Catweazle

Catweazle is a British children's fantasy television series for London Weekend Television, created by Richard Carpenter and starring Geoffrey Bayldon as the title character. The first series, produced by Joy Whitby and directed by Quentin Lawrence, aired on ITV in 1970. The second series, produced by Joy Whitby and directed by David Reid and David Lane, aired in 1971. Each series had thirteen episodes, most written by Carpenter, who also published a book for each series based on the scripts.

Carpenter, a former actor who turned to screenwriting in the 1960s, got the name Catweazle from an old stone gatepost he noticed while lost in the countryside after visiting his brother-in-law’s farm. He decided to create a TV show about a wizard after seeing a picture of a "wizardly old man" in the bottom left corner of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting *Christ Crowned with Thorns*. He made his wizard a time traveler from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, and incorporated ideas about witchcraft from historian Margaret Murray and occultist Gerald Gardner.

In the first episode, the 11th-century bumbling wizard Catweazle, carrying his magic charm and toad familiar, is chased by soldiers through a wood. He says a spell as he jumps into a pond, and when he emerges he believes he has flown—but has actually jumped 900 years into the future. He arrives on a farm in rural England in 1970 and befriends a ginger-haired teenager named Edward Bennet, nicknamed Carrot (Robin Davies), who spends most of the series hiding Catweazle from his father (Bud Tingwell) and the farmhand Sam (Neil McCarthy). Catweazle searches for a way back to his own time while living in a disused water tower on abandoned Ministry of Defence land, which he calls Castle Saburac, with his toad Touchwood. When spotted, he uses his amulet to hypnotize people into forgetting they saw him.

The second series involved Catweazle trying to return to his own time and encountering modern inventions. A third series, planned to return to the Bennets’ farm rather than the stately home of the second series, never progressed past the drafting stage.

Catweazle mistakes all modern technology for powerful magic—especially "elec-trickery" (electricity) and the "telling bone" (telephone)—an example of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.