The Box of Delights

Chris Hallam remembers how his Christmas 40 years ago was lit up by a magical television drama

- Chris Hallam

Forty years ago, the BBC delivered children everywhere a magical Christmas present which they would never forget.

The gift took the form of a new fantasy drama which aired across six halfhour episodes between Wednesday 21 November and Christmas Eve 1984.

The show in question was The Box of Delights, adapted from the 1935 book by John Masefield. I celebrated my eighth birthday just a few days before Christmas in that special year. As with many other people who watched the series for the first time as children back then, I have never forgotten it.

The most haunting feature of The Box of Delights is undeniably the music. The theme used for the show's opening and closing title sequence was an orchestral arrangement of The First Nowell extracted from the third movement of the Carol Symphony which had been written by a Victor Hely-Hutchinson in 1927. The version used was recorded in 1966.

Watching today, the opening title sequence seems surprisingly unsettling for a children's programme, a mood which is matched by the sinister music. We see a series of images - a wolf, a particularly terrifying looking Mr Punch, followed by Herne the Hunter (Glyn Baker), the villainous Abner Brown (Robert Stephens) and several of the weirder characters from the show all materialising against a starry or dark night sky background in a similar manner to the opening titles of the old Doctor Who.

In time, the music becomes more reassuring and recognisably The First Noël. An image of a fully bearded Patrick Troughton, who plays the nicer character of Cole Hawlings, then fills the screen, perhaps reinforcing the slight Doctor Who effect, before we see the mystical Box of Delights itself which then opens, bathing the screen in a blinding light.