Station Zero

I stumbled upon this film while I was looking for Merlin , the previous stop on my Arthurian films tour. It’s very recent (released in 2020) but pretty obscure, starring nobody I’ve ever heard of and bearing an ugly rash of one-star reviews. Most of the one-star reviews rightly point out that it has a clumsy and misleading title: Merlin is not by any definition a Knight of Camelot, and even if he were, he’s only in this film for about five minutes (he’s played rather well by Richard Brake).  I’ve decided to stop blogging about the bad Arthurian films I encounter, and this one certainly isn’t good, but it does have  a couple of interesting things about it that make it worth including here. Of all the films I’ve watched for this blog so far, I think this is the only one which makes use of the story related by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Sir Thomas Malory that Arthur led his knights across the Channel on a war against the Roman Empire. Perhaps these stories originated in folk memori...

If you’d asked me as a small child who Merlin was, I would have been able to tell you. He was a wise but eccentric old wizard, and he looked like this: I’d never seen Disney’s The Sword in the Stone - Disney films never came on TV in those days, just got re-released at the cinema from time to time. But clips cropped up fairly frequently on programmes like Screen Test and the Bank Holiday Disney Time specials, and I think we had a book with some of the pictures and presumably the story in. So, even without seeing it, it was still one of my first encounters with Arthurian legend, and that’s probably true for most people of my generation.  As Disney animations go, I don’t think it’s quite top tier - it’s not as good as Sleeping Beauty, or The Jungle Book - but that’s a high bar and it’s still pretty good. Based on the novel by TH White, and directed by Wolfgang Reitherman, it tells the story of the Wart (it rhymes with ‘Art’) who lives with his stepfather Sir Ector and loutish stepb...

Watching all these Arthurian Movies lately shook loose a memory of this Thames TV children’s programme, which I saw when it was first broadcast back in 1979 (I think it was on Monday afternoons, about 4.30: not exactly Prestige Drama.) So I looked it up on YouTube - where it’s available for free since it has ‘no commercial potential’ - and what do you know, it’s surprisingly good! 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 McCart...