'Tis the time of the season for rhyming with reason as we follow on from our previous review to take another adventure with the sibilant sorcerer Estabis of the Brotherhood or Arcanaan - 'Mr Stabs' to you and me - and his leprous lieutenant Luko. Earlier in real-world chronology (1975 does come before 1984 after all, i know how many beans make five) but later in his own personal time stream (this all seems very Doctor Who all of a sudden. Yes, it's "wibbly wobbly, timey wimey", if you must), here the malignant mage is portrayed by his Onlie True Begetter Russell Hunter whilst the role of Luko is essayed by Kenneth Caswell who had featured in the 'Gone to the Angels' installment of Terry Nation's post-apocalyptic farmer drama Survivors earlier the same year) taking over from Ian Trigger's original.
After the end of Ace of Wands in late 1972, producer-director Pamela Lonsdale had gone on to over see the inception of the legendary children's show Rainbow before heading Thames TV's anthology series Shadows. A sort of tea-time Twilight Zone for tweens, Shadows featured a variety of tales of a supernatural bent and - as she'd helmed the Wands story 'Seven Serpents, Sulphur and Salt' which debuted Mr Stabs - Lonsdale was quick to contact Trevor Preston for a solo Stabs spin-off as part of the show. The sixth episode of Shadows' first season, 'Dutch Schlitz's Shoes' (try saying that three times fast) saw the wicked wizard and his cringing acolyte on a foray into the land of the "merely mortals" on a quest to obtain an arcane artefact of power - the fabled Black Glove of Mendoza.
Upon a darkened country lane, Stabs and Luko come upon a night watchman named Albert, played by Ron Pember (an actor with impressive resume whom i nonetheless find it difficult to think of as anyone else but the thumb-breaking Taxman from Red Dwarf: 'Better Than Life'). Tired from their voyage, Stabs decides that the mile-long journey from the Albert-minded roadworks to his destination is too much to walk, and there fore employs his customary poesy of power - magical incantations delivered in stanzaic form a la the spells from '80s animation Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light ("By natures' hand / By crafts, by art / What once was one now fly apart!" is one such that springs to mind, though i did always like "By mist-filled pits / Dark, dank, unclear / Fill all before me with frost-fingered fear!" as well) - to convince Albert to carry him on piggyback on pain of being transformed into an aged horse fit for the knacker's yard.
"Hand of Stabs, prepare straight 'way / A serpent circle pot of clay / Polandi dust and all i need / To make this magic spell succeed"
Arriving at Inchwood House, Stabs and Luko wander amidst the glass-cased exhibitions in the private collection of the doddery eccentric Sir Arthur Inchwood (an absent-minded turn by Gordon Gostelow, who played Shakespeare's Bardolph twice on television in 1960's An Age of Kings and 1979's Compleat BBC Shakespeare adaptations of Henry IV Part One, Henry IV Part Two and Henry V and yet shall forever remain enshrined in fannish memory for his outrageous performance as outer space mining pioneer Milo Clancy in Doctor Who's 'The Space Pirates') before coming across their quarry just as the proprietor of the property, dressed in a Halloween skeleton suit and wielding a blunderbuss, finds them. Ignoring the protestations of the "senile sentinel", Stabs takes up the occult gauntlet of the centuries dead Mendoza and re-infuses his hand (the power of which has been fading and growing weaker) with that hideous strength before transfiguring Sir Arthur into the form of a hop toad.
"Hand of Stabs, these shoes exchange / This fabled footwear rearrange"
Browsing among the alien lanes of this 1970s drawing room version of Henry Van Statten's Utah extraterrestrial museum, Stabs chances upon a snazzy pair of old brogues marked as the clogs of Chicago gangster Dutch Schlitz, an obvious allegorical avatar of Dutch Schultz whose final post-fatal shooting stream of consciousness ramble included - among such apropos of what the fuck non-sequiturs as "French-Canadian bean soup!" - the mournful plea of "They won't let me get up. They dyed my shoes. Open these shoes, give me something!"(William S, Burroughs of The Naked Lunch fame would dramatise this dying diatribe in 1970's The Last Words of Dutch Schultz). Popping on the pimp's possessed pumps, Mr Stabs soon finds his corporeal form becoming home to the spectre of Schlitz, his normal silky tones replaced with 1920s gangster lingo (all "mook"s and "wiseguys"s) delivered with a drawl that gives Gostelow's Clancy characterisation a run for its money in the "talkin' American" stakes.
Packing a pistol, Schlitz!Stabs orders Luko (or "Shorty" as he now calls him) to drive him to the nearest bank in order to stage a heist as "I gotta fatten up my bank roll, which at this moment is zero potatas" (on another Red Dwarf related reverie, all this George Raft jive talk put me in mind of the season eleven opener 'Twentica'). After the armed robbery in which the bank teller Mr Baxter (George Waring, another Doctor Who and Survivors alumnus) is referred to as "Tootsie" and forced to fill a Gladstone bag with money the local constabulary is called in in the form of Inspector Rumbold, a role essayed by the late great John Abineri amidst whose long list of credits people may remember as Herne the Hunter from Richard Carpenter's Robin of Sherwood, and who appeared in not only Survivors (in the regular role of Hubert Goss) and Doctor Who (as Van Lutyens in 1968's 'Fury from the Deep', the xenophobic General Carrington in 1970's 'The Ambassadors of Death' and boy was his face green as Ranquin in 1979's 'The Power of Kroll') but also played Rimmer's dad in Red Dwarf (alongside Ron Pember's Taxman in 'Better Than Life'). At a loss as to what to make of the teller's tale of the robbery, combined with the reappearance of Sir Arthur (still croaking like a toad) and the discrepancies between the two victim's reports as to whether the perpetrator was named Schlitz or Stabs, Rumbold-not-of-the-Bailey sets out for Inchwood House just in time to witness a cabbalistic confrontation.
Unable to remove the shoes himself, Stabs summons the spirit of Schlitz (Barry Stanton, also of Survivors, and the bird-like Noma in Doctor Who nadir 'The Twin Dilemma') to manifest and take his spellbound spats back. Schlitz is ceded his shoes, but refuses to return to the netherworld from whence he came as the modern world has banks that require robbing and eludes Stabs' spells by vanishing and rematerialising in different locations throughout the house in a game of cat and mouse watched through the window by a baffled Rumbold, Baxter and Sir Arthur. Finally, this hexed hide and seek comes to a close when Stabs focuses the power of the Black Glove of Mendoza and banishes the rogue ghost in a piff-paff-poof of sulphuric smoke before teleporting himself and Luko away from the house and off the the bright lights of the big city where real evil can be done - leaving the entering trio behind and baffled as they go.
Featuring some lovely location works, sparkling along at a brisk pace and never outstaying its welcome, Dutch Schlitz's Shoes is a nice slice of 1970s archive television and an insight into what Preston and Lonsdale's hoped-for but sadly never realised Mr Stabs series could have been.
