42 Ace of Wands

First  watched  : Uncertain

Back  to  ITV  now  and  if  Catweazle  was  a  bit  creepy  this  was  downright  terrifying  ( and  I'm  not  talking  about  the  clothes  ) . With  its  Tarot  cards, seances , evil  villains  and  gritty  urban  setting  this  pushed  the  envelope  much  further  in  terms  of  what  you  could  include  in  a  children's  TV  series.

The  stories  centered  around  Tarot ( Michael  McKenzie ) , a  stage  musician  who  had  genuine  supernatural  powers  which  made  him  the  focus  of  attack  from  evil  forces  both  in  this  world  and  beyond. Like  Dr  Who  each  series  was  comprised  of   four  to  six  self-contained  serials  and  Tarot  had  a  couple  of  sidekicks. The  original  pair  left  at  the  end  of  the  second  series  and  the  new  girl Mikki  ( Petra  Markham ), in  the  third  and  final  series,  could  communicate  telepathically  with  Tarot. One  of  the  villains,  Mr  Stabs,  played by  Callan's  Russell  Hunter  was  resurrected in  a later  series  called  Shadows .

I  recall  the  programme's  sinister  ambience  rather  than  the  actual  storylines  and  I  suspect  I  wasn't  watching  it  from  its  start  in  1970. Only  the  third  series  survives  intact  and  has  been  released  on  DVD; the  first  two  appear  to  have  been  completely  wiped.  As  an  introduction  to  the  fashions  and   preoccupations  of  early  seventies  Britain  it's  hard  to  think  of  anything  better.