Written by Alan Seymour
Directed by Renny Rye
Kay: "The wolves are running."
Well, it is the month of Christmas and while I haven't overloaded this blog yet with Christmas posts/reviews, I did recently watch this miniseries for the first time. Yes, you heard correctly - I watched this for the first time to coincide with it's 40th anniversary.
Imagine if Doctor Who sort of did Christmas specials back in the 1980s (K9 And Company aside), I'd imagine it'd be something like this that we would've gotten. The fact that Second Doctor actor Patrick Troughton also had a prominent role as a mysterious stranger certainly added to that feeling as well.
Anyways our hero of the piece was a boarding school kid named Kay Harker (Devin Stanfield). He's given the title box in question and it's a box that effectively lived up to its name because through this six episode miniseries, Kay was able to change his size, time travel in dreams, fly and even communicate with rats and so on.
Of course having such a powerful box meant that bad guys also wanted it too. This was where Abner Brown (Robert Stephens) factored into the miniseries, keeping the box's original owner, Cole Hawlings (Patrick Troughton) captive, while actively pursuing the box.
As a baddie, there's a good boo hiss quality to Abner as a character. He's so outwardly nasty that it beggared belief that none of the authorities would listen to Kay when he tried to tell them about Abner being evil. We got to see Abner's cruelty towards several characters, including two who ended up betraying him at the worst possible moment.
As for the box itself, there's a moment where Kay travelled back in time to meet the original creator, who wasn't much help to him at all. By the end of this, Kay managed to rescue everyone he cared about, defeated Abner and went to Christmas mass and did some more flying about.
- Episode titles are Where The Wolves Were Running, Where Shall The Nighted Showman Go?, In Darkest Cellars Underneath, The Spide In The Web, Beware Of Yesterday and Leave Us Not Little Nor Yet Dark.
- Cole was a Punch and Judy man but also was alluded to being Ramon Llull.
- The title sequence was very 1980s Doctor Who and the use of The First Nowell was a little chilling.
- Chronology: Set during the Christmas of 1934. John Masefield's book came out in 1935.
The Box Of Delights is a certainly a good treat to watch for the first time over the Christmas period or even watch again if you haven't in a long time. For a first viewing, I quite liked it.
Rating: 7 out of 10
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