ITVX is about to unleash a serious dose of 90s nostalgia, as beloved Australian children’s series ‘Round the Twist’ heads back to UK screens this September.
For anyone who grew up watching Children’s BBC during the 1990s, ‘Round the Twist’ is one of those shows capable of unlocking memories you didn’t realise were still lurking somewhere in your brain. A lighthouse. Ghosts. Extremely weird supernatural happenings. Quite a lot of toilet humour. And, of course, an absolute banger of a theme tune.
The Australian comedy-drama follows widowed father Tony Twist and his three children, 14-year-old twins Pete and Linda, and their younger brother Bronson, after the family leaves the city and moves into an old lighthouse overlooking the fictional coastal town of Port Niranda.
Unfortunately for the Twists, it isn’t exactly the peaceful seaside existence they might have been hoping for.
The lighthouse is haunted, the locals include the obnoxious Gribble family, and practically every week brings some new piece of supernatural nonsense. Across the series, the children encounter ghosts, magical objects, strange creatures, runaway shadows, bizarre transformations and storylines which could be surprisingly disgusting for something going out during children’s television. The Australian Children’s Television Foundation rather wonderfully describes “ghosts, vikings, magical underpants, runaway shadows” among the things waiting for the family.
Much of the early series was adapted from stories by Australian children’s author Paul Jennings, whose books specialised in exactly the same combination of fantasy, gross-out comedy, horror and the sort of gleefully peculiar ideas that children adore and adults occasionally stare at in disbelief.
And ‘Round the Twist’ could get VERY strange.
Episodes included haunted outside toilets, enchanted underwear, a spaghetti-eating machine which goes disastrously wrong and, in later years, a teenage boy becoming pregnant after falling for a tree spirit. Another episode featured Bronson swallowing a magical fish, resulting in a rather unfortunate anatomical development which effectively turns him into a human outboard motor.
This was children’s television operating without fear.
The show first reached UK screens on BBC One on 6th April 1990 as part of Children’s BBC, becoming a fixture for British viewers throughout the decade and into the early 2000s. The second series proved particularly successful here, with the Australian Children’s Television Foundation reporting that it had become the UK’s most popular children’s programme by the end of its BBC One run in 1993.
In total, four series and 52 episodes were produced, although there were lengthy gaps between them and the younger roles were recast several times as the original performers inconveniently committed the cardinal sin of children’s television and grew up.
Then there is that theme tune.
Even people who can remember virtually nothing about individual episodes may find the opening line, “Have you ever, ever felt like this?”, immediately lodging itself back in their head.
The song was written by Andrew Duffield and sung by Tamsin West (Round the Twist), who played the original Linda Twist in the first series. Its combination of playground rhyme, catchy melody and slightly unhinged energy fitted the programme perfectly.
The other instantly recognisable part of the show is the Twist family’s lighthouse, which was not a studio creation. Exterior filming took place around the real Split Point Lighthouse at Aireys Inlet on the Victorian coast of Australia, which provided the series with its wonderfully windswept seaside backdrop.
ITV says the classic series will now be available through ITVX, giving those of us who watched it the first time around a chance to discover whether it really was as gloriously bizarre as we remember, while introducing an entirely new generation to the important cultural experience of wondering what on earth Australian children’s television had just shown them.
And yes, you will be singing the theme tune afterwards.
‘Round the Twist’ streams from Thursday, 17th September 2026 on ITVX.
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