What TV character did you grow up watching before you became a teenager?

Mine was Catweazle. There are still some aspects of this character I still admire. The 'happy go lucky', 'Try it, it might work', 'It wasn't where I thought I was going, but glad to be here anyway'.

Catweazle was a magician who lived in the eleventh century, but however hard he tried, his spells hardly ever worked.

Then one day was different. First of all he had two bad omens - a bad dream and an owl hooting in daylight. Then Norman soldiers tried to capture him, so in desperation he used some magic, and it worked! The only trouble was that it had worked in the wrong way: Catweazle flew through Time instead of Space, and ended up in a place Hexwood Farm, nine centuries later, where of course he thought everything he saw - motor cars, telephones, electric light ('Electrickery') - all happened by magic.

How Catweazle is befriended by the farmer's son, Carrot, and how he finds his feet in the twentieth century, while hiding from the world in a water tower, makes a riotously funny story, as anyone who has watched the London Weekend Television serial of Catweazle will know.

For readers of eight and over.

Author: Richard Carpenter.
Published by: Puffin Books.
Front Cover: London Weekend International Limited.

'Thou great Norman lump!' muttered Catweazle the magician. 'If I conjure till Doomsday, I cannot make thee gold,' and there was a sympathetic croak from his familiar, Touchwood. Even the world of Elecrickery had been better than this, thought Catweazle bitterly.

They were captives, imprisoned in the deepest of Farthing Castle at the behest of the great Norman lord, William de Collynforde, and likely to remain so unless Catweazle's magic worked for once, and he managed to fly from the accursed castle.

Fly he did, but once again it was through time, not space. Hurling himself, full of faith, from the battlements, Catweazle landed splosh in the moat - but the castle had vanished! In its place was a large white house with a clock tower with a little turret on top. Cedric Collingford, the boy who lived in the house, was to be his ally in a new series of magical and hilarious adventures, in which Catweazle seeks the 'Thirteenth Sign' of the Zodiac which he believes will help him fly back to his own time, and Cedric hopes to restore his family fortune by finding the lost Collingford treasure.

Catweazle's presence produces just as many hilarious situations as it did in the first book, Catweazle.

For readers of eight and over.

Author: Richard Carpenter.
Published by: Puffin Books.
Front Cover: London Weekend International.