The most delightful Christmas TV treat of them all
Wolves, wickedness, witches... and THAT amazing theme tune. Why, even after 36 years, this BBC festive family classic – filmed in snowy Scotland – could well be...
IT was the most expensive television programme the BBC had ever made; cameras and crew struck lucky with Scotland’s winter weather; the DVD is still watched annually in tens of thousands of homes as part of the family festive ritual; and it has a devoted cult following – and no wonder, for The Box of Delights is Christmas on stilts.
The 1984 dramatisation of John Masefield’s 1935 children’s novel, directed by Renny Rye, comes with epic snow, spooky music, pursuing wolves, carols and feasting, travels in time and space, master- criminals, a glamorous witch, talking animals, much English folklore, quirky 1930s slang and high ecclesiastical drama.
It is most unlikely that the BBC today would countenance a show, even for adults, about two-faced clergymen and the epic fight to save the annual, midnight Christmas service – to say nothing of a theological training college being blown up. Splendiferous.
It was neither the first nor the last BBC children’s drama centred on a posh boy in a big house – but The Box of Delights is up there on its own for its enduring and near-timeless appeal, not least for the utter conviction of its cast and, especially, the instinctive actingchops of its 13-year-old star, who appears in nearly every scene.
Now a lavishly illustrated new book by Philip W Errington, scholar of English literature and expert on Masefield, digs anew into both the book and the show, trying to disentangle The Box of Delights’ mysteries and its enduring enchantment of so many.
John Masefield, born in Herefordshire in 1878, orphaned by thirteen and soon afterwards sent to sea by his deeply unpleasant guardians, was first and foremost a poet and one of extraordinary endurance.
He remains our longest-serving Poet Laureate, from 1930 till his death in 1967; his last great poem was a lament for the murdered
John F Kennedy, and his first t was the beloved Cargoes of f 1903: ‘Quinquireme of Nineveh h from distant Ophir,
‘Rowing home to haven in n sunny Palestine, ‘With a cargo of ivory, ‘And apes and peacocks, ‘Sandalwood, cedarwood, and d sweet white wine...’
The Box of Delights is actually ly a sequel to a slighter, 1927 tale, le, The Midnight Folk, and this is sense of unrelated back- story ry only deepens the eeriness of the he BBC adaptation. We know that at Kay Harker is an orphan, but ut not how, and that he is of assured ed gentlefolk – for almost all adults lts address him as ‘Master Kay’ and nd he is on occasion a little lordly dly with the servants.
What is still less appreciated d is that Masefield is as foundational nal to modern children’s fiction as The Beatles, three decades later, ter, were to popular music.
In The Box of Delights we have ve a talking mouse and a portal l to other worlds years ars ahead of C S Lewis, s, a flying car long before fore Chitty Chitty Bang ang Bang, a stylish suburban rban witch far before Beverley erley Nichols and Roald Dahl.
And the young hero with a loyal but dim sidekick and an assertive e girl is a formula 60 years ahead of J K Rowling – and there are other striking elements of modernity amidst the wassailing, snowmen and tinsel.
‘Christmas ought to be brought up to date,’ declares feisty Maria in an early scene. ‘It ought to have gangsters, and aeroplanes, and a lot of automatic pistols...’
And The Box of Delights delivers them in spades.
THE plot is simple enough. On his train journey home from boarding school for the Christmas holidays, young Kay Harker (Devin Stanfield) has his pockets picked by two crooks got up as clergymen, and is befriended by a mysterious old Punch and Judy man, Cole Hawli ngs ( Patrick Troughton), who warns him enigmatically that ‘ the wolves are running’.
In short order we learn that Hawlings is being chased by the villainous Abner Brown, yet another fake cleric, who is desperate to lay his mitts on the Box of Delights – a magical gadget Hawlings soon entrusts to Kay, just before he is kidnapped (‘scrobbled’) by Abner and his henchmen.
All sorts of magical things start happening even as all sorts of people disappear and Abner soon seems to have scrobbled almost all the clergy in the county, his obsession with the Box matched only by his desperation to stop the thousandth consecutive Christmas service at Tatchester Cathedral.
The story does not really stand up to the most cynical scrutiny.
It never dawns on Abner that Kay might have the Box, he and Kay never actually meet, adults throughout are surprisingly blasé about children gone missing – and then there is the infamous ‘it was all only a dream’ ending, though Renny Rye cleverly inserts a note of doubt at the very end of the show.
But, despite these arguable flaws, and some special effects that seem, by today’s standards, a little shonky, there is a sheer – well, magical quality to The Box of Delights that carries you effortlessly along.
In fact, even a mere two or three years earlier the show would have been impossible to make – Rye availed himself of new state-of-theart video effects and an unprecedented £1million budget – and it says much for the achievement of all involved that, nearly 40 years later, no one has dared to film The Box of Delights since.
It was not merely a huge hit in Britain – it was nominated for five Baftas, and won three – but scored huge ratings in America, where it was screened by 215 Public Service Broadcasting stations.
Tireless promotion helped. The Box of Delights was the first BBC children’s programme to make the cover of Radio Times; its stars were interviewed by Blue Peter and Pebble Mill At One and the show’s gorgeous theme tune is still thought one of the most inspired ever.
In fact, that particular, dreamy, First Nowell chunk of Victor HelyHutchinson’s 1927 Carol Symphony, with its menacing bass and insistent harp, had been associated with The Box of Delights since the first, in 1943, of successive BBC radio adaptations (There have been six, most recently in 1995).
And the music perfectly matches the tale because Masefield had nailed something central to The Box of Delights – that Christmas is not just cosy, but scary.
It’s a season when nothing is growing and few birds sing; of long dark nights and thin, ever-shortening days and lengthening evening shadows.
So much of what we associate with Christmas today is but really rather modern, commercial confection. Santa Claus, for instance, as we generally envisage him, was got up by the ad-men at Coca-Cola and, as recently as the 1970s, advent calendars never involved chocolate.
Masefield draws deeply on an older, pagan Yule: the lonely forest, the earth stood hard as iron, the iced pavements, the berried holly, the evildoers in the shadows, the demons Abner summons to cut off Tatchester Cathedral.
AND in the first episode of the TV show alone, When the Wolves Were Running, there is much to unsettle even an adult audience. The man who shape-shifts into a fox just as the train hurtles into a tunnel. Caroline- Louisa’s casual remark, when Kay points out some Alsatians: ‘ Oh, lots of people have them these days – for protection.’
From what? The bloodied, frightened youth who scurries by Kay in a dark alley – who, and how? And the mystery of Hawlings himself, twinkleeyed as he may be. ‘ Only I do date from pagan times, and age makes bones to creak...’
Enough to give anyone the fantods. Still only 36 when filming began, early in 1984, Rye was a bold choice to make such an innovative, bigbudget drama. But he was already a seasoned director – first on Renta
ghost. His later work has included dramas by Dennis Potter and episodes of Midsomer Murders, and his cool, analytic approach averted many problems.
There simply had to be snow – never a given in any British winter. When and where was it most likely, Rye asked the Met Office.
West of Aberdeen, around January 27, came the reply.
‘We went for a tech recce just after Christmas,’ Rye recalls, ‘which is when you take the lighting man and so on up, and go to look at the locations, and there was still no snow. As usual, all the locals said, “We’ve never seen anything like it, there’s always snow at this time of year”.
‘And we panicked about a week before the actual shoot, and I booked a snow machine at a great expense to travel up from Pinewood to Scotland.
‘I flew up on the Saturday to start shooting on the Monday, and the crew were all going up by road with the trucks.
‘My plane was the last to land in Aberdeen because the snow hit on the Saturday night, and it was so deep that all the crew got stuck at Carlisle. They didn’t make it until Wednesday, so I only got two-and-a-half days filming out of my first week...’
SO prodigious was the snow at his base in Lumphanan, Aberdeenshire – five feet deep in places – that all filming was confined to the hotel grounds, under a gorgeous rosy sky; but that footage is the making of The Box of Delights. The other glory, of course, is the casting; there are more than 30 speaking parts in The Box of Delights, the sort of human-resources largesse that we are unlikely to see in British television again.
Much has been made of the seasoned grown-up performers. Patrick Troughton – who had, after all, been the second Doctor Who – was, of course, no stranger to whizzing about in a magic box.
Robert Stephens, once thought the heir to Laurence Olivier, gives a scenery-chewing performance as an increasingly deranged villain, and his real-life partner, Patricia Quinn (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I Claudius, Shoulder to Shoulder) is the perfect, treacherous foil.
But the children were the stars, and Rye refused even to consider any precious little things from drama school. It had to be wandering-about real ones. More than 200 boys were considered for the part of Kay Harker, but Devin Stanfield stood out at once.
For one, Stanfield could actually act; for another, he had just read the book, and bombarded the director with probing, often astute queries as to how this or that particularly fantastic section could be filmed.
And ‘his face could express wonder, bravado, dismay, joy,’ remembers Rye, ‘all the essentials of Kay, without being tutored... a magical piece of casting.’
REVIEWERS agreed. ‘ Stanfield, as Kay Harker,’ declared Peter Ackroyd in a London newspaper, ‘was the most natural and least irritating child actor seen on television for some time.’
Three decades later, another writer mused: ‘Stanfield acted very little following this, and it’s a shame, given what a find he was.
‘To carry a six-part series is an unenviable task for a 13-year-old, but Stanfield manages it with aplomb, and the look of delighted awe that often springs to his face characterises the programme for me...’
The show i s otherwise best remembered, one reviewer has thoughtfully observed, for ‘its collisions of young and old. This is not only in its combination of live action with animation, nor its fusion of orchestral and electronic music, but in the varied kind of story it tells.
‘ Differing genres and i deas bounce off each other in a piece of Christmas television that is more daringly experimental, and perhaps more rewarding, than we are used to today...’
And, j oyously, we have been spared the Hollywood remake. That really would be the Purple Pim.
■ Opening The Box Of Delights. By Philip W Errington. Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd. £20.