Troughton's Hitch In Time To Get Spruced-Up DVD Release

Friday, 24 May 2013 - Reported by John Bowman

The film A Hitch In Time starring Patrick Troughton as a time-travelling professor is to be released on DVD for high-definition viewing.

Penned by the Oscar-winning scriptwriter T E B "Tibby" Clarke and directed by Jan Darnley-Smith, the 54-minute Children's Film Foundation feature from 1978 will form part of the three-film CFF collection Weird Adventures from the BFI.

In A Hitch In Time, Patrick Troughton plays time-hopping inventor Adam Wagstaff. Discovered working on his time machine by two curious kids, Wagstaff decides to send them back through the ages. But with malfunctions a-plenty, will they be able to make it back?

It also stars Jeff Rawle as "Sniffy" Kemp, a teacher out to spoil the fun. The art direction is by Doctor Who's current production designer Michael Pickwoad.

The other two films in the collection are Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's last collaborative feature The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972) and Alberto Cavalcanti's The Monster of Highgate Ponds (1961).

All the films have been newly transferred for high-definition viewing from the best available elements in the BFI National Archive, having been out of distribution for a number of years.

Weird Adventures - the third volume of CFF films brought out by the BFI - will be released on Monday 17th June and is available to pre-order.

The CFF was a non-profit-making pan-industry initiative set up in 1951 by the owner of the Odeon and Rank cinema chains to make home-grown entertainment for young cinema-goers to see at the "Saturday morning pictures". Key themes included adventure, mysteries, monsters, science-fiction, shipwrecks, races, and animals, with regional content from Scotland to south-west England.

It became the Children's Film and Television Foundation in 1982, with film production ending in 1987. The CFTF is now known as the Children's Media Foundation, with the film collection preserved in the BFI National Archive.