Cult Television Essentials: The Witches and the Grinnygog
The Witches and the Grinnygog was a 1983 television series of six episodes based on the 1981 children’s novel of the same name by Dorothy Edwards; it was shortlisted for the 1981 Whitbread Prize for a children’s book. It is a story of pre-Christian traditions, considered in the middle ages to be witchcraft, surviving into the modern world, and deals with various themes related to English folklore, ghosts and time slips. The show opens with an ancient English church being moved to a new site, one stone – a strange statue, the Grinnygog of the title – is found to be missing.
Its accidental rediscovery (by a woman who, not realising its significance, gives it to her elderly father as a pseudo garden gnome) coincides with the arrival in the same town of three eccentric old women who seem to be looking for something lost or hidden many years before, and a nervous, “other-worldly” child.
The townsfolk find themselves looking into their collective past but it takes a group of children to put the pieces of the puzzle together and make amends for an ancient injustice.
The story is notable in modern popular culture for its portrayal of witches as something other than evil old hags.
The TV series featured Patricia Hayes as Miss Bendybones, John Barrard, Adam Woodyatt and Anna Wing and was filmed in and around Titchfield and Bishop’s Waltham, Hampshire.
It was adapted by Roy Russell and directed by Diarmuid Lawrence, with music by James Harpham. It was shown on Nickelodeon in the United States as part of the anthology series The Third Eye.
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Brett Summers
Founded Cult Faction in 2014; previously crawled out of the Black Lodge in 1976, only to find himself in the Village.