The Box Of Delights

A Load Of Scrobblers

The Box Of Delights
Directed by Renny Rye
BBC Six Episodes November - December 1984

I was 16 years old when The Box Of Delights aired for the first time on British television. Which might explain why I didn’t take to the show after seeing the first episode and then ignored it for the rest of its run. I was much more interested in watching things like Battle Of The Planets, Monkey and my precious Flash Gordon serials. It was, for its time though, the most expensive children’s TV production to date, mixing live action and animated effects in a way that, to my then young eyes, didn’t even look good in the early 1980s but still, people responded to it well and it was much loved and popular enough that, a few decades later, it aired again. It was then that my mother and father watched it (I stayed away again) and they both enjoyed it. So much so, in fact, that in time for it’s 40th Anniversary Blu Ray bells and whistles release, my dad bought it for my mum so, alas, in Christmas 2024 I finally caught up to the thing and… what do you know? I’m even less impressed with it now, truth be told. 

A staple of BBC radio plays over the decades, it’s based on John Masefield’s book and set contemporaneously to when it was written, in 1935. It stars Devin Stanfield as schoolboy hero Kay Harker, who gets caught up with a box of delights carried by an old man, played in three episodes here by the great Patrick Troughton, using magical forces so that he, his brother and their friends can fight off a scheme by the villainous Abner Brown, played by Robert Stephens. Brown needs said box to increase his own dark, magical arts.

Now the performances are all fine, the special effects somewhat clunky (though certainly serviceable enough and light years ahead of contemporary science fiction programmes like Doctor Who and Blake’s Seven at the time) and, although I can see that many people find it a charming watch, I have to say I still find it quite dull. It’s not exactly pacey at all and, apart from a nice score by Roger Limb of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, I can’t find much that I’d personally recommend in it. Now, it jumps around a bit and assumes a certain knowledge of the characters in their relationships to each other but this is explained by the fact that the book was a sequel to an earlier, magical Kay Harker novel by the same writer. However, two things especially got to me as elements I found either curious or annoying. 

One is the fact that when various children get abducted by the gang of bad guys… or scrobbled in the vernacular of the writing (I’m guessing that comes directly from the source novel)… then nobody really seems to mind. A kid goes missing for a night or two and it’s all, “Oh, I’m sure they’re fine, they’re just doing something.” This tale comes with awful parenting skills from any of the adults in the story, it seemed to me.

Secondly, the box can do very little. When he asks what it does, Kay is told it can make you go swift and it can make you go small. Plus other things completely undescribed or demonstrated, other than at the start, when a projection of a phoenix is glimpsed in a fireplace. And then when the box is brought into action, Kay does indeed either shrink to hide and stealth about, go swift by flying to escape his captors or, when they’re really pushing the boat out (as opposed to shrinking it), a less than subtle combination of the two… and that’s about it. I’m probably quite jaded then in perhaps admitting that I couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. 

And that’s me done with The Box Of Delights, I’m afraid. Not something I’m anxious to visit again anytime soon but, at least it had some nice music. It is a well loved British children’s TV phenomenon though so, don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself.