By hook or by Crook, Worzel Gummidge is a TV wonder: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews the BBC’s take on the iconic scarecrow
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What greater horror could befall a 21st century child than to be without wi-fi or a phone charger? ‘It’ll be like the olden days,’ gasped Susan to her brother John, cut adrift from technology in Worzel Gummidge (BBC1) – ‘like the Nineties or something’.
The olden days were director Mackenzie Crook’s inspiration as he brought this quick-tempered, slow-witted, muddle-headed scarecrow back to life.
That didn’t mean going back 40 years, to the time when the character was first on TV, played by former Doctor Who Jon Pertwee from 1979 to 1981.
Crook, who not only starred as Worzel but wrote the script, has an abiding affection for the countryside.
This first emerged in his wonderful sitcom Detectorists, about a couple of dreamers in an East Anglian village who spend their leisure hours searching with gentle persistence for buried gold.
Detectorists wasn’t really about amateur archaeologists and their rivalries with the local history group.
It was a hymn to the British countryside and how our national character has soaked into the soil.
So too is his version of Worzel Gummidge. In his world, every child might have a smartphone (or a ‘musical box’, as the puzzled stickman calls it when he hears the ringtone) but there’s no thrill like running down a country lane and scrambling over a stile.
John (Thierry Wickens), Susan (India Brown) and Worzel Gummidge (Mackenzie Crook), the stars of the new BBC show
Here, boys and girls don’t only want to go out and play in the open air, but they’re actually allowed to.
Townies Susan and John (India Brown and Thierry Wickens), staying with foster parents at Scatterbrook Farm, are sent exploring within five minutes. Apart from over porridge at breakfast, the only time they see adults during daylight is if one accidentally almost runs them over in a tractor.
To modern parents, programmed to fear that their children will be abducted if they step outside the house unsupervised, such freedom looks very much like negligence.
But the most dangerous predators in Worzel’s world are the crows, who want to graduate from stealing grain to bank raids.
When the scarecrow tried to enlist their help for a litter blitz, collecting plastic bags caught in trees, the birds demanded payment in guns. And a chainsaw. (They settled for grain, though.)
There was more than a touch of the Carry Ons about the original Worzel Gummidge, which was co-written by the Mail’s own late Keith Waterhouse. Barbara Windsor played Saucy Nancy, the ship’s figurehead who wanted to marry the scarecrow. Joan Sims was haughty Mrs Bloomsbury-Barton, the lady of the manor.
The most dangerous predators in Worzel’s world are the crows, who want to graduate from stealing grain to bank raids
And, of course, Worzel was hopelessly besotted with Una Stubbs as sharp-tongued Aunt Sally, the wooden fairground attraction. She treated him with derision, which made his scarecrow heart – a robin’s nest in his coat pocket – beat all the faster.
In Mackenzie’s rewrite, based on the 1930s stories of Barbara Euphan Todd, Sally really is his aunt – his mother’s bad-tempered sister – who lives in a rural museum.
Vicky Pepperdine played her as a shrill, ferocious harridan, the sort of aunt PG Wodehouse would have recognised immediately, though with a hint of softness beneath the wooden bands of her corset.
Ah! The kindly scarecrow retrieves John’s iPhone from the field and returns it to his home, scaring the child on arrival
By dropping that running joke of unrequited love – a very Seventies comic treatment of what used to be called ‘the war of the sexes’ – Mackenzie’s Worzel feels much more traditional.
The ‘groovy’ catchphrases that Pertwee loved are gone too – nobody says ‘I’ll be bum-swizzled’ or ‘Bozzy McCoo’. There was a cleverness to the direction, acknowledging that this Worzel will appeal strongly to nostalgic adults who were once bookish children.
When the scarecrows gathered to perform an ancient rite, they danced along the skyline like the procession led by Death at the end of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. And no, I’m not reading too much into that.
On a mission: The storyline addresses environmental problems such as global warming as the trio help ensure the field’s late harvest arrives
Perhaps daringly, the story hinted that climate change is nothing so new. Worzel and the children were trying to discover a spell that would put the seasons back on track but, as Aunt Sally explained, the weather wasn’t always reliable in the past – citing the deep freeze of ’63 and the blistering heatwave of ’76.
Worzel’s costume added to the old-fashioned appeal. He wore a redcoat’s military frockcoat, which was either an heirloom from Waterloo or, more likely, chucked out by the props department when Sean Bean hung up his rifle as Sharpe.
The haunting theme tune and soundtrack by folk-singing family The Unthanks echoed the notion that, even in the internet era, magic still lingers in the countryside. Worzel returns this evening with Sir Michael Palin as the Green Man – that pagan spirit of England’s green and pleasant land. There’s a touch of the ‘old gods’ about this revival.
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