‘Swiftly enchanted’: why Bedknobs and Broomsticks is my feelgood movie

“Filigree, apogee, pedigree, perigee!” – the four incantatory words I blame for receiving a shonky Paul Daniels Magic Set as a child in the 80s. In Bedknobs and Broomsticks, it’s the spell that Angela Lansbury’s patriotic Nazi-vanquishing witch Eglantine Price casts to transform people into fluffy rabbits; a trick I yearned to pull off.

When it became clear I wouldn’t deter the Third Reich with three plastic thimbles, a deck of playing cards and a flaccid wand, my conjuring kit was mothballed – but my irrational love of the Disney film remains to this day. For me, it originally fell into the category of the crackling VHS that your parents taped off ITV at Christmas then would repeatedly plonk you in front of to shut you up – to the point I can even recall the adverts.

Still, Bedknobs has a flying nanny-shaped shadow over it; its ignoble reputation as a knock-off Mary Poppins was perhaps coded into its DNA. Put into production as a back-up plan when acquiring the rights to his beloved Poppins was looking shaky, Walt’s second-favourite attitude towards Bedknobs was captured by its screenwriter Don Da Gradi, who sketched his boss asleep during a 1963 story conference, exaggerated ZZZs tumbling out of his mouth, as the Sherman brothers previewed the rousing love song Eglantine. When it premiered in 1971, both the Shermans and Lansbury felt the picture had been hobbled by cuts, while critics found the use of Nazis in a kids’ movie tonally jarring, akin to show tunes and a kick line erupting in The Hills Have Eyes.

But (non-Paul Daniels-branded) cards on the table: I’m a ’Knobstruther. As a working-class nipper, turning my bed into a DFS-based Tardis and hanging out with Jessica Fletcher-with-an-English-accent appealed more than a bossy nanny healing a posho family. Even now, I prefer its more offbeat, darker tone, and how its spoonfuls of sugar are strictly wartime-rationed.

Lansbury’s Miss Price is introduced to us rocking up to the village post office in a heraldic puff of luridly coloured motorcycle fumes, to collect a broomstick from a witchcraft correspondence course (a scam run by huckster magician Emelius Browne, a twinkly portrayal by Poppins alumnus David Tomlinson), only to end up reluctantly housing three London orphan evacuees. Together, they embark on a quest to locate a levitation spell to send inanimate objects into battle, thus preventing human casualties.

Objectively, I realise Bedknobs is an oddly paced jamboree of set pieces and styles, but the greatest comfort feelgood movies trip the critical switch in your brain. Simply typing the song titles – the Poppins offcut The Beautiful Briny (soundtracking a dazzling underwater animated dance competition), Substitutiary Locomotion and the market-based cockney rave-up Portobello Road, featuring sailors on shore leave from HMS Choreography – means they’ll be lodged in my head. Best of all is the sumptuous sorrow of The Age of Not Believing, lamenting the receding of childhood wonder directed at sceptical 11-year-old Charlie Rawlings, which handily doubles as a midlife crisis anthem for adults. In the wake of the death of Disney in 1969, the Shermans channelled their existential angst into the number and it shows. It makes Feed the Birds resemble the Macarena.

Revisiting it decades later, despite possessing a cynical anti-nostalgia firewall, I was nevertheless swiftly enchanted. It also proved funnier than I remembered. Particularly a hilarious cartoon/live action football match on an animal-ruled island, where stretcher-carrying vulture paramedics excitedly flap on to the pitch at the first sign of injury. A climactic battle where Miss Price, clad in a Brodie helmet and brandishing a sword while gliding atop a Union Jack-adorned broom, summons a phantom army of medieval suits of armour to repel a platoon of invading Nazis is played for slapstick yuks, like a bizarre cross between Went the Day Well? and the Three Stooges.

In fact, the sole difference is I now snigger at eight-year-old Paul Rawlings’s exclamation of “What’s that got to do with me knob?” (I’m not proud) and understand a reference to Mr Browne’s familiarity with sex workers on Portobello Road that had previously whooshed over the innuendo no-fly zone above my head.

Lately, a friend’s four-year-old son has become obsessed with Bedknobs. Talk of getting in touch with my inner child usually makes me want to find my inner King Herod, but seeing it through his eyes is like a mirror back to being a kid convinced that if he pointed at someone and really believed, I could turn nemeses into nose-twitching bunnies.