Lizzie Dripping

Part of the wonder of the internet is that it allows you to prove that random bits of memory from your childhood did actually have some relationship to reality. It has been like that recently with me and Lizzie Dripping. This TV series, made by the BBC in 1973 and 1974, starred Tina Heath as the eponymous Lizzie who meets a witch in the graveyard of her village church and spends the nine episodes of the series trying to work out whether she is real and what her relationship to her really is: can anyone else see her, is Lizzie herself a sort of witch, and is the witch tied to the village or can she go elsewhere? Of course we viewers can see instantly that the witch is a projection of something inside Lizzie, an outlet for dreams and desires that don’t fit the life of a 12-year-old working-class girl living in a small village in 1970s Nottinghamshire. In fact, I didn’t really remember any of this, not surprisingly as I would have been no older than 5 when the series was broadcast: I did recall the title sequence of Lizzie running down the village street and turning a corner, and her encounters with the witch including the one where she pops up to interrupt a family trip to the seaside, but that was all.

Looking at Lizzie Dripping now (and I’ve just watched all of it) you can see an intriguing mixture of 1970s verisimilitude and unreality. The location, Eakring near Mansfield, feels very real as does the life of Lizzie’s family the Arbuckles, laid-back plumber dad Albert, often quite stressed mum Patty, flowerpot-hatted Gramma who is always on hand with strongly-worded advice which (even Lizzie notices) she does not consistently follow herself, and baby Toby. When Albert wins the village leek-growing competition in ‘Lizzie Dripping and the Leek Nobblers’ the prize is nothing other than a spanking, shiny front-loading washing machine! – we must have acquired ours at roughly the same time – and although Albert drives a truck for work purposes that’s no good for taking the family to the seaside so he borrows a car from a customer as payment for a job. It’s all quite period, and even daring in a way nobody would now even think of being daring: showing ordinary, mostly nice people living very ordinary lives and speaking in extremely strong accents full of beautifully incorrect grammar. Good.

And the grammar, or dialect, leads us to the unreal side of the series. For a start, ‘Lizzie Dripping’ isn’t the character’s name (which is Penelope), but supposedly a Nottinghamshire phrase for a girl who can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy. The fact that everyone in the village calls her this, including her sympathetic teacher, and parents, is odd and unexplained. I use the word ‘supposedly’, because I rather suspect author Helen Cresswell made it up. She claimed she heard a neighbour in Eakring using the term for their daughter, but I can’t easily find any indication that it existed before the TV series; we need a dictionary of northern slang but I have none to hand! The 19-year-old Tina Heath has a good stab at being a pre-teen but when placed alongside actual children looks a bit awkward, most acutely when she’s surrounded by a class of singing kids in what is nearly the final scene.

You never see any scenes specifically relating to religious life but in the first episode everyone assumes Lizzie should be at Sunday School (the teacher is away) which I would have thought unusual even for 1970s rural Nottinghamshire. Lizzie teases her very unhumorous Aunt Blodwen that she could help with Sunday School - 'I know it's Church and not Chapel', when it's clear Blodwen would never countenance any such thing. How many children even then would know what that was about? And in the last episode Lizzie refers to the unseen vicar as 'parson'. This all has a slight air of anachronism and I wonder whether Helen Cresswell was remembering her own childhood rather than what she could see around her in 1973.

There are lots of lovely moments: ‘leek nobbling’ prime-suspect Jack Jackson’s face as he only gets third prize in the competition; Gramma following up scolding Lizzie by giving her a mint imperial; snobby Aunt Blodwen’s appalled discomfort on the journey to the seaside when, just after her tirade against ‘day-trippers’ (which of course the family are), Albert strikes up ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside’ and everyone except Blodwen lustily joins in; the school children singing a deliciously eerie song about the Pendle Witches which just happens to have been written for the BBC’s schools Music Workshop series in 1971 by Yorkshire poet Harold Massingham and Irish composer Gerard Victory; and just the sights and sounds of Eakring, rechristened Little Hemlock for the series, the flower meadows, the streams, the sunny or rainy churchyard.

It’s the final episode which is something of a masterpiece.  The title ‘Lizzie Dripping Says Goodbye’ flags up the theme but what we get is much more than we might expect. The summer holidays are nearly here and the village school is assembling a time capsule to be opened in 2074; right at the start, Lizzie’s mum tells her she is growing up and the valedictory atmosphere is maintained when Lizzie and irritating southern cousin Jonathan go out to take photos of wild flowers for the archive, prompting Lizzie to meditate on memory and impermanence. She wishes she could put the whole day in the archive. ‘They’ll have days like this, even in 2074’, counters Jonathan. ‘Nor’ exactly’, insists Lizzie, ‘Never have a day again exactly like today. Even we’ll never have one exactly the same. Coz we’ll be different, see.’ She inspects the photo she’s just taken of the meadow. ‘No. That ain’t it. That ain’t it at all. Nowt like, really.’ Show me a contemporary children’s show that philosophical. In the end a bitterly regretful Lizzie has to cope with the departure of the witch, and, as she leaves the graveyard having committed the story to tape, her life is ahead of her. Though her mum’s already accused her of being so morbid that ‘I sometimes think you won’t be happy till you’re buried’, it won’t all be like that. The last sound we hear is the churchyard crows. They really don't make them like that anymore.