Devised by Anne Carlton and written by veteran communist-turned-Wiccan (!) TV writer Stewart Farrar, The Boy Merlin was expanded from a single episode of the anthology series Shadows. It has the twelve-year-old Merlin living with his foster parents, a smith named Dafydd (Donald Houston)and his wife Blodwen (Margaret John) , and honing his magic skills with the help of his foster-grandmother Myfanwy (Rachel Thomas) But as the illegitimate grandson of local ruler King Conaan of Caernarfon (Meredith Edwards) he’s soon embroiled in his grandfather’s dealings with tyrannical High King Vortigern (Neil McCarthy) and Vortigern’s poisonous wife Rowena (Hilary Tindall). Meanwhile, over the sea in Brittany, the rightful High King Aurelianus and his brother Uther prepare to retake Britain from Vortigern…
It’s the sort of vaguely plausible-ish Dark Ages setting that’s familiar from novels like Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave or Rosemary Sutcliff’s Dawn Wind, and although there a few bum notes - they seem to have have far more bother from Vikings than you’d expect in the 5th Century, and at one point Rowena tells someone to ‘speak in plain English’ - it’s a more believable picture of post-Roman Britain than any other Arthurian film or TV I’ve yet seen. The extremely low budget works in its favour - kings with retinues of one or two sit about on wooden thrones in halls you couldn’t swing a cat in. The costumes are all furs and fustian, in earthy colours, set off with the old gold brooch or buckle, and in poor Vortigern’s case with an uncomfortable-looking square crown like an elaborate biscuit tin. It’s the complete opposite of the big-budget Byzantine fantasy Britain in the previous Arthur film I reviewed.
The sets don’t make much more effort to look real than those in Rohmer’s Perceval, but most telly looked like that in the ‘seventies: it’s closer to theatre than to cinema. The few exterior scenes are shot in a misty winter beech wood. The lack of extras or any shots of towns or large buildings gives the world an empty feeling which I associate with a lot of the best Arthurian adaptations - a sense of a time when humans hadn’t quite got the upper hand over the forces of nature and magic.
The acting is good, from a bunch of stalwart TV regulars whose faces I knew but whose names I didn’t - Hilary Tindall’s Rowena is a splendid villainess, and Derek Smith is great fun as her pompous court magician Grimbold.
Merlin himself (Ian Rowlands) is a little child actor-y, but then he is a child actor, and I doubt the directors had much time to work with him, so he’ll do. I think this Merlin is meant to be a bit annoying, too - he’s young and arrogant and pleased with his cleverness and his strange powers.
The show’s main strength is its writing. The political tussles between Vortigern and his vassal king, the relationship between Merlin and his foster-family, and the machinations of Rowena and Grimbold are all nicely drawn. There’s a lot of comedy too - some of it a bit laborious, like the episode where Merlin accidentally turns his foster-mum invisible, but the cast mostly make it work.
Most of the episodes involve some sort of foreshadowing of things to come - Arthur’s birth is still years in the future, but the machinery of fate is already grinding into action. Stewart Farrar was apparently an important figure in the Wiccan religion, and I detect a strong whiff of proto-New Age 1970s paganism in a lot of this. A conversation between Grimbold and grandma Myfanwy about their different styles of magic feels like exactly the sort of thing Farrar would have been discussing round the cauldron on coven night (or whatever - I don’t know what witches do, because I’ve never read his book, What Witches Do.)
There is at least one novel detail which I’m assuming Farrar invented: the Round Table is discovered: it’s very small (more of a Round Coffee Table) and made of stone, there’s a face carved on it, and the mouth is a slot into which a sword can be inserted: one day it will double as the stone Excalibur is wedged in. The sword itself is forged in the final episode, on the orders of Vivien, Lady of the Lake. (Three feet of shining steel and starburst filters, it surely comes from hundreds of years after Merlin’s time, but then it is supposed to be magic.)
Grimbold and Rowena both drop out of sight in the later episodes, which is a pity, and leaves a distinct feeling of unfinished business - perhaps there was hope of a second series that never came to pass. But it’s a miracle there was even one series - it’s hard to believe something so complex and so rooted in knowledge of the legends went out as a children’s programme on commercial TV. What I made of it in ‘79 I don’t recall. What anyone who hadn’t grown up on Rosemary Sutcliff and Alan Garner made of it I can’t imagine. I suspect to modern viewers it will look very quaint and theatrical. But if you have half an hour to spare, pretend it’s 1979 and you’re thirteen years old, and give the first episode a try.
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