John Masefield

(This feature first published in Fortean Times No 452, dated Christmas 2024)

In 1984, the BBC’s ambitious adaptation of The Box of Delights became a highlight of the Christmas TV schedules. To celebrate, a special anniversary Blu-ray release includes Time and Tide, a new feature-length documentary from film-maker CHRIS CHAPMAN. Taking his rightful place at the heart of it? The elusive DEVIN STANFIELD, four decades on from his spellbinding central performance as intrepid schoolboy Kay Harker. Without a toss to his kick, BOB FISCHER scrobbles them both

“I first watched The Box of Delights when I was four or five years old,” says Chris Chapman. “We had it on VHS, taped from the telly. It was a programme my mum and dad adored, and they wanted to introduce me to it. My dad loved it because he was a train buff and it had so many shots of the Severn Valley railway line! And my mum loved it for the traditional British folklore and fairy tales it features.

“Whereas I just found it completely magical. I genuinely think it’s the BBC’s greatest-ever endeavour. In terms of every department going full steam, every cylinder, it’s the most ambitious series they ever made. It had a budget of a million pounds, and a director in Renny Rye who was hungry and wanted to show that he should be making feature films. He’d been making short inserts for Blue Peter, but suddenly he had a million quid to make an epic fantasy drama, and he just went for it.”

Forty years after The Box of Delights became one of the highlights of the 1984 Christmas TV schedules, the anniversary is being celebrated with a sumptuous new Blu-ray release. The set includes Time and Tide, Chris’ staggeringly ambitious new feature-length documentary. Running to 1 hour 40 minutes, it revisits key locations from the series as well as interviewing almost the entire surviving cast and crew. And the genuine coup? Devin Stanfield is all over it. He’s even back on the Severn Valley railway line with Renny Rye. In 1984, the twelve-year-old Devin assumed the lead role of Kay Harker, the intrepid schoolboy whose encounter with the titular box leads to a world of dangerous magic. In the intervening decades, however, he has been decidedly reluctant to discuss his memories of the show.

“I’ve been very media shy for the last forty years,” confirms Devin. “I’ve turned down almost every request for contact or interviews, I just don’t have any interest in doing that kind of thing. So when Chris e-mailed me about his documentary, I was going to say no. I did an interview with Renny twenty years ago for the DVD release, and I didn’t know if I had much to add to that.

“But as soon as Chris said he wanted to revisit the locations, and that Renny would be there, I was like ‘What? I basically get to stay in a hotel for the weekend and go on the piss with Renny? Yeah alright, I’ll do that!’ [Laughs] So I’ve had a bit of a mental block about it all, but it’s been a healthy, cathartic process to go back to it after forty years. I can look at it with fresh eyes now and be a little less reactionary. It’s been great fun.”

For Chris Chapman, the participation of the show’s lead actor and director were deal-breakers in the production of Time and Tide.

“I wanted Devin and Renny at the heart of the documentary,” nods Chris. “Because it really is their story. For a twelve-year-old like Devin to be thrown into a rollercoaster like that, a full year of production… it was basically like he’d been cast as Harry Potter. And I think genuinely, if he’d been born a bit later, he’d have been in the running for that. He’s a real unsung talent, and he gives a great performance in The Box of Delights.”

Let’s go back to 1984. For children of a certain age, The Box of Delights felt like the perfect conclusion to a year riddled with folkloric strangeness, a time when British playgrounds were dominated by spirited re-enactments of Robin of Sherwood and the Fighting Fantasy books. Was Devin himself gleefully immersed in all this splendiferous weirdness? Was The Box of Delights a book he would have read at the time?

“I hadn’t read it, but there was a copy in the house,” he recalls. “So when I heard I was going to the audition, I managed to read about three quarters of it. I got through a good chunk of it on the way, on the train with my mum! That stood me in good stead. Renny Rye did the interview himself, and I proceeded to ask him a ton of questions that suddenly started dawning on me. ‘How are you doing to do this on a children’s show?’ Because there’s far more fantasy in the book than in the TV version, some really crazy stuff going on. I just bombarded him with questions, and I guess it was that curiosity that attracted him. Renny says the reason he cast me is because I reminded him of himself as a boy: confident and curious. So reading the book did me a favour, really.

“And to answer your question about fantasy, I had read Lord of the Rings shortly before my audition. So although I didn’t fully understand what an incredible and significant talent Robert Stephens was, I did know him as Aragorn from the BBC radio adaptation. And to me, that was the best thing on Earth! As much as I love Viggo Mortensen’s performance in the films, for me Aragorn’s voice will always be Robert Stephens.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, Stephens had been a theatrical powerhouse, widely regarded as the heir to Laurence Olivier’s mantle. By the 1980s his career had faltered, but – as central villain Abner Brown – he brings a delicuously dark frisson to The Box of Delights. It’s a performance that crackles with flamboyant malevolence.

“With Robert Stephens, I think what you see is just ultimate commitment,” agrees Chris Chapman. “We spoke to Patricia Quinn for the documentary. She played Sylvia Daisy Pouncer, but she was also living with Robert at the time. They later married, and she became Lady Stephens. She told us that Robert had listened to The Box of Delights on the radio in the 1940s, with his dad, and he’d loved it. So when the BBC approached him, he said that he would pay them to play Abner Brown.

“And the documentary explores that commitment. When Abner falls into the sluice gates at the end of the series, it’s really Robert Stephens doing it! And when he goes under the water in slow motion, that’s genuine canal water pouring into his mouth.”

It’s a memory that makes Devin Stanfield chuckle with relish.

“The fact that he swam a victory lap is my favourite part of that story!” he laughs. “The stuntman jumped into the canal once, but Renny didn’t get the shot he wanted so he asked for a second take. The stuntman kicked off and said he wasn’t going in there again – it was too cold and too dangerous to do it twice. So Robert Stephens, who was a very strong swimmer and had almost certainly been at the vodka by that point, said ‘Fuck that, I’ll do it’. And he did! And then, just to rub salt into the wounds of the embarrassed and annoyed stuntman, he proceeded to swim a couple of lengths of the canal just to prove how easy it was.”

The light to Stephens’ shade, meanwhile, is provided by Patrick Troughton. Playing enigmatic Punch and Judy man Cole Hawlings, the erstwhile Second Doctor becomes the custodian of the Box of Delights and a seasoned practitioner of “old magic”.

“I think one of the things people have always admired about The Box of Delights is the presence of those veteran performers,” says Chris. “There’s a great bit in the documentary when Devin is talking about being opposite Patrick on the railway platform in Episode One, and he says the hairs on his arms were standing on end. He said he could smell Patrick’s breath – and not in a bad way! It was just a really intimate and scary moment.”

“I’d worked on television before,” remembers Devin. “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.

“I was surrounded by very giving, very skilled and very experienced actors. They fed me what I needed and I was naive and innocent enough to respond naturally. So yes, Patrick was a very memorable person to act opposite. I would describe his performance as mesmeric. There was almost a heat coming off him. He embodied the role.”

For a generation of kids, The Box of Delights has become synonymous with the unique feel of Christmas in the 1980s, a period when resolutely analogue delights began to be superseded by the alluring charms of the digital world. The children of 1984 were just as likely to covet a ZX Spectrum as a Hornby train set, and the series captures that moment perfectly, swathing ancient folkloric weirdness in a raft of swanky digital effects. For Chris Chapman, this balance between old and new magic is struck perfectly, with Renny Rye’s insistence on ambitious location work being an integral part of the mix.

“We think about the budget being spent on electronic effects and animation,” says Chris. “But one of the series’ great virtues is how much Renny filmed on location. When they filmed on a steam train, it was a real steam train. And when he said ‘We want lots of snow,’ then – for the most part – they didn’t fake it. He said ‘Where are we most likely to get snow in February?’ And the answer was just outside Aberdeen. When they got there, there was far more snow than they bargained for, but for the viewers it’s just beautiful. That snow is so deep. It was hell for the crew, and we dwell quite a lot on just how cold it was, but they all knew it was worth it. Even now, whenever I wonder whether it will snow at Christmas, those scenes from The Box of Delights are my ideal vision of how it should look.”

It might have been hell for the crew, but surely this kind of stuff must have been terrific fun for the kids on set? Devin Stanfield laughs heartily at the suggestion.

“They were hoping for six inches of snow, a nice dusting to make everything look pretty, but they got six feet!” he recalls. “The location vans couldn’t get up there, the equipment got stuck and they couldn’t reach half the locations they’d scouted. So we shot most of those scenes in the grounds of our hotel. The only other location I remember visiting was for the ‘scrobbling’ scene, literally waist-deep in snow in a ditch. I just remember being bitterly, bitterly cold. And then going back to some crappy location bus with diesel heaters, trying to get my hands warm enough to hold a pen and do some schoolwork!”

As well assembling 25 assorted cast and crew members (“I got carried away!” he grins), Chris’ documentary also uncovers some key props from the original filming.

“The most remarkable thing happened when I contacted the show’s puppeteer,” says Chris. “He’s a chap called Jonathan Styles, and he was the real Punch and Judy man in The Box of Delights. I contacted him hoping we’d get a nice interview, but what I didn’t expect was that he’d still have the full Punch and Judy set from the show! He brought out the actual Mr Punch puppet from the title sequence. Mr Punch, the Devil and the Policeman have all survived, and he was able to operate them all for us, and still do the voices. There are couple of other artefacts that might pop up throughout the course of the film, too. Things that I didn’t expect to survive…”

Come on Chris, let’s do a single spoiler here. Read this and weep, misty-eyed children of 1984: forty years on, Kay Harker is still the steward of the original Box of Delights.

“I have one of them!” confirms Devin Stanfield. “Chris apparently asked around the BBC, and everyone was of the opinion that it had simply gone missing. But there’s no mystery – at the wrap party, they just gave me the box that I’d been carrying around for most of the shoot. It’s been sat on my mother’s shelf gathering dust for the last forty years, only occasionally being taken down to show the kids. At the last minute, Chris said ‘Can you bring it?’ And I said ‘I’ll have to drive down to my mother’s and get it…’.”

Both men speak further about their fondness for the show and the gargantuan effort that went into its production. Chris splendidly describes the series’ spectacular final episode – broadcast on Christmas Eve 1984 – as “the Apocalypse Now of children’s television”. Devin is keen to stress the vital contribution of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s Roger Limb, who composed the show’s atmospheric score. “He’s the unsung hero,” he says. “Whenever the special effects fail, Roger Limb picks up the running.”

But for Devin, the fame afforded to him by The Box of Delights was a double-edged sword. Tellingly, the show marks his final performance as an actor.

“I was bullied mercilessly for the rest of my school career,” he says. “I grew up in Eastbourne, so it was small town syndrome. I was very recognisable. Now, people come up and say ‘My child wants to be an actor, what advice what you give them?’ And I generally say ‘Don’t’. I don’t know that it’s necessarily a very healthy thing – it gives you unrealistic expectations of what life will be. And I think in my case, it radically altered how I turned out to be. I think I made the best of it: I’ve ended up working in film and TV production, and I think that was because it dawned on me that the people making all the decisions were the senior producers, the floor managers and the directors. The actors were all sat in caravans, being hauled out for five minutes then sitting on their arses for three hours.

“But I don’t have any issues with having done it. I’m proud of it. It was wildly ambitious and groundbreaking for any piece of TV, but for a children’s show it was outrageous. God, the sheer ambition of it all. But for me, it’s something that I did in my childhood. It’s not part of my life now and I’m not that person – I just want to get on with my life. As a kid, I had to draw quite a firm line under it and say ‘I’m not going to be an actor, I’m going to move on, finish my education and find my own path’.”

For the show’s fans, however, the show’s appeal is undiminished. It’s not just an evocative and ambitious adaptation of John Masefield’s original novel, it’s a direct route to childhood Christmases, to the impossible excitement of unopened presents and the clink of glasses raised by fondly-remembered loved ones.

“I still love it,” nods Chris Chapman. “My mum and dad aren’t with us any more, but it’s my way of communing with them. When I watch it now, I feel a connection to them through The Box of Delights. It’s a very profound love”.

And let’s give heartfelt thanks to Devin Stanfield too – for both his original performance as Kay Harker, and for stepping back into the public arena for what he insists will be the final time.

“This will be the last interview, I think,” he smiles. “I’m going back into hiding now! I’ve had my little bit of the limelight, and that’s enough for one lifetime.”

The Box of Delights blu-ray is out now.

(1984 photographs copyright of BBC, 2024 photographs copyright of Chris Chapman)

Why not take out a subscription to Fortean Times? “The World’s Weirdest News” is available here…

https://subscribe.forteantimes.com/