Ace of Wands (1972) S3, Ep7 "The Power of Atep": Part 4 - TV Supernatural Drama - Ancient Egypt

The concluding part of this story.
Some impressions of the series by Tim Worthington's blogspot: From the Edge of Mystery:
"Back when I first started using the Internet, one of the first websites I discovered was www.aceofwands.net, Simon Coward's now sadly defunct site devoted to ITV's early seventies children's drama series Ace Of Wands. If you've never seen Ace Of Wands, it is probably best described as a deeply stylised post-psychedelic pre-Glam action series about a stage magician who solves unusual - and frequently apparently supernatural - crimes in his spare time. Massive in its day, and then completely forgotten about, it had started to be rediscovered more or less by word of mouth but there'll be more about that later. Actually I found the website so long ago that at that point it was still hosted on Simon's Freeserve pages, which in itself amusingly now seems more archaic than any television show where the lead character goes about in a snakeskin jacket and Jim Morrison hair.
I'd been obsessed with Ace Of Wands - 'obsessed' is a bit of an understatement to be honest - ever since catching an episode by chance at an archive TV event. Even more than the actual show itself, it was the animated psychedelic opening titles with their self-drawing pentagrams and mystic hand-based imagery, and the accompanying progtastic yet naggingly catchy theme song with bafflingly indecipherable lyrics, that really caught my attention.
Over the next couple of years, I would put more time and energy than is probably considered healthy into finding out whatever I could about Ace Of Wands, which in those days wasn't as easy as you might think. Searching for features and interviews in old issues of TV Times and Look-In was challenging and time-consuming enough, but it was tracking down that elusive theme single - more properly known as Tarot by Andrew Bown, with incidental music track Lulli Rides Again on the b-side - that really took dedication. I spent so long flicking through boxes in charity shops in the hope of spotting a casually discarded copy that the catalogue number is indelibly burned into my memory; Parlophone R5856. So much so in fact that I nearly referenced it in a wedding speech once, but that's another story.
As it transpired, there were quite a few other Ace Of Wands enthusiasts out there. The series was starting to get a good deal of coverage in the more esoteric archive TV fanzines, notably Andrew Pixley's early venture Time Screen, and increasingly in glossy genre magazines, which invariably referred to it as having 'returned for a stylish new season' featuring 'Tarot's sometimes sinister foes'. It was courtesy of said increasing coverage that I learned the sad fact that the first two series of the show - which, I was reliably informed, was when it was best - had long since been wiped; all that was left was Series Three, not all of it even in broadcast quality, and a handful of almost unintelligibly poor quality audio recordings of a couple of second series episodes made by holding a tape recorder up to a television speaker. Amusingly, I'd made my own equally poor audio recording of a third series episode in more or less exactly the same way during another archive TV event, back when the possibility of actually owning any of Ace Of Wands on video seemed so remote as to be laughable. Needless to say, there was tremendous excitement when clips turned up on Telly Addicts and TV Weekly, and later on the sell-through video compilation The Best Children's TV Of The Decade - The Seventies.
There were a handful of millionth generation VHS bootleg copies floating around, if you knew where to look for them, but otherwise that really did seem like the best that we were likely to get. So that's why Simon's website, packed with what were entirely 'new' facts, cuttings, trivia and images, seemed so thrilling and felt like everything I'd hoped for from this new fangled World Wide Web that they had now. One of the most intriguing of these 'new' facts was the suggestion of several correspondents that the first two series had used an entirely different set of opening title graphics, now entirely lost to history and with only literally sketchy artistic impressions to go on. Or at least that's what we all thought until the DVD came out."
Michael MacKenzie as Tarot
Petra Markham as Mikki
Roy Holder as Chas
First broadcast 30th August 1972.
IMDB page for full cast and other contributors:
www.imdb.com/t...

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