The Box of Delights

The Box of Delights is a BBC Television adaptation of John Masefield's 1935 children's fantasy novel The Box of Delights starring Devin Stanfield, Patrick Troughton and Robert Stephens. It was broadcast on BBC1 between 21 November and 24 December 1984. The series was adapted from Masefield's novel by Alan Seymour, directed by Renny Rye and produced by Paul Stone. The series is a fantasy adventure about a schoolboy who is entrusted with a magical box which allows him to time travel and shapeshift to protect the box from an evil magician. An innovative mixture of live action and animation, the production made extensive use of the Quantel Paintbox and chroma key effects. The series cost £1 million to make in 1984 (£ in ), the most expensive children's series the BBC had made to that date, but it was widely acclaimed and won a number of BAFTA and RTS awards, in particular for its special effects. Production John Masefield was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom between 1930 and his death in 1967, but alongside his poetry he also wrote books for children. The Box of Delights: or When the Wolves Were Running, published in 1935, was the sequel to his 1927 book The Midnight Folk. Masefield's novel had been adapted by the BBC for radio several times; a six-part adaptation, with a script by Robert Holland and John Keir Cross, was produced three times as part of its Children's Hour with different casts in 1943, 1948 and 1955. A new radio adaptation by John Keir Cross had been produced for Saturday Night Theatre in 1966, then remade with a new cast in 1977. Producer Paul Stone had a longstanding ambition to create "the ultimate in children's drama" after discovering Masefield's 1935 novel The Box of Delights in the 1970s. Stone told Books for Keeps: "as soon as I read it I wanted to make it for television. It's an amazing and singular mixture of adventure story and poetic myth and the writing is packed with visual imagery...television is uniquely able to translate those qualities from one medium to another".