machiavellian overlord Windsor Davies to provide respite for Gabrielle. Travelling to our world through the circuits of her computer (cue glorious scenes of Kelly and film-stealing genie Eric Sykes protecting each other from Space Invaders lasers), he is rechristened “The Doodleman” by Gabrielle. And, true to his mission, he grants her a series of heartbreakingly modest wishes. These are realised through ambitious dream sequences – a medieval pageant, a circus, pantomime – in which, tellingly, Gabrielle is able-bodied and her father is now confined to a wheelchair. It’s a jarring combination of tones, but the cast are a joy, and its inclusion is the highlight of a collection that becomes slowly subsumed by a sense of deliciously vintage strangeness.      

*****

The Children’s Film Foundation Bumper Box Vol 4 is available here:
https://shop.bfi.org.uk/children-s-film-foundation-bumper-box-vol-4-dvd.html

Full Vic Pratt interview here:
https://hauntedgeneration.co.uk/2023/06/06/vic-pratt-the-childrens-film-foundation-and-the-chiffy-kids/

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