One of my favorite Freaks and Geeks episodes is the one about Halloween. This was a show that got right to the heart of the special, unforgettable misery of adolescence; it maintained a strong sense of how cruelty, uncertainty, and hilarity combine during that time in unpredictable but utterly formative ways. The Halloween episode does that especially marvelously. In the above clip, Sam and his friends decide they aren't too old to trick or treat, and they dress up in their costumes and sally forth in search of candy.

In the below clip, some older kids decide Sam and his friends are most definitely too old--and too geeky--to be trick or treating, and punish them accordingly.

Together the clips capture the way Halloween seems to license both kids' remarkable imaginations and their equally remarkable capacity for meanness. And as such they get at something timeless, at once terrible and wonderful, about being that young.

The English are having some issues with youth these days, and have in some quarters decided that Halloween, as a day of youthful license, must be suppressed:

Remember when trick-or-treating was looked upon as a bit of fun, or at worst a bit of mischief? Now it is branded Anti-Social Behaviour, and the children who carry it out are referred to as 'Halloween hellraisers.' Police forces around Britain are supplying households with posters warning children not to knock on their doors. A poster distributed in the London borough of Barnet by the Metropolitan Police and the Evangelical Churches of Barnet (an unholy alliance if ever there was one) says: 'SORRY! No Trick Or Treat ... Trick or treat causes DANGER to the children who are often unsupervised; DAMAGE to other people's property; and DISTRESS to the elderly and vulnerable.'

A poster produced by West Mercia police in Shropshire says: 'Sorry, No Trick or Treat. Thank Yooooou!' West Mercia police have warned local kids 'Don’t be a rotter this Halloween'. They urged 'all wannabe Harry Potters, witches, ghosts and devils' to avoid cold-calling at people's homes (er, isn’t that the point of trick or treating?) because doing so can cause 'fear, harassment, alarm and distress.'

Other police forces have put pressure on retailers to stop selling eggs and flour to under-18s in the run-up to Halloween, since some youths use these lethal weapons to pelt the homes of people who refuse to give them a treat. So everyday foodstuffs will now join knives, cigarettes, alcohol and porn in the list of things that must not be sold to youth.

The Halloween panic captures modern Britain's view of children as both threatening and super-vulnerable, as both 'rotters' who must be controlled and potential victims who must be prevented from knocking on strangers' doors. Youthful exuberance is relabelled 'anti-social behaviour'; and that kindly old phrase that was used to describe mischievous children -- 'little monsters' -- has been replaced with the not-so-kindly (ie, serious) phrase 'Halloween hellraisers'. The authorities are effectively saying: 'We're scared of kids, and scared for them.' And that's a really scary, and confusing, message to transmit to the next generation.

One reason why Halloween gives the powers-that-be the heebie-jeebies is because it involves people getting out in the open unsupervised. We can't have that. So police forces are introducing Halloween-appropriate authoritarian measures to keep an eye on the monsters, zombies and freaks traipsing through the streets.

In North Wiltshire, police will wear special 'head cams' -- video cameras attached to their helmets--to record anti-social behaviour. 'We hope they will act as a deterrent as well as an excellent evidence-gathering tool', said a Wiltshire-based Inspector. In short? The cops in Wiltshire will wear weird costumes that really are designed to frighten the local population. In Lancashire, four dedicated control rooms have been set up by the police to monitor CCTV footage on 31 October. The Lancashire police say that they will issue on-the-spot fines of L80 to anyone under the age of 18 found in possession of a firework or other potentially dangerous items (eggs and flour, perhaps?).

The authorities' plans for Halloween reveal their profound distrust for the public – and their absolutely cavalier attitude to introducing new forms of spying and petty punishment. A spokesman for London mayor Ken Livingstone once said that New Year's Eve is not so much a public holiday as a 'public order problem'. Now even Halloween – a children-oriented evening event, which in Britain has always been a pale imitation of the bigger celebrations in the US – is looked upon as a ‘public order problem’ that requires stern posters in house and shop windows, spycams on street corners and coppers' helmets, and fines for anyone who gets a bit too frightening.

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And of course, no public holiday is complete these days without lectures from on high about how wasteful we are. Apparently, we consume too much on Halloween, leaving a carbon devil's hoofprint in our wake. Some local councillors are worried that the million-plus pumpkins sold at Halloween will clog up landfill sites, where they 'break down without oxygen and create methane, a potent greenhouse gas'.

The UK Energy Savings alliance has issued advice on how to celebrate 'Hallowgreen': make your kids costumes from second-hand clothes; only give out sweets that don’t come with packaging to trick-or-treaters; and give your own children a re-useable container for trick-or-treating, such as a 'cloth bag, decorated lunch box or upside-down hat.' There's nothing like a bit of patronising advice about the green'n'careful way to do things to inject a bit of spirit into a minor kind-of holiday.

The English often get credit for "inventing" the child (think: Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, Beatrix Potter, all pathbreaking in their day). Now they may be working on the decidely less honorable distinction of destroying childhood altogether.