The Worst Witch is back on the class schedule. Cackle’s After Dark, a nostalgia podcast hosted by Holly Rivers, launched in July and has been reuniting the cast of the 1998 series for long looks back at life at Cackle’s Academy, with six episodes out so far.
The Worst Witch, based on Jill Murphy’s books, ran from 1998 to 2001 on CITV in Britain, and for American kids it was a fixture of HBO Family, where it aired into 2004. This is that late-90s series, not the 1986 TV movie with Diana Rigg and not the 2017 revival that later streamed on Netflix. The series is set at Cackle’s Academy, a boarding school for young witches in training. Georgina Sherrington starred as Mildred Hubble, the disaster-prone young witch whose spells rarely went as planned, alongside Clare Coulter as the kindhearted Miss Cackle, Kate Duchêne as the fearsome Miss Hardbroom and Una Stubbs as the eccentric Miss Bat.
Rivers played Drusilla Paddock, sidekick to Mildred’s rival Ethel Hallow, across the series, and she is now a children’s author. On the podcast she guides each conversation herself, swapping set stories with Emma Brown, who played Mildred’s best friend Maud Moonshine, Charlotte Knowles, who played Sybil Hallow, and Katy Allen, who stepped into the role of Ethel after the first season. The fifth episode landed the show’s original Ethel, Felicity Jones, who has since become an Academy Award-nominated actress.
In a treat for longtime fans, Jones and Rivers also re-enacted one of their old scenes together for the podcast’s YouTube channel.
You can watch the podcast’s video trailer here.
Cackle’s After Dark is free to hear on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts and YouTube. The show is listener-supported, and a paid Substack subscription unlocks bonus material, including exclusive video and photos from the recordings.
If the reunion sends you back to the original series, it is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video, and free with ads on Tubi TV. Trevor Decker News has traced the franchise’s full history, from Jill Murphy’s books through its many screen lives, in The Spellbinding History of The Worst Witch.