Watt on Earth
Entry updated 6 April 2026. Tagged: TV.
UK tv series (1991-1992). BBC TV / Children's BBC. Created and written by Jane Baker and Pip Baker. Directed by Roger Singleton-Turner. Produced by Angela Beeching. Cast includes Tom Brodie, Simon Cook, John Brillo, Garth Napier Jones, Michael Kilgarriff (voice), Jessica Simpson and Heather Wright. Two seasons each of twelve 15-minute episodes. Colour.
The title character Watt (Jones) of this Children's SF comedy series is a 300-year-old Alien, heir to his home world's throne, who looks like a young man and has fled to earth from a wicked uncle (voiced by Kilgarriff). The uncle seems previously to have arranged the deaths of Watt's parents and repeatedly sends his chief assassin/henchman Jemadah (variously played) to eliminate the heir. In the English town Haxton where he has landed, Watt befriends the human boy Sean (Brodie) and secretly lives with Sean's family, usually concealed by his ability to Shapeshift into various objects via "transanimateobjectification", though never quite getting it right (an apple, for example, but with a blue stalk). Jemadah regularly attempts to locate and kill Watt, in the first series as a sinister Mercedes-driving man in black (Grillo) and in the second Shapeshifting into various perfect human disguises given away only by names involving the letter J or its sound: for example, private detective J J Jefferson. A further complication is that Sean's prying sister Zoë (Simpson) suspects that something strange is happening. After many narrow escapes and a final unwitting betrayal by Zoë, Watt and Sean use Jemadah's equipment to contact the home world and discover the uncle has been overthrown; Jemadah nevertheless makes a last assassination attempt only for the beam of his Weapon to be reflected by Watt using a satellite dish: it is the killer rather than his target who, contained in a Force Field, is ejected into space. Watt's final transformation is into a Spaceship for the journey home.
Watt on Earth, with its frequent touches of Humour, is fondly remembered by those who saw it as children. The novelization is Watt on Earth (1991) by Jane Baker and Pip Baker. [DRL]
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