One of the remembered pleasures of childhood was being frightened half to death at the cinema by Bela Lugosi's Dracula, by Lon Chaney Jnr as Lawrence Talbot – poor Talbot: all fans will know, of course, that he as the wolfman – by the various Dr Frankensteins and their several monsters. Remember that heart-stopping moment when no less an actress than Elsa Lanchester came alive on the slab in The Bride of Frankenstein? Odd, now, that when these films appear on television they are too late for ones own children to enjoy. Somewhere along the line someone seems to have forgotten what it's like to be a child.
Still, here and there our television fills the gap. None fills it better than Thames's Ace of Wands which happily return to independent television at 5.15 yesterday. One wonders if a bare outline of the opening incident – the dead man with the mark of the serpent wrigged across his death-pale face – might not ring a complaint from some terribly grown up mind in the head of some do-gooder.
Anyway, Ace of Wands, is produced and directed by Pamela Lonsdale, who succeeded admirably a few years back in the equally mysterious but more traditionally enchanting world of the lion, the witch and the wardrobe for ABC Television; and is scripted by Trevor Preston whose idea this series is.
Carot (sic) (Michael Mackenzie), is aided in righting wrongs by the wise cracking cockney Sam (Tony Selby), and the lovely Lulli (Jody Loe). The Devil comes to bat with Russell Hunter's rather Dracula-like Mr Stabs (greased-back smarm hairstyle and untrendy pasted-down Transylvanian sideburns), with Ian Trigger's Luka (sic) who is in the mould of evil but cringing side kicks, and with the beautiful she devil Polandi (Harriet Harper).
Something should be said about the dialogue and style of playing, which have an economy and directness which somehow make the more conventionally "grown-up" thriller series look verbose and clumsy.
But within the heightened atmosphere so carefully created, where walking sticks wiggle like snakes and have a life of their own, etc, this curious speech mannerism works like magic giving an extra tingle to the juvenile spine. Of course the evil Polandi will say "You know that in my earthly life I work on a magazine." That is how evil henchwomen have always talked.
This piece was whole of the day's television review column in The Times on 22nd July 1971.