They missed a trick in not giving this episode the name “The Demon Drink,” because that’s what we got to talk with our son about this time. Catweazle gets drunk! Boy, that doesn’t happen on American children’s shows. In point of fact, since I average about one pint of beer maybe every nine months, our son actually had no idea what I was talking about when I told him that Catweazle is going to get drunk. He remembered from a recently-viewed episode of The Avengers that you’re meant to sip wine and not guzzle three glasses of it, but had no idea what might happen if you do. So I had a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.
This is a very funny little episode. The main guest star is Peter Butterworth, who would return to this show in a different role in its second series. He was another semi-regular in the Carry On movies (16 of them!) and also appeared in many popular comedies like A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, but he may be best known in the US as the Meddling Monk, the first, and until the debut of Roger Delgado’s Master, only recurring villain in Doctor Who.
Butterworth plays an eccentric retired colonel who is hosting a lecture by an explorer named Nat Wheeler. He mishears Catweazle and thinks the wizard is Wheeler, and Catweazle thinks that the colonel is a great magician who can create thunder from a stick. Between them, they have a riotous misunderstanding about the colonel’s squirrel monkey, and whether the colonel’s thunderstick can put the monkey out of its misery by transforming it back into a human boy.
This was a great episode that our son enjoyed, and also left him curious whether you can see a muzzle flash from the end of a thunderstick. I don’t know much about guns, but I told him that I believe that a bolt-action rifle’s barrel is usually too long for that. Let me know if I told him wrong, won’t you?
Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time 