Jamie and the Magic Torch

Archive transfer - originally posted August 9th 2005

I was born the same year that this well-loved Cosgrove Hall animation debuted in 1976, but it was repeated at lunchtimes right through until the late 1980s, when I was at secondary school. And it never lost its lustre.
I got the whole of series one on DVD for a fiver the other week and finally got round to sitting and watching the first episode, Mr Boo Loses a Mountain (careless chap!), last night. It only lasts 10 minutes, and about a fifth of that is taken up with the memorable opening and closing credits which see Jamie tucked up in bed by his mum.
But the episode itself is completely bonkers! The characters that live in Cuckoo Land are surely the products of the most drug-addled imaginations possible. They say The Magic Roundabout was dreamt up by hash-smoking animators, but this is another dimension!
Mr Boo, the moustachioed, bespectacled mad professor who flies around in a floating submarine is just about within my grasp, but then we have a policeman with a wheel for legs, an orange creature who uses his nose as a flute, a talking Old English Sheepdog, and a yellow and black cat with a broad Scottish accent.
And they don't half talk some flob. I know it's for kids, and kids loved it (indeed, I loved it!), but there's never much of a cohesive story. Maybe that was the point - this is Cuckoo Land after all, and there aren't many sane destinations at the foot of a helter skelter under your bed. Or any, in fact.
It seems like I'm dissing Jamie and the Magic Torch, but I'm not. I think it has aged quite badly, with its 1970s groovyness and psychedelic colour schemes, but it remains a compellingly cheerful show that pushes the imagination further than many kids' shows, certainly these days.
What these characters are doing or saying might make little sense, but that is made up for in the imagination of the viewing child. A child will make sense of it, will impress upon it their own idea of what is going on. This art of creative imagining is largely lost when we grow up and become boring adults, more interested in food and sex and TV and paying the bills than imagining what it's like to have a magic torch and disappear to a fantasy world beneath our beds.
The loss of imagination and creative depth when we grow up is a sad fact of life. Of course, not all adults lose their creative streak - if they did, things such as Jamie and the Magic Torch wouldn't exist - but it is important to remember we were all children once, and we all thought as children do, with enthusiasm, daring and absolutely no limitations.
Those who remain creative into adulthood are lucky. Those who have lost it should perhaps try and rekindle that innocent magic by revisiting their childhoods, and digging out old series like Jamie and the Magic Torch.

Jamie and the Magic Torch, originally transmitted 1976-79 (three series).
Written and narrated by Brian Trueman, animation directed by Keith Scoble.