It was first broadcast over forty years ago and has only twice, ever, been repeated. Yet The Box of Delights has proved so definitive — a screen-adaptation that is actually better than the book — that, for many, it is now an institution.
A dedicated Facebook page has thousands of quietly fanatical followers. And, in households the length of the land, the serial’s ritual viewing every Yule — it was released on DVD in 2004, just as tired VHS tapes started to fray — is as central to their Christmas as the turkey.
It’s a blend of the Christian and the supernatural, the reassuring and the terrifying
The Box of Delights — produced for the BBC by Paul Stone, directed by Renny Rye and with a taut screenplay adapted from John Masefield’s 1935 novel by Alan Seymour — at once chilled and enchanted the children of Britain, back in 1984 and with the sensational finale airing on Christmas Eve.
It’s a blend of the Christian and the supernatural, the reassuring and the terrifying, and — replete with carols and steam trains, gifts and feasts, decorated trees and wassailing and thigh-deep drifts of snow and even sleighs and Santa — it is Christmas on stilts.
It is, of course, inconceivable that the achingly woke BBC would make such a drama today. Indeed, after a repeat in 1986, it took thirty-eight years before it was rebroadcast and, to the fury of fans, it has just been pulled from BBC iPlayer.
But thirteen-something young Kay Harker, after all, is a plummy-voiced lad bouncing around Worcestershire in a Norfolk suit. Orphaned — though we are not told how — but unmistakably of gentlefolk, with a pleasant country house and sometimes just a little lordly with the servants.
They deferentially address him as “Master Kay.” His guardian, the glamorous Caroline Louisa, is draped in fox-fur; the young Jones siblings, joining Kay for the hols, likewise attend frightfully good schools. There isn’t a person of colour in sight, no one is bi-curious or out to decolonise anyone’s curriculum, and central to The Box of Delights is foiling a dastardly plan to prevent the 1000th annual Christmas service at Tatchester Cathedral.
One can readily imagine Adjoa Andoh’s curled lip. But no less important is Kay’s custody of a small magic box — entrusted to him by a mysterious old. The box must, at all costs, never fall into the hands of Abner Brown — a villain in charge of a cabal of pretend-clergy who can shapeshift into wolves, and who desperately wants that box – when he isn’t kidnapping (“scrobbling”) choirboys, conjuring up demons, or plotting badness with Kay’s old governess, Sylvia Daisy Pouncer.
The dialogue is remarkably faithful to Masefield’s original, complete with the boarding-school slang of his day — the enjoyable is “splendiferous”, anything unpleasant or vexatious damned as the “purple pim” — and the stunning snowscapes our heroes must wade through in the second episode were filmed on location in Scotland.
Renny Rye, still only thirty-six, was a bold choice to direct what, at the time, was the most expensive children’s programme ever made — in charge of a £1 million budget, allowed to cast more than thirty speaking parts, and with first crack at the technology for new, daring special effects.
Already a seasoned director, Rye filmed as much as possible on location and was desperate for real snow. When and where, he asked the Met Office late in 1983, was it most likely? West of Aberdeen, around January 27, they murmured confidently
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 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…
Most of the painstakingly scouted locations were unreachable. Filming, under the most magical roseate sky, had largely to be confined to the grounds of a Lumphanan hotel — but with glorious results.
Central to the impact of The Box of Delights was Rye’s astute casting and the fierce conviction of everyone in their work. The seasoned Patrick Troughton played the mystical Cole Hawlings: as the second Doctor Who, after all, Troughton knew a thing or two about travels with a magic box.
Robert Stephens, of serious Shakespearean chops and sometime husband of Maggie Smith, played the cackling Abner Brown; his partner Patricia Quinn (The Rocky Horror Picture Show; I, Claudius; Shoulder to Shoulder) his sinister and witchy moll, Miss Pouncer.
Other memorable parts are the warm if rather thick police inspector — James Grout, who would play a far grumpier cop in Inspector Morse — and John Horsley’s gracious but redoubtable bishop.
But who could be Kay Harker? More than two hundred boys were considered, and a good number auditioned, but Devin Stanfield — twelve; grandson of actor Leslie Sands — stood out immediately.
For one, he could actually act; for another, he had just read the book, and bombarded the director with probing queries as to how this or that particularly fantastic section could be filmed.
“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 The Times, “was the most natural and least irritating child actor seen on television for some time.”
The central genius of Masefield’s tale is that he grasped, confidently, the two sides of Christmas
Stanfield’s achievement was all the more remarkable as it was an arduous part — he appears in almost every scene, and had to wallow in snow, fly from a zip-line, and spend much of the last episode waist-deep in water – and, time and again, he had to react convincingly to marvels, added only in post-production, that were not actually there.
The central genius of Masefield’s tale is that he grasped, confidently, the two sides of Christmas.
The Christian marvel that is the Incarnation — God become Man; infinity dwindled to infancy — with the related worship, rites, meals and treats we all know.
But also the creepy side. That scary season of thin days and fading light, till we pad home from school in the dark. Unseen things rustling in the woods. Devils, as well as angels; the long, long nights when the wind moans round the chimney-pots, those nights the wolves are running …
Enough to give anyone the fantods. The Box of Delights was also an extraordinarily influential book: as moulding a milestone in children’s fiction as when, first, Eric Ambler and then — decades later — Frederick Forsyth reinvented the thriller.
It wasn’t just Masefield’s delightful mash-up of Christmas and warlocks and wolves with motor-cars, aeroplanes, gangsters and automatic pistols. Not to mention time travel, and attitudinous rats.
In The Box of Delights we meet a flying car long before Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, portals into other worlds and talking mice years ahead of C.S. Lewis, and, in Kay’s close partnership with feisty young Maria and the loyal but slightly dim Peter, a formula J.K. Rowling unabashedly borrowed for the Harry Potter saga.
But, in fact, the novel was actually a sequel to John Masefield’s slighter 1927 tale, The Midnight Folk — and the sense of an untold back-story adds to the unsettling charm of the 1984 production.
Renny Rye and Alan Seymour had another challenge: the book’s clunking it had all been a dream ending. Without giving anything away, their solution to that problem was deftly done.
And we cannot overlook the glorious theme music, over the indefinably sinister opening titles. In fact, the composition — a variation on The First Nowell from Victor Hely-Hutchinson’s 1927 Carol Symphony, with its ominous bass and insistent harp — had been associated with The Box of Delights since its first adaptation for radio in 1943. (There have been quite a few, most recently in 1995.)
Whatever Auntie thinks of The Box of Delights now, at the time the BBC had no doubt they had a hit on their hands. Stanfield and Troughton gave gracious interviews on Blue Peter and Pebble Mill at One. The young star, with an enraptured smile, even made the front cover of the Radio Times — a very, very rare honour for a children’s programme.
Splendiferous. And a hit it duly proved. Children of all ages tuned in in their millions. Critics loved it. The Box of Delights was nominated for five Baftas: it won three. It would capture vast audiences in America — where it was screened by 215 Public Service Broadcasting stations — and the viewer is gripped from the start.
Masefield had drawn deeply on that older, pagan Yule, and so did Renny Rye: the lonely forest, the earth stood hard as iron, the iced pavements, the berried holly, evildoers in the shadows and the demons Abner summons to cut off Tatchester Cathedral.
In the first episode of the TV show alone, “When the Wolves Were Running”, there is much to unnerve even grown-ups. The chortling cleric who morphs 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, twinkle-eyed as he may be. “Only I do date from pagan times, and age makes bones to creak…”
Inevitably, after four decades, some aspects sag a little. Elements — not least the BBC Radiophonics Workshop score — rather remind you of classic Doctor Who.
The pace drags a tad in the middle of the drama. Grown-ups do seem strangely unbothered about all the steadily disappearing children and, as for the special effects, as Robin Lobb (the chap in charge of them) conceded last year, you could now do most of it on your phone.
Sadly, Devin Stanfield would never act again, confiding in a 2004 interview that he didn’t want to spend ten per cent of his life hanging around luvvies and the other ninety per cent unemployed.
Not that he hasn’t a tosser to his kick: Stanfield has enjoyed a happy career as a production manager in theatre and television, with much hands-on carpentry.
“It’s been an odd experience,” Stanfield told the Radio Times last year. “I’d put the whole thing to bed and moved on with my life and hadn’t really given it a great deal of thought, to be honest. It’s just kind of a childhood chapter. So revisiting it was very interesting. I’ve said no to almost every request for publicity or interviews over the years …”
Now, in 2024, Stanfield had agreed to return to location with Renny Rye, filming a wistful 40th-anniversary documentary for the remastered DVD and Blu-Ray about a children’s show among the most beloved of all time. Its stature such, still, that no one has ever dared to do a remake — which really would be the purple pim.
