The Man Who Hated Children

By it's third and final series, the ITV anthology 'Shadows' was running out of both scares and steam and was delving into the realms of fantasy with stories about Merlin, magic lands and, in this instance, Peter Pan.

At it's centre and hamming it up horribly is future 'Grange Hill' caretaker George A Cooper as the curmudgeonly councillor 'Higgs', determined to bring the wrath of the law down on the heads of the two kids, 'Willie' (Paul Watson) & 'Tom' (William Smoker) who've been bedevilling him.  Recruiting fellow councillor 'Sliggs' (Brian Wilde - 'Porridge', 'Last of the Summer Wine'), he begins to enact a plan that unwittingly pits him against literature’s perpetually prepubescent prankster and brings him to a particularly odd ending.

To my mind this episode has very little to recommend it, Cooper is in full on pantomime villain mode and Wilde is still essentially playing 'Mr Barrowclough', a role he'd only left the previous year, but, right in the middle, there is one rather magical little scene that makes it all worth while but which will leave you wondering why the rest of the story couldn't have been like that.

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