The Further Adventures of Oliver Twist (1980) ATV (ITV)

Sorry-just the book...erm NOVEL!!

A sequel to eclipse 'The Empire Strikes Back', The Further Adventures of Oliver Twist (or TFAOT to mega fans) was, to be fair, a Tour De Force in the world of children's TV back in the dawn of the 80's. I for one must admit charging home from school to see this!
 The plot as I remember it, involves Oliver being sent to a dodgy school after Mr Brownlow gets ill, and meeting Jack Dawkins, the artful dodger, who has been rehabilitated by a country vicar. The headmaster (who adds an entire tin of ham to the proceedings......"TWIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSSST"!) is bribed by the evil Monks to put Oliver back onto the streets, (which he manages to do) so he can inherit the Brownlow millions. As soon as Oliver (and Jack) hit the streets, they start to bump into all the surviving characters from the original book (good and bad), Mr Bumble, Noah Claypole and FAGIN! (erm, forgive me, but wasn't Fagin executed in the original?). There are some new characters as well, mostly played by theatrical rejects that ATV probably hired for the price of an afternoon piss-up! Pauline Quirk is present in the series, playing her usual 'scrubber' type role, but the rest of the cast are non entities.
I must confess a sense of disappointment with the absence of Ron Moody in the Fagin role, considering he was all over kids TV during this period, and his inclusion would have elevated the series to the dizzy heights of TV gold!
I have to add special mention to the character, Mr Grimwig, whose ham acting would measure a 9.0 on the Richter Scale, with his "I'll eat my head" quote, closely followed by a head slap and a cloud of talcum powder sufficient to drive a ship onto the rocks!
Over 13 episodes the cat and mouse story moves to its inevitable happy conclusion, blah blah Oliver saves Brownlow, blah blah Oliver exposes Monks. But what more would you expect at 4.15 on a Wednesday afternoon, Oliver getting buggered by sex crazed dockers and sold into slavery?, No sir, you would not!
Apart from John Lennon's death and Hot Gossip fuelling my masturbatory imagination, this is the only thing I remember about 1980, and that's not such a bad thing, I mean what 25 year old today could boast of such childhood variety from the year 2000?
The tragedy of this series, is that it seems to be completely lost, it was never repeated (maybe because ATV had a hissy fit when they lost their franchise in 1982), and you can't buy it on VHS, let alone DVD or Blu-ray! I can only guess the reason behind this, is that the moral of the story is dated or non PC. There were a lot of children's series made during the 70's and 80's that implied the worst thing that could happen in Victorian England, was to be working class..HEAVEN FORBID!, and the stories usually ended with the junior heroes being elevated once more to middle class domesticity (I mean, hang on, being working class wasn't all about typhoid and going up chimneys - it probably had its fun moments too!).
Rose-tinted specs have blinkered my memories of this show and I suppose if I had to watch these episodes again, I would cringe at the shockingly bad acting levels and awful plot. At the time of its release, the series was popular enough to get it's own cartoon strip in Look-In magazine. But so far as children's TV goes, it was quickly forgotten. Maybe this is in part to do with the shabby way ITV cherry-picks its history, unlike their BBC rivals, but I find it disturbing how bollocks like 'The Cedar Tree' and 'By The Sword Divided' can be released on DVD while entertaining stuff like 'TFAOT', and 'Murphy's Mob' have been confined to the trash can of TV history!

Look-In (1980)