The Enchanted Castle

I was six or seven when I watched this, but still have extraordinarily strong images from it stuck in my mind - girls trapped inside a stone dinosaur, for instance. A haunting, magical children's programme, I would love to see it now.

I wonder, since I have to fill more lines for my review to be accepted, if it was also the source of one of the most disturbing images from my childhood - a town meeting from which all the attendees emerged as faceless men with sacks instead of heads.

I wonder if anyone else remembers this series, and wish the BBC would treat some of its old children's series the way they do their Jane Austen back catalogue, and release them in DVD box sets.

Like all the other reviews here I was never sure if is this was an actual TV childrens drama or just fragments of a dream I was remembering. The only thing about it that has always stuck in my mind is remembering the children becoming trapped inside a hollow stone statue of a dinosaur.

Thanks to the internet my wondering has finally come to an end. It's strange the things that haunt us from childhood. I'm now in my 40s.

I remember this as a child but was never sure if it was just a dream. Only in recent years and research i found out that this was in fact a real TV series that i watched when i was about 5 years old. I remember the hole in the wall, the invisible girl with the hankie and the big dinosaur statue that the children went inside and it came to life. All very bizarre just like a dream but it was very magical for every child who watched this. We have the Railway children and the secret garden shown all the time written by the same author. It seems not many people have heard of The Enchanted castle. This needs to be shown again. I'd do anything to see this series again.

I know the name after almost thirty years of occasionally asking British people, "Can you remember a TV programme - probably in the late 1970s - where a group of children make some dummies to serve as the "audience" to a play they were putting on and the dummies came to life?" Cue years of blanks stares!

That is all I can remember from the programme but I was utterly petrified. One child rubbed a "magic ring" and said that she wished that the dummies would come to life. You had forgotten that and then the dummies started clapping at the end of the show. I remember them then chasing the children through a tunnel.

I was reading a newspaper article on old children's TV shows and someone mentioned something that sounded like this in the comments. It turned out it wasn't this show but another person suggested this title: The Enchanted Castle. I finally have proof that I didn't imagine or dream this!

I gave it a 9 as it obviously had a huge effect on me at the time: I don't like horror stories even as an adult!

What a travesty of a wonderful E Nesbit story.

Dismiss your memories of having seen this as a child on its original transmission, with an adult's perspective it is excruciating.

None of the child actors can act - wooden, uninspired and unconvincing. Perhaps as a child one didn't notice it, but as an adult it makes it unwatchable.

The dinosaur is a dreadfully crude un=detailed badly made model.

Simon Sheard as Gerald the eldest boy is especially excruciating, and I notice that he was the son of. Michael Sheard, a very successful actor. Only. Georgina Stowe as the princess knows what she is doing.

None of the three children went on to have acting careers - says it all.