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Showing posts with label Box of Delights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Box of Delights. Show all posts
I probably heard the repeat of it near Christmas in 1968, but it was this BBC Radio adaptation of The Box of Delights from 1966 that introduced me to the book's magic.
And I discovered recently that Stanley Unwin was in it.
Click play on the video above and you will hear a short scene between Abner Brown, Sylvia Daisy Pouncer, Rat and Rat's nephew Alf. The nephew is played by Stanley Unwin.
Unwin understood that his act worked best in small doses, which is why he turns up making cameo appearances in all sorts of unexpected places.
"Almost all workers (98 per cent) at SOSE [South of Scotland Enterprise] believed the four-day week trial improved motivation and morale, while there was a decrease in workers taking time off sick and a 25 per cent fall in those taking sick days for psychological reasons." A Scottish government trial of a four-day working week finds that it improves productivity and staff wellbeing, reports Joanna Partridge.
Sam Whewall, Avril Keating and Emily Clark say young people in seaside towns are being left behind and set out what could be done to help them: "Our professionals made two key suggestions for improving the lives of the young people they work with. The first is to invest in safe spaces and leisure activities that are available outside of the short summer season. ... The second suggestion is to invest in and rebuild youth services."
Jonquilyn Hill on the rise of the wellness industry: "Nowadays, in many parts of North America, wellness is everywhere and anywhere, and the definition has really ballooned to include anything and everything. If we ask one wellness guru to define wellness, we’ll hear a different answer from another one."
"There has been a rise in privately operated tournaments set up as little more than vehicles for illegal betting. Organisers are theoretically expected to monitor betting markets for signs of suspicious movements, but problems with manipulation have been manifest." Steve Menary reveals that cricket has been flooded with betting sponsorship since the Covid pandemic.
Adrian Teal examines the eccentricities of the great portrait painter Thomas Gainsborough.
"'The Wolves are running…' is the mysterious message the boy Kay Harker is given by the old Punch and Judy man in Masefield’s The Box of Delights; it was a potent image from Joan Aiken’s childhood reading, complete with snow… and re-reading the book became one of the Christmas traditions that remained with her until she was able 'to write the wolves out of her subconscious' and into her own story many years later." Lizza Aiken traces the links between The Box of Delights and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.
An old edition of the Hypnogoria podcast put me on to this.
Praising the new, expanded edition of Philip W. Errington's book Opening The Box of Delights, it mentioned he had discovered that ITV broadcast an adaptation of The Box of Delights in 1962.
The Amazon blurb for Errington's book mentions "The 1962 ITV Story Box adaptation of The Box of Delights." This enabled me to find it in this listing of the next day's television from the Halifax Evening Courier, God bless its woollen socks, for 8 November that year.
Story Box appears to have been a programme for schools.
"Neither More in Common nor Opinium highlight the fact that Ed Davey tops their net approval ratings. This amnesia spills into other areas. BMG data shows that more people have not heard of Kemi Badenoch than have not heard of Ed Davey, while Ipsos gives Ed Davey the best net score on whether he would be a good or bad PM." Stephen McNair asks why the press and the pollsters aren't talking about Britain's most popular party leader.
Tom Gordon, Lib Dem MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, calls for adoptive parents to be given more support: "Adoption is often viewed as the happy ending in a child’s journey through trauma and instability, but for many families across the UK, it marks the beginning of a far more complex and challenging chapter."
"Banning books will only drive young people online for answers, where they are more likely to encounter content produced by people who have no interest in equipping them with the information and skills they need to navigate the world. In this age of digital exposure and misinformation, librarians play a more vital role than ever. We should trust them to do their jobs." Alison Hicks on the need to resist the growing pressure on British schools to censor their libraries.
Phoebe Weston meets the volunteers who are restoring ancient hedges.
Bob Fischer talks to Devan Stanfield (Kay Harker) 40 years after the BBC production of The Box of Delights: "I’d worked on television before. I’d done two shows – John Wyndham’s Chocky and Nina Bawden’s The Robbers – so I’d been on set with some very good actors. But I’d never been in a lead role, and I’d never done anything particularly intense. Most of my scenes had been opposite other kids. So that moment on the platform, where I’m face-to-face with Patrick Troughton, really close up, and he switched it on… yeah. I didn’t really have to act."
"A draw or two in the next two series could well go a long way to determining the overarching success or failure of the Bazball project. Time, then, for Stokes to rethink when it comes to the draw and embrace the grey in an increasingly black and white world." James Wallace defends the draw in cricket.
There must have been a time when arguing that Die Hard is a Christmas film, or that The Muppet Christmas Carol is the best filmed version of the book, was novel and interesting. That time ended some years ago.
But there is one character in John Masefield's The Box of Delights, a book that, like A Christmas Carol, encompasses the Christmas and pagan sides of the festival, who would certainly agree about Die Hard.
She is Maria Jones, who complains:
"Christmas ought to be brought up to date. It ought to have gangsters and aeroplanes, and a lot of automatic pistols."
I took that quote from a good essay on The Box of Delights by Bob Fischer. In particular, he argues convincingly that if you read the first book about Kay Harker, The Midnight Folk, and then read the full original text of The Box of Delights, then the revelation that it was all a dream does not come as a great surprise.
A word too for the BBC radio adaptation of The Box of Delight that won my heart in the 1960s.
Josh Self says the rise of Reform could consume Kemi Badenoch and then the Conservative Party: "As Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch has the privilege of interrogating the prime minister every Wednesday afternoon. And yet Farage can probably corral more support with a single TikTok (addressed to his one million followers) than Badenoch with her six scattergun PMQs. The bottom line is this: even before the English council elections, when Reform could evince serious strides, Farage is a far more visible (and effective) critic of the Labour government than Badenoch, the de jure opposition chief."
"Important issues are being obscured by the swirl of errors, confusions, and hyperbole which has reappeared around UK freeports and ‘charter cities’ or ‘states within a state’ – particularly on social media but also crossing over into the traditional media. Dispersing this fog is difficult because the claims made are convoluted, fragmented, hard to pin down, and difficult to disentangle from the occasional truth they contain." Chris Grey on the debate about freeports.
Happy birthday to Joan Armatrading, who has enjoyed an extraordinary, pioneering career as a Black British woman singer-songwriter. She recently talked to the Guardian.
Francis Young opens The Box of Delights by Philip W. Errington: "To this day, the Bishop of Tatchester’s rush to find his mitre and ensure that Tatchester Cathedral celebrates its 1000th Christmas is my iconic image of Midnight Mass, as the carol ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ fills Tewkesbury Abbey (the real Tatchester). It was not until years later, as a young teenager, that I read the novel by John Masefield on which the adaptation was based, and then I found an even richer source of fantasy and magic."
The Opinionated Reader enjoys Gloucestershire Folk Tales by Anthony Nanson: "Sky-ships are flying over Bristol, a pious nun becomes the innocent prey to a heathen, a mysterious woman haunts a village, requiring fresh flowers on her grave."
John Masefield's The Box of Delights is many things, and one of them is a crime novel.
Shedunnit, an excellent podcast on women crime writers, has made a previously subscriber-only episode available to everyone. It looks at The Box of Delights as crime fiction.
Kay Harker, after all, is trying to report a nasty case of scrobbling, but like many amateur detectives in fiction, he finds that the police don't take him seriously.
The podcast emphasises that The Box of Delights is a long book - there's a lot in it that didn't make it into the television adaptation.
And it suggests that the themes of snow and Christmas were an influence on C.S. Lewis and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
The word 'Scrobbling' was coined by Masefield. A post on Tyger Tale reminds us that:
One of the many pleasures of reading classic Christmas books is the way they open a window into the past in an especially vivid way. More than just present another idealised vision of Victorian festivities, the best of them can highlight the small details and forgotten language of Christmas’s past. As Piers Torday’s delightful stage adaptation reminded me, few books do this more effectively than John Masefield’s The Box of Delights.
Kim Leadbeater explains why she tabled her bill on assisted dying: "“It’s been an extremely busy process, and it has been very emotional, because I’m spending probably 90 per cent of my time talking about death. That can be very emotionally draining. I’m hearing really harrowing stories from families who have lost loved ones under really traumatic circumstances, and that’s been really hard."
Young people need liberal listening, not authoritarian threats, argues Jack Nicholls: "Our approach, the approach we should push unrelentingly whenever we get a chance in any local legislature, should be about helping young people into the work or education situation that helps them develop, not by threatening them until they comply for the convenience of others."
"For the government’s missions to succeed, they require societal support. An effective government communications strategy is required to implement the level of change necessary to meet our energy and climate targets," says John Russell.
Giles Fraser takes to his pulpit: "I love the Church of England. I love its liturgy, I love its glorious parish churches, I love its lack of ideological fervour, I love the gentle and inclusive way that it is porous to those outside of the Church, I love the inheritance of faith that it preserves. But things have not been well with the Church for quite some time, and the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury is a fork in the road. Either it grasps this opportunity for radical reform, or it will continue its slide - if not vertiginous collapse - into irrelevance."
Radio Times catches up with Devin Stanfield, once the young star of The Box of Delights: "I don't think child stardom is a particularly healthy thing. In the end it probably did me more good than harm, but it could definitely be quite a difficult thing to live with to be recognised not just at school but in the street."
Athena Stavrou offers a guide to the best Christmas sandwiches.
Look what I've found on YouTube. This radio adaptation of The Box of Delights was first broadcast at Christmas 1966 and repeated in the same season in 1968 and 1969.
It may have been through the 1966 broadcast, but is more likely to have been through the 1968 one, that the story won my heart. Who can resist a healthy blend of the Christian and the pagan? I know I was enthralled by it as a little boy.
Listening to the broadcast today, it's slow to get going. But when the story picks up, the production makes good use of sound and the proper music is used.
Cole Hawlings is Cyril Shaps and the young Kay Harker is Patricia Hayes. Caroline Louisa is played by Carol Marsh, whose first film role was Rose in Brighton Rock, and there's even a small part for Stanley Unwin.
"There is a strained cosiness to modern Christmas, but beneath the lights and mulled wine lurks the black pause of the year’s end. It is a time for barred doors and ghost stories. John Masefield understood these things." Alexander Poots on The Box of Delights and Deep England.
Samantha Booth reveals that investors are making millions from the 'bankrupt' public SEND (Special educational needs and disability) system.
"Since 2010, the supply of new trainee teachers compared with need has slowed to a trickle while the rate at which teachers are leaving the profession has continued to grow, leaving schools stuck in a vicious cycle of low recruitment and high attrition." Matilda Martin investigates why England is losing its teachers and how we can get them back.
James Bloodworth argues that Jordan Peterson and the wider populist right aren't anti-elitists: "They simply have their own pretensions to elite status and resent the fact that they aren’t treated with the prestige and reverence they believe they are entitled to.
Rachel Garratt examines how Captain Ian Fraser used his position as an MP and disabled veteran to campaign for radio access for blind people.
"Above all, I love the badass nuns who vandalise the Nazis’ cars – it’s so nice to see the Catholic church bending the rules positively for a change." Noo Saro-Wiwa sees The Sound of Music as an edgy, progressive film.
No sooner does Lord Bonkers divine a social problem than be proposes a solution. Here, that solution is characteristically robust. So welcome to another week with the old boy.
'Scrobbled', it turns out, was coined by John Masefield in his The Midnight Folk. It's well known from his later book The Box of Delights, but I had wondered if it was older than that. The word has a Scandinavian flavour.
Monday
I find myself increasingly worried about right-wing comment journalists, who can only be described as unhappy, unskilled and unmoored. Flabby chested public-school types to a man, their eyes hollow from think-tank reports and self-abuse, what they need is fresh air, exercise and some good, old fashioned hard work.
As we can supply all three of these here on my estate, I have determined to act. With the help of Freddie and Fiona, I have drawn up a list of recruits for my ‘Great Rutland National Service’.
The next step is to have them scrobbled as they leave their favourite fashionable restaurants and brought here in an unmarked charabanc. I have no doubt that a regime of farm work, unarmed combat and cold showers will make them happy and skilled in no time.
As to being moored, I shall ensure that they are securely tied up at night.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
There has been no news of the actor Julian Sands since he disappeared last month while walking in the San Gabriel Mountains in California. It seems we have to fear the worst.
Late last year, the Guardian published a piece on the making of The Box of Delights. In it the director of the series, Renny Rye, recalled:
Julian Sands also loved the story and wanted to be involved, even though he’d just finished The Killing Fields and I’d already cast most of the parts. He just has one line as a Greek soldier.
Devin Stanfield, who played Kay Harker, was also interviewed:
I got on well with the adult cast. Pat Troughton was charming, kind and patient. I remember waiting with him for hours until we were needed on a night shoot with hundreds of extras in the grounds of Hereford Cathedral. We had an in-depth discussion about how his being impaled with a lightning rod was achieved in The Omen.
Stratford Johns's Inspector Barlow began life in Z Cars in 1962. The critics all say that this series had such an impact because, until then, police drama on television had meant Dixon of Dock Green, which presented a laughably cosy picture of British policing.
Not many episodes of Dixon survive - certainly, few have made their way on to YouTube - but I thought I would watch one of them so I could form my own judgement.
So I chose Wasteland from 1970 and was pleasantly surprised.
Yes, you have to set aside the fact that Jack Warner was by then visibly a couple of decades past retirement age. And even Dixon's son-in-law Andy Crawford, played by Peter Byrne, must have been disappointed not to have made it past Detective Sergeant at his age.
But get past that and there's nothing cosy about it.
Dixon's opening monologue, the description of the missing police officer's dream by his wife and, above all, the vast derelict landscape in which it is set give Wasteland an eerie quality.
And, perhaps because the show was developed by the Labour-supporting Ted Willis, the script is on the side of the ordinary constable rather than the higher ranks - note the disparaging comment about the police medical service.
Among the cast we find - long before Inspector Morse or The Box of Delights - James Grout as Chief Inspector Prescott. His boss, Chief Superintendent Bannister, is played by Arnold Peters, who was the voice of Jack Wooley on The Archers for many years.
You may also recognise the mother of the little boy who collects the numbers of police cars. She is Anna Karen, better known as Olive from On the Buses.
But the real star of the show is that landscape. I believe it was filmed on the Isle of Dogs and that the 'wasteland' is the Mudchute, which is now a park with an urban farm and its own station on the Docklands Light Railway.
Some people on Twitter say they recognise the vast industrial building at the start of the episode from Doctor Who and Blake's 7. Where do television companies find to film now that Docklands has been redeveloped? These derelict riverside locations were a favourite of Gideon and The Sweeney too.
So that's The Wasteland for you - a warning not to accept the word of critics uncritically.
Neal Lawson believes there’s no point Labour winning the next election unless it acts to dismantle our toxic electoral system.
"Truss was the product, not the source, of her party’s problems. She embodied a Conservatism that embraced creative destruction, that was dismissive of caution and contemptuous of institutions, that prized ideology over experience and regarded opposing voices as heresies to be burned out; a Conservatism that had ceded power to irresponsible think-tanks, contrarian newspaper columnists and a dwindling party membership that nobody has elected." Robert Saunders shows that the forces that gave it Liz Truss still dominate the Conservative Party.
Sebastian Stroud says that botany degrees are disappearing from British universities just when the world needs botanists most.
"Kay’s great-grandfather, Captain Harker, in whose house Kay lives, lost some treasure - 'church ornaments, images, lamps, candlesticks, reliquaries, chalices and crosses of gold, silver and precious stones' - entrusted to his care by the archbishop of a South American port during the revolutions and uprisings of 1811. The loss haunted the captain until his death, a haunting that also ruined the happiness of his wife and son. Now others more avaricious than Kay are on the treasure's trail. Can he find it before they do? It is only at the end that you realize the book is about the restoration of more than one kind of treasure." Mathew Lyons on The Midnight Folk, John Masefield's prequel to The Box of Delights
Eleanor Parker finds that genteel Buckinghamshire is really wild border country.
Renny Rye, who directed The Box of Delights, and Devin Stanfield, who played Kay Harker, are interviewed for a Guardian piece on the making of this children's classic.
Here is a little of what they have to say.
Renny Rye
I remember reading the script for the first episode, which includes Punch and Judy man Cole Hawlings riding into a painting and Kay landing in a wolf-besieged Roman encampment on a flying pony, and thinking, "OK, how do we do that?"
These things just weren’t possible in those days, but the technology was changing daily and the BBC was building an electronics workshop we were allowed to use. I ended up spending almost six months in there.
Not all the solutions were hi-tech and they included pantomime-style costumes and traditional animation. I knew that children’s imaginations would paper over the cracks. We could only afford four-frame animation, which gave a sort of slow-mo quality, but it’s quite dreamlike, which suited the narrative.
Devin Stanfield
The other children in the cast would turn up for a week’s shooting and then disappear again, whereas I was stuck in hotel rooms with my chaperone for months at a time. But I got on well with the adult cast. Pat Troughton was charming, kind and patient.
I remember waiting with him for hours until we were needed on a night shoot with hundreds of extras in the grounds of Hereford Cathedral. We had an in-depth discussion about how his being impaled with a lightning rod was achieved in The Omen.
I recently treated myself to the edition of The Box of Delights you can see above. Quentin Blake is a national treasure, but I'm not convinced that his style suits the story.
But it's the text I bought it for and this edition was compiled from John Masefield's original manuscript. It includes passages that were omitted in error and others left out to make room for the illustrations,
Now we're well into Advent it's high time I posted the opening titles of The Box of Delights.
Job done.
In order to qualify as a regular reader of Liberal England, you have to know that the cottage where the band Traffic got it together in the country in 1967 was near the Berkshire village of Aston Tirrold.
Years ago, I got excited because John Masefield's first book about Kay Harker sees him setting out to discover what became of a fortune stolen from his great grandfather Aston Tirrold Harker.
But Masefield's connection with the village is closer than that. The Astons website reveals that he lived at Lollington Farm, Aston Tirrold, between 1914 and 1917.
And Battlelines Redrawn, a website devoted to war artists, has a quote from Masefield (though it doesn't say where it is taken from):
In the first week of July, 1914, I was in an old house in Berkshire, a house built eight centuries ago before by the monks as a place of rest and contemplation and beauty.
I had never seen England so beautiful as then, and a little company of lovely friends was there. Rupert Brooke was one of them, and we read poems in that old haunt of beauty, and wandered on the Downs.
I remember saying that the Austro-Serbian business might cause a European War, in which we might be involved, but the others did not think this likely; they laughed.
Lollington Farm and Traffic's cottage aren't next door to each other, but both are out of the village on its southern side.
There has been only one episode so far, but I'm pleased to see a podcast devoted to John Mansfield's The Box of Delights and the 1984 BBC adaption of it in particular.
It carries interviews with some of the cast members from the 1984 BBC television adaptation. One of them is with Geoffrey Larder, who played Foxy-Faced Charles.
In it he reveals that he took the part after Alan Rickman had turned it down.
