The Cynic's Top Ten Best Children's TV Shows of All Time.
So, having taken a look at the chaff of children's tv programming, we can crack on with the wheat of the problem, and my blood pressure can actually be somewhere other than a level that makes me extremely glad that I'm now living opposite the A&E of Winchester hospital. So, what kids' shows are actually worth watching? Which dramas teach valuable lessons, and which comedies are- shock, horror- funny? Now, with bad shows, it's easy for me to point out the plot holes, the potentially offensive moments or the bad or damaging morals. With good shows, this becomes a lot more opinionated, based on my own tastes and likes. However, I like to think that I've got quite a wide range of shows here, so hopefully that reflects that I've been taking a look at all areas of children's tv to see what comes up.
With that said, let's take a look at the Top Ten Best Children's TV Shows of all time.
10. The Secret Show
Ruthlessly parodying spy film and sci-fi tropes in an age when clever comedy cartoons seem unfashionable, The Secret Show is a breath of fresh air in the gunge- filled, overflowing-with-fart-jokes modern schedules of Saturday morning TV.
Each episode begins with the pre-titles scenes of a show called "The Fluffy Bunny Show," a dig at the saccharine- tasting nonsense for younger kids these days. "Sweet Little Granny" is about to start her show when a bunch of men in suits and sunglasses rush in, kidnap Granny and the Bunnies (in a different way each episode), and hijack the timeslot for The Secret Show. Intrigued? That's just the beginning.
The show tells the story of two top agents, Victor Volt and Anita Knight, working for an organisation known as UZZ. This is led by a man who, for "reasons of security" must change his name daily, usually to some kind of surreal or just plain silly title. Also present is a diminutive scientist with an accent that puts his country of origin... somewhere... Europeish, known as Professor Professor. His nemesis is, of course, the villainous villainess Doctor Doctor. Trust me, in context... no, in context it still makes no sense.
The Secret Show thrives on the sheer exuberant energy of its daftness and insanity, with hectically- paced scripts designed never to give the audience a chance to ask questions of the shows non-logic. With that said, this can sometimes be the shows downfall as well, with the endless onslaught of bright flashing images of aliens and space-age spies often becoming exhausting and difficult to sit through. Nevertheless, taken an episode at a time, this is a very funny show that doesn't hold back.
9. Byker Grove
Ah, yes. CBBC's "other" soap opera (after the much more (in)famous Grange Hill), Byker Grove was the story of a group of teenagers who always seemed to have nothing better to do than hang around a youth club all day. Being a soap, that was about it plot-wise, with the characters kind of just left to get on with all the drink, drug abuse, pregnancy, incest, decisions over sexulality, etc. that got thrown at them over the years. And boy, was there a lot of that. Without the obligatory conversations about homework and detentions and all that malarkey present in Grange Hill, this show could get straight to the point and get on with making these kids' lives a living hell.
Now, to be brutally honest, I did not see much of this show at all. One season, to be precise. I wasn't really the right age to understand or relate to the teenage-centric plots until the penultimate season. I tuned in, was very pleasantly surprised, and watched it avidly for the rest of the year. The following year, the decision was made to transfer BG from BBC1 to the CBBC Channel. This being back in the days when hardly anybody had digital TV, lo and behold the ratings plummeted into a chasm and the series was cancelled.
But the point is that Byker Grove and Grange Hill both provided a look at teenage life, in a timeslot where preteens could watch it as well, and learn about the kind of stuff that happens to teenagers. Neither of these shows pulled their punches: they presented teenage life as unapologetically crap, and we loved them for it. In fact, you've got to wonder why anyone would voluntarily join Byker Grove youth club, or go to Grange Hill school. I mean, the death toll is catastrophic! In just a couple of decades, loads of people die in increasingly horrible ways, and people still merrily go there. Why hasn't the Grove been closed down by now? It's clearly unsafe.
Seriously, this was a violent show. People remember that this was the show that catapulted Ant and Dec to fame as musical duo P.J. and Duncan- fewer people remember that Ant's character, P.J. was blinded in a paintball accident. Over the years, characters died from brain tumours, were electrocuted, were run over by cars, were killed in bike crashes... and those are just the more famous ones. Over on Grange Hill, characters fell off the roof, drowned in swimming pools, fell out of windows and were killed in road accidents. Blimey. It's a wonder I ever survived my secondary school years, if this is supposed to be the average.
And if some of the stuff I've mentioned doesn't really sound much like a kids' show, there's a reason for that. In 2007, CBBC was rebooted. Under the direction of CBBC controller Richard Deville Deverell, CBBC was altered to suit a target audience of age 6-12, rather than 6-16. Apparently convinced that halving his target audience was a good idea, he proceeded to radically change the format of Grange Hill, turning it into a patronising pile of dreck that confronted such edgy topics as smuggling a rabbit into school, or helping an old man to use a computer. Gripping stuff. Amazingly, a series about secondary school kids and their issues did not translate well to a target audience of primary school children, and Grange Hill also only lasted one more series.
For the past couple of years I've been using Richard Deverell as a kind of hate figure to blame for everything that has gone wrong with modern children's programming. I don't in all honesty know who made the original decision, but the fact remains that CBBC has lost millions of viewers, not to mention some of their best shows, and there is now pretty much no television aimed at teenagers. At all.
It's fashionable now to complain that teenagers have nothing to do except lounge around on street corners, drinking vodka and stabbing homosexuals. Well, why did you stop making TV programmes for them? God, what a ridiculous state of affairs.
I guess Waterloo Road is in many ways a spiritual successor to Grange Hill, although that show focuses more on the adult characters, but the fact remains that there's very little to fill the gritty, slightly heavy- handed, occasionally cheesy hole in our schedules once occupied by such well- loved shows.
8. In the Night Garden
What? What? Oh, come on, this show is great! From the makers of Teletubbies comes... this. It should be terrible. Every fibre of your being is screaming at you that this is awful. And yet... it isn't.
Basically, I don't really know what a 2 year old (the actual target audience) would think of this, but to me (18) and my Mum (55), In the Night Garden is one of the greatest surreal comedies of all time.
I mean it. This thing is hilarious. It's your standard load of colourful costumes hopping about, seemingly unable to to say anything other than their own name, in the name of apparently calming down toddlers before bedtime. Um... excuse me? Calming them down? How the hell does this world of hysteria calm anyone down in any way? Look, if I had kids, I'd calm them down with slow, whimsical and dull imagery. Not Iggle Piggle and chums boarding a blimp with a big honking red nose and drinking Pinky-Ponk Juice while flying up into the trees to look at the Olly-Bolly-Dob-Dob flower. Nor Upsy Daisy feeling so tired that she needs to lie down, so she bellows in a hurricane-force voice for her bed to drive towards her so she can go to sleep on it. Nor the Pontipines and the Wottingers getting on board the Ninky-Nonk, which travels so fast that everyone ends up covered in their dinner.
Oh, I'm sorry. These are the Pontipines:
The Pontipines feature in probably my favourite episode of all time. It can really only be explained via bullet points.
- Mr and Mrs Pontipine and their eight children go for a walk.
- They walk past a tree. Mr and Mrs Pontipine walk on, but the children, without pausing, walk up the trunk of the tree.
- Mr and Mrs Pontipine get some distance away, when the narrator, played as ever by Jesus Christ Derek Jacobi, asks "Mrs Pontinpine, where are the children?
- The Pontipine parents suddenly realise they have lost their offspring. Using the binoculars around her neck that she carries everywhere for this very purpose, Mrs. Pontipine seeks her children.
- Through the binoculars, we see the children merrily walking upside-down along the underside of a branch.
- Mrs. Pontipine throws her hands up in the air and runs around in a tiny circle, making high-pitched noises. No, really.
- The children reach the end of the branch and fall off, plummeting to their doom below. Wait, what?
- But it's alright! The children conveniently fall one by one, meaning that they can each in turn pop down the chimney of their house, and emerge safe and sound. Once again, this is what really happens.
As you can imagine, by this point I was in tears of laughter, convinced that this show is one of the most excellent things ever. And you will never convince me otherwise.
Haahooo...
7. Thomas the Tank Engine
Hell, yeah. Who doesn't love a bit of Thomas the Tank Engine? Based on the Reverend Awdry's classic books, this was probably one of the first shows I ever watched. Having gone back and watched a few of those old episodes recently, I was pleasantly surprised to see that this model-based series still holds up, with very simplistic five-minute plots that are both coherent and action-packed. Never make the mistake of thinking kids don't like a bit of action. It's a mistake Thomas never made, with trains frequently crashing, becoming derailed, getting into serious trouble...
One of the most memorable episodes has got to be the one where a huge boulder on top of a mountain suddenly comes loose and falls onto the track, and starts rolling down the hill, seemingly chasing one of the trains, Indiana Jones style, until it eventually crashes into a shed, which explodes. No, really. I believe it's one of the only times we see flames in the series.
So, what happened to this series? I ask myself. Believe it or not, it's still going, twenty years on. Only... well... It's now called "Thomas and Friends," and I believe it now focuses on a group of characters called "The Steam Team," comprising Thomas, a few of the other original characters, and Emily, a new character brought in because there were no female characters in the original book.
They're trains.
As well as this, it's now heavily CGI, because why have models with charm and depth that have been scientifically proven to help autistic children learn when you can have crappy cartoons?
It's probably not the bastardisation of my childhood that I think it is... actually, yeah, yeah it is. I've seen images of CGI Thomas, and it ain't pretty. It's best to remember the early series, when it was based on the original books. A slice of nostalgia that will never die, Thomas the Tank Engine is another of those shows that to me just naturally exudes awesome.
6. The Story of Tracy Beaker/ Tracy Beaker Returns
This is one of those shows that slipped through the net in terms of the aforementioned lockdown on mature storylines. This may have something to do with the fact that a lot of high up people at the BBC probably barely glance at it before saying "Oh, yeah, Tracy Beaker, yeah. It's based on that book, thing, isn't it? Very good, very good, churn it out..." Equally it may have something to do with Deverell's axe falling on Grange Hill and Byker Grove during the five year hiatus between the end of The Story of Tracy Beaker and the beginning of Tracy Beaker Returns, and in 2009, when the number of viewers for CBBC were plummeting faster than Gordon Brown's approval ratings, Deverell's successor Joe Godwin presumably threw up his hands and said "Hey, let's bring back that phenomenally popular show famed for its gritty and emotional stories, and hope no one notices that we've just admitted to our own incompetence."
Although later becoming very much an ensemble show, the first couple of seasons followed the turbulent life of Tracy Beaker, a young girl with a very overactive imagination, abandoned by her uncaring mother and living in a care home with a bunch of assorted moody teenagers and hyperactive kids. The first series followed her as she attempted to fulfill her dream of being fostered by writer Cam Lawson, while at the same time attempting to fit in with the other kids. The best thing about this show was the fact that nothing was ever simple: nothing was solved overnight. Tracy and Cam's relationship forms the backbone of the series, with Tracy often falling out with Cam and returning to the "Dumping Ground," the kids' name for the care home, which sums up perfectly how they see their situation. By season 4, the routine of Tracy returning at the start of the series, to be fostered again by Cam at the end, had become predictable, and in the last two seasons of Story, the focus shifted onto other characters, allowing their lives to become balls of never- ending misery instead.
Interestingly, the main character of season 5, much as there was one, was Justine Littlewood, the main antagonist of the first two seasons: another sign of the unpredictability of the show, and another mark of the most prevalent theme: all children are redeemable, all children have a reason for why they do things, deep down. I mentioned unpredictability, and the show was unpredictable: some of the kids could be fostered or collected by their parents without warning; as a flipside, one of the most energetic and gutsy characters, with a promising future ahead of her could have her beloved grandpa die without warning, and events like this could have repercussions for episodes, even whole series, to come. It gave the show an added edge, that set it apart from other series of the time: stuff mattered.
I'll admit, the final series did get a bit sappy, with a fairly obvious effort to pair up as many of the kids as possible, and pretty much no mention of school or anything outside of the care home, but I just saw that as collateral damage from trying to bring the show to a satisfying conclusion, which they succeeded in doing. Like Grange Hill, the show ended with a special final episode focusing on a character who hadn't really appeared for most of that series. Unlike Grange Hill, it mostly worked. Tracy's domestic problems with Cam and her fiancee Gary were abruptly brought back to the fore, for one final introspective on Tracy's life and how it feels to feel abandoned by those you rely on most. Eventually, Tracy decided to accept that Cam was in love with Gary, and the series ended with Cam adopting Tracy, and everyone living happily ever after (except, y'know, the fact that most of the characters are still in care).
Until the sequel series, that is. In January 2010 Tracy Beaker Returns came to our screens. Surprisingly, it was very good. It just about qualifies as a natural continuation of the same series, although the Dumping Ground looks completely different and there are only three characters from Story (Tracy herself, Cam ("we don't talk about Gary") and Mike, the head care worker). The basic plot is that Tracy, having "borrowed" a great deal of money from Cam to advertise her new book, must now get a job at the Dumping Ground to earn enough money to repay her adoptive mother. The individual episodes swing between "acceptable" and "very good," and with the exception of a couple of utterly horrible characters, who I have the awful feeling are the ones we're supposed to identify with, the cast are likeable. Interestingly, there's now a distinct focus on family, with more than one set of siblings at the care home, something that definitely works in the show's favour. Returns has now been comissioned for a second series, or a seventh series overall if you wish to look at it that way. I'm looking forward to it; I think the show still has a lot of mileage. I'd like to see more episodes where individual characters are removed from the comfort and security of the DG and the other kids, but we'll see what they have too offer in the early months of 2011...
5. Dark Season
Hey, guys, remember Russell T Davies? That's right: the bloke who brought Doctor Who back from the dead, and whose writings I rather infamously despise with all my soul. Well, I'm going to prove to you why you should never judge a book by its cover, because the 1991 series Dark Season, the very first thing ever written for TV by said T Davies, is fantastic.
I'm not sure where exactly RTD went insane, given that this and, from what I've heard of it, the 1992 children's series Century Falls are so good. At first I thought "Maybe writing a kids show meant that he couldn't shove in his random sexual innuendo or Messiah-like imagery (rather absurd considering his devout atheism)," but then I remembered that watching Sarah Jane Adventures is worse than watching an Ice-Hockey game while being kneecapped, so that can't be it.
Anyway, whatever the reason, this is good. Century Falls may be even better, but I haven't seen it yet. It's clearly heavily influenced by the final two years of classic Doctor Who, which can only be a good thing, and it has a strong cast, out of which everyone remembers the young Kate Winslet, occupying the "companion" role in this Who- esque setup. The real star is Victoria Lambert, playing Marcie, a thirteen year old girl who basically acts like the seventh doctor, drifting around, making vague allusions to higher powers and aliens. And it's awesome.
The basic plot is this: Marcie, along with two fifteen year-olds called Tom and Reet (the latter played by the aforementioned Winslet), become suspicious when a company issues one free computer per pupil to everyone in their school. It later transpires that these computers brainwash the children and turn them into mindless evil zombies. They foil this plot, of course, but the great thing is that we never find out who the mysterious Mr Eldritch and his company really are, or what exactly they want. The raising of questions rather than answers adds to the unsettling feel of the story, which ties in nicely with the alien (?) conspiracy occurring in a normal everyday setting, a hallmark of RTD's stories. In the second half of the series, Eldritch returns with a bunch of mysterious archaeologists led by... *sigh*... led by Jaqueline Pearce, who isn't quite as hammy as she was in the final series of Blake's 7, but still pretty much throws all credibilty out of the window with her performance as the leader of a group that wants to unearth the "Behemoth," a supercomputer buried under the school that can somehow create worldwide racial purity. Mind you, we do get this excellent line:
Teacher: You're acting like Nazis!
Eldritch: They are Nazis.
Really, would any other kids' show have the sheer guts to mention Nazis in such a way? I think not. RTD, it has to be said. Once upon a time, you were a truly great writer.
4. The Ghost Hunter
Good, solid entertainment that hits all the right buttons for a child audience without patronising them in the slightest. It's well acted, it's got ghosts in it, and Jean Marsh, one of the greatest actresses alive today, plays the villain. What's not to like?
Going into details, The Ghost Hunter tells the story of Tessa and Roddy, twin siblings who encounter the ghost of a young Victorian shoe-shine boy, William, who, along with the other ghosts who reside at the nearby castle, live in fear of the Ghost Hunter, a sinister and vicous woman who seeks to use technology to absorb and destroy the ghosts. Later seasons involve the Ghost Hunter attempting to use the spectral energy of destroyed ghosts to transcend time and become an immortal time- traveller.
This show was not only a critical trimuph but was also highly influential, setting the dark and supernatural tone for most children's fantasy series of the last decade. I remember being particularly impressed by the third and final series, which fast-forwarded to the year 2025, with Roddy's children as the main characters, the Ghost Hunter and her henchmen struggling to escape from Victorian times, and lots and lots of exciting alternate timeline stuff. Bafflingly, the third series has never been repeated, while the first two series were each condensed into 90-minute tv movies which get wheeled out every Halloween. It's a shame, as it means that I don't really remember much outside of the basic facts and a general sense of nostalgia.
Nevertheless, this remains a great show with dozens of plot twists and developments that I will always remember fondly.
3. Pinky and the Brain
I don't know if Animaniacs was ever shown in the UK. If so, it was before my time. This fantastic spinoff, however, most certainly wasn't. I grew up with Pinky and the Brain, through those years of my childhood when I was just about starting to get the more sophisticated jokes. And, like much Warner Bros. animation from the past twenty-thirty years, this show had a lot of sophisticated humour to go alongside the slapstick and the complete barminess.
I'm not really sure how to describe this. Basically, The Brain and Pinky are two genetically engineered mice who live in a cage at Acme Labs. Every episode, The Brain devises a new plan to Take Over The World. Hilarity Ensues, eventually ending with a dismal failure of The Brain's plan, usually something to do with the utter idiocy of Pinky. The show was not only hilarious, it was also bitingly satirical, ridiculously intelligent, and beautifully animated.
Pinky and the Brain may be one of the funniest shows in the world, but that makes it all the more difficult to review. I should, however, mention that the show had moments of brilliant character drama, with the two leads excellently three-dimensional.
I suppose any retrospective of Pinky and the Brain must contain mention of the absolutely terrible show Pinky, Elmyra and the Brain, which basically shoved in an unpopular Tiny Toons character, taking the focus off of the two leads and removing most of the humour, even though almost everyone at Warner Bros. thought this to be an absolutely terrible idea (the new theme tune actually contains the line "it's what the network wants, why bother to complain?") This incredibly brief disaster aside, Pinky and the Brain remains possibly the most intelligently written animated comedy of all time. You can always rely on Warner Bros. to put the effort in where it's needed. I can think of a few British production companies that could learn from that...
2. Avatar: The Last Airbender
Damn you, America.
You had this brilliant show, and what do we get? Oh, we get the first damn season-and-a-half, and that's it. God knows how this show ended. I've looked it up on wikipedia and I've still got no idea because of the phenomenal rate at which this plot developed.
Basically, this show was a bold move to create a kids' cartoon in an anime style, and then make it as adult as possible. As you might expect, it was awesome, so awesome they made a horrible movie about it. It follows the adventures of Aang, the Avatar, a mystical figure with the power to control and manipulate (or "bend") all four of the elements. However, after being frozen in a block of ice for a century, the world is out of balance. The Fire Nation controls most of the world. The Air Nomads, Aang's people, are extinct, and the Water Tribe scrape out a difficult life at the North and South poles. The Earth Kingdom are the only race that could ever be a match for the Fire Lord. Aang must learn the arts of Waterbending, Earthbending and Firebending before it is too late, and the Fire Nation has taken over the world. He is joined initially by Katara, a Waterbender, and her brother Sokka, who represents the normal person without the gift to shoot air or water or fire from his hands.
The show gradually more epic as the threat to Aang and co. became more real and more deadly. Wars took place, lives were lost, and backstory was developed as the show moved on. Cool blind Earthbender Toph joined the cast in season two, a bold move to introduced a handicapped individual to what is essentially a quest show, where the characters are constantly on the move. Although as with all American shows there were filler episodes, these often became essential exercises in world-building, meaning that practically nothing was wasted, almost everything tying into the story arc.
Another big plus was the amount of character development and fleshing out of backstories, especially with the villains. Original bad guys Prince Zuko, eaten up by his quest to find the Avatar, horrifically burned in the face by his own father as a punishment, and his Uncle Iroh, cool old guy, lover of tea and retired Jedi super ninja warrior type, were probably the two most developed characters in the entire series. Their promotion to good guys by season three barely registered as a change, as they had basically been secondary protagonists for a year anyway.
There's a spin-off in the works, apparently: Avatar: The Legend of Korra. I can't wait. This show is pretty much my idea of what all kids' TV shows should be like: adult TV shows, just with kids as the protagonists. Oh, and no swearing. Anyway, on to the best of the best of the best:
1. Young Dracula
Welcome, my friends, to Young Dracula, the crowning example of a show cancelled long before its time. To be fair, the first season seemed pretty much like just another CBBC fantasy. An above-par, well written and incredibly well acted fantasy, but still the same old fantasy where a fantastical being, in this case the Dracula family, have to fit in, go to school, blah, blah, blah, hilarity ensues. However, even in the early episodes there were strong hints of the darkness to come. Both main characters Ingrid and Vlad Dracula, children of the Count, and secondary character Johnno Van Helsing, suffer from seperated parents, and the Count is on a continual mission to kill the town's men and seduce their women.
The basic plot is that Count Dracula (played by the excellent Keith-Lee Castle), his daughter Ingrid and his son Vlad, are forced to free from the angry Transylvanian mob that wants to kill them, and end up in the sleepy English village of Stokely, where Vlad quickly makes friends with Robin and Chloe Branagh and tries to live a normal life, complicated by the fact that woodwork teacher Mr Van Helsing is secretly a vampire hunter.
As you can probably tell, this show positively bathed in references to Bram Stoker's classic novel, while at the same time making a definite identity for itself. This identity was pretty much solidified by the absolutely perfect second season. Not to say that the first season wasn't good, but, like Avatar, this show suffered from playing things a little safe in the first year, so that once it was established as a success, the creators could go all-put and do whatever the hell they wanted. Hence the first season getting lumbered with a load of dull kids' show tropes and cliches, like slapstick, or cultural misunderstandings, or turning into the wacky adventures of a power trio (which was subverted hard in ep. 1 of season two, in which Chloe refused to hang out with Vlad and Robin any more because it was becoming too dangerous). Oh, and the silly talking stuffed wolf with the hokey accent, who got about one line per episode in season two.
Anyway, why do I like the second (and final) series so much? Well, the show became very dark, very quickly, at times turning into an all-out action series, with Van Helsing and the Count attempting to duel to the death a couple of times (in suitably daft ways, of course: the show was about their children, so to have serious battles would have undermined the point). The psychological effects of the stuff these characters went through also bagan to show: Johnno became more openly violent, Vlad became more ruthless and manipulative, hypnotising people to do his will, and Vlad's friendly cousin Boris became a homicidal maniac after turning into a vampire.
Ah, yes. You see, on this show, vampires are normal mortals until the age of sixteen. While I can imagine this show in America putting this off for years and years, keeping the characters the same age despite the actors clearly growing up, Young Dracula has Boris have his "blooding" very early on, with Ingrid following a couple of episodes later. In another shocking twist, Ingrid promptly kills her own boyfriend by drinking his blood, tuning him into a "halfling." I think that's what they called him, anyway. It was two years ago, but I don't remember him turning into a hobbit...
So, with Ingrid now a full vampire, her boyfriend Will now a half-vampire, and the Count growing more lustful towards Van Helsing's estranged wife every day, the second series had clearly completely changed the status quo, something a lot of adult shows are afraid to do these days. To compund this, throughout the series, Vkad's worst nightmare began coming true: he was beginning his transformation, with strange dreams that almost proved fatal (leading to him being taken into hospital, which caused for some very dark humour when the Count stole a bag of blood so that he could have a snack...), and hints that he was "The Chosen One" (bear with me here), who would become the greatest vampire ever and crush the mortals or something.
Things came to a head in the mind-blowingly excellent final two episodes, in which the Grand High Vampire comes to stay at the castle with his aide, Justice Morag. Soon, the Grand High Vampire is found murdered. It of course turns out to have been Justice Morag who killed himm, but Morag in turn is revealed to be cousin Boris, who murdered the real Morag and took his identity. Seriously, this show was not afraid to pull its punches. Boris tries to crown himself Grand High Vampire, but the crown turns him into dust. Meanwhile, the Count has captured Van Helsing's wife and keeps her imprisoned in a dungeon.
In the finale, a new Grand High Vampire must be chosen, but the crown turns anyone who wears into dust. After several disintegrations, it is revealed that the Count is next in line. Vlad realises that, as the chosen one, he is the only one that can wear the crown safely. At the same time, Mr Branagh finally realises that they've had a bunch of vampires living in the town for two years. At the same time as this, Van Helsing and Johnno are kicked out of the slayers guild, while a new slayer, Kurt, attempts to break into the castle. Eventually, an epic battle breaks out in the castle between Vampires and the mortals, with several vampires, including one of the main characters, getting killed.
This is one of the key reasons I loved this show so much. While even Avatar could wind up doing the same sort of thing for a few episodes in a row, the Young Dracula status quo was continually changing. If you've never seen that final episode, I'm sure as hell not going to give away the ending to you, but it changes everything. Absolutely everything. Nobody and nothing remains the same. Watch it. It is the most epic thing ever seen on kids' TV.
So, what better time to cancel the show? That's right, they cancelled this show after the most agonising cliffhanger ever seen on any children's programme. The creators have since gone on record, saying that the third season would have featured an army of teenage vampires. An army of teenage vampires! Just to reiterate, this was before the first Twilight movie. Pretty much nobody outside of the US had heard of Stephanie Meyer and her post-menopausal witterings. This was before the world-wide edict that declared that every vampire show had to completely suck (although we had just had to suffer through a billion years of Buffy).
The acting was completely top-notch, of course, the set design was excellent, the direction was gorgeous, the costumes were ravishing... this may have actually been the perfect show. If it had an ending, of course.
So, those were my Top Ten Greatest Children's TV Shows of all time. What are yours? I'm interested to know. I'm right and you're wrong, of course, but I'm still interested nontheless...