When I was but a tiny child, I bloody loved The Worst Witch. The book, that is. This wasn’t, like, some kind of child hipster thing. Harry Potter hadn’t happened at that point, so the Worst Witch books were like the best option for magic school shenanigans. In reality, that might still be true. I only remember reading two, maybe three, of the books; the first and third mainly, as we owned a copy of the first one and for some reason the third seemed a lot more common about schools and libraries than the second, though I have a vague recollection of reading the second one at some point, as I do remember Enid actually being introduced even if I don’t remember any plot details. I digress. At time of writing, I haven’t really seen much backlash about The Worst Witch books, compared to people finally noticing en masse that the Harry Potter series is chock full of weird latent racism and bigotry. I suppose I could go back and look through, but let’s face it, even if I did and found out that they too are problematic as hell, considerably fewer people are basing their entire life philosophy on Jill Murphy’s series of children’s books than the frankly terrifying amount of people, adults, no less, who found Joanne Rowling’s series of children’s books to be revelatory and life changing.

The Worst Witch series still hangs about. The eighth and apparently final book came out in 2018. There have been two TV series, one in the ‘90s and one in the past few years that may or may not still be a thing (it’s all pretty vague), along with a couple of spin-offs of the former. There was a stage musical that did the rounds a couple of years back before landing in the West End for a spell.* And more to the point, there’s this thing that I’m supposed to be writing about. All in all, things have gone pretty well for the series, even if there are people out there who think it’s ripping off Harry Potter… through some kind of rip in the fabric of space/time, presumably.

If you’ve managed to go the 45 plus years since the original book without encountering it at all, it’s the mostly episodic story of 11 year old Mildred Hubble’s (played here by Fairuza Balk; she doesn’t do an accent incidentally, but her nationality is, surprisingly, never remarked upon within the film) first term at a boarding school for witches, headed by the kind hearted Miss Cackle (Charlotte Rae). As you might surmise from the title, she’s not hugely competent at witchery, and so finds herself at odds with the stern Miss Hardbroom (Diana Rigg); head of the first form, vice-principal, and potions teacher. Miss Hardbroom does however favour fellow first year Ethel Hallow (Anna Kipling), the latest in a well-established magic family to attend the school, who is a masterful student as well as a massive brown-noser and, behind the teachers’ backs, is a stuck-up, petty and vindictive bully. …Man, just as I was typing all that, it really struck me how suspiciously similar the scenarios are. Anyway, it carries on episodically for a bit, until on Halloween, an important holiday in the magic world (natch), the chief wizard (Tim Curry) comes to attend the school’s festivities which are to include formation flying by the first years. Ethel curses Mildred’s broom to become uncontrollable in the middle of the performance in order humiliate her in front of everyone as revenge for an earlier slight. Mildred’s disaster takes pretty much everyone else in the display with her thereby ruining it and raising the ire of everyone, including Miss Cackle, and rather than face the brass’ wrath in the morning, she chooses to run away. In the woods however, she finds a coven, headed by Miss Cackle’s apparent doppelganger, plotting to overthrow the school by transmogrifying the entire faculty and student body.

The book’s structure, such as it is, probably doesn’t lend itself particularly well to a film format, so this production chops and changes the order of events in a vague attempt to make it flow in a more sensible filmic fashion, most notably introducing the villain a lot earlier as opposed to just having her pop up around the climax. Not that that makes much odds, as it still walls pretty much all the stuff involving the coven off from the main story until Mildred stumbles upon them near the end. It also, despite using the same actress for both parts, seems to go out of its way to make them obviously distinct from one another, with Charlotte Rae having a grey bouffant and a posh accent that varies wildly in location as the headmistress and flowing pink locks and a southern drawl as her sister. Yes, this thing has some weird creative decisions in it. While from a screenplay perspective, introducing her and her coven early the most logical route to go, the fact that her expanded role pretty much consists of her and her gang milling about on a hill talking about how she’s totes going to overthrow her sister any day now with some slapstick thrown in means it largely serves to undermine any real threat in the story, which god knows it’s lacking, and renders the climax tonally dissonant. The thing makes an attempt to turn rampant anti-climax of the book into something a bit more dramatic. It almost works at making it seem like Mildred is in peril, but it clashes terribly with pretty much everything else.

‘Everything else’ in this instance is, as you might have guessed, rather a mess however. The film naturally has a lot of effects, mostly through the magic of chroma key, but they manage to fail quite a bit, including the ever popular ‘see-through bits on opaque objects’. The budget was, one assumes, pretty damn tight, with the production’s TV based status being quite apparent. Central Independent Television did actually have no less than two units for glossy film-based productions in the ‘80s; the inhouse-ish Central Films and external-ish Zenith Productions; and seemingly neither of which were involved in this thing, despite being shot on film and presumably intended for international (i.e. American) consumption given the cast.** I’d hazard a guess that it was whipped up by the children’s department and budgeted accordingly (as part of a standard cheapness with regards to children’s programming). Either that or they blew all the money on the cast. It seems like they didn’t have the money for a sound effects tape given as Mildred’s cat’s meows are very obviously a man making cat sounds. That’s not true. I don’t know what noises he was making, but they sure as hell weren’t cat sounds.

I suppose anyone who is familiar with this will know the elephant in the room here. I’ve largely avoided mentioning… THE SONGS! Another potential money sink for the film, they hired the composer of Annie, Charles Strouse, and sometime Lloyd Webber lyricist, Don Black. In fact, they only did two songs; the title theme, sung by a disembodied Bonnie Langford, because of course it is, and Tim Curry’s big (or rather ‘only’) number. The other major number, the requisite villain song, being fobbed off on Denis King. No one really seems to be bringing their A game, with them all coming off rather rhyming dictionary-eriffic. The fact that the budget seems to have run to a Casio keyboard probably doesn’t help. Still, it does give us the thing’s iconic moment: Tim Curry’s aforementioned number. Despite being listed quite highly in the credits, he’s in fact only in the film for two scenes totally about eight minutes (don’t read that as ‘he has eight minutes of screen time’, I mean the scenes as a whole clock in at about that). That eight minutes includes Mr Curry doing his best David Bowie impression in front of a green screen (or blue or whatever) while singing a slightly off-kilter song about how great Halloween is as often incongruous images and video effects that the production team of The Tomorrow People would deem ‘not good enough’ play out behind him.

It’s wonderful.

As, for that matter, is Charlotte Rae’s cheery little doo-wop-ish number which includes lines about killing and eating her enemies. It’s all quite odd, as despite the film’s obvious cheapness and seeming laziness, the actors are actually putting quite a lot of effort in; the adults in particular seem to be relishing the opportunity to go full pantomime ham, while at the same time willing to pull back when need be. The whole affair’s camp quality is somewhat predicated on the odd balancing of things; competence and incompetence, earnestness and irony, loudness and subtlety. While not good by any stretch, it nonetheless is quite charming.

And, yes, Diana Rigg is fabulous.

* From what I can tell, that musical has nothing to do with this musical (such as it is) beyond sharing the source material.



** By most accounts, HBO was involved in its funding, though they’re not actually credited at all. I’d say ‘you wouldn’t know it to look at it’, but HBO’s original productions were seemingly pretty damn spotty prior to the mid ‘90s.