Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

The Box of Delights

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In this episode we discussed The Box of Delights BBC TV series from 1984, based on the 1935 novel by John Masefield.

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at makiyamazaki.com. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and their band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find her work at behance.net/lettydraws

Many thanks to our guest this episode, Willow!

Transcript

Adam: Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and otherwise unsettling children’s books, films and TV. I’m Adam Whybray, your other host is Ren Wednesday and today’s a very special Christmas episode, looking at the 1985 BBC children’s’ classic The Box of Delights. So wrap up warm and enjoy!

(Theme tune from The Box of Delights turns into the show theme tune)

Ren: Hello, Adam!

Adam: Hello!

Ren: And hello Willow, my one and only sibling!

Willow: Hey there! It’s very nice to be here, although I’d be lying if I didn’t say I had a bit of a case of the phantods about it.

Ren: Ahaha, I was about to ask, you beat me too it!

Willow: It has given me the phantods, just a bit. And that’s a piece of the excellent 1930s slang, slangage, from our piece today.

Ren: The Box of Delights! The TV series from 1984, based on the novel by John Masefield published in 1935. And we have Willow here today because this is something we both grew up watching every Christmas.

Willow: On recorded VHS, if I remember correctly? I don’t think they were showing it every Christmas on the TV.

Adam: It did get an official VHS release. Can you remember the box? Did it just have ‘Box of Delights’ scrawled on it in black marker pen.

Ren: I don’t have any associated 90s advert memories associated with it.

Adam: But this is the BBC! You wouldn’t have got 90s adverts on the BBC.

Willow: Maybe we used to rent it then, maybe we went down to the video rental store.

Ren: I don’t know, it was something very retro, either way.

Adam: What was the video rental store your parents used to live near, it was great!

Ren: Oh, The Film Shop.

Willow: It was very much the Black Books of video rental.

Ren: Absolutely, vast selection of world cinema and a few blockbuster in the corner.

Adam: Can you remember what your most commonly borrowed films from it were?

Willow: Wind in the Willows. The live action Wind in the Willows. That’s one of the films I remember watching most often with you.

Ren: I did borrow Withnail and I maybe four times from that shop, until they were eventually like: ‘You could just buy this’.

Willow: Other films we enjoyed as children together, The Wind in the Willows, The Box of Delights, and, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, The Stupids. Which is not one I’ll be revisiting.

Ren: Oh God.

Adam: What’s The Stupids?

Ren: Ummm…. well…

Adam: We’ve got to the secret shame section of the podcast early this week!

Ren: I know! All it took was bringing my sibling on to really accelerate that process. It was a very bad ‘90s film about a family who were very stupid. And did lots of daft things.

Willow: And they got embroiled in an adventure by wildly misinterpreting everything that happened.

Ren: And there was a song in it that I still get in my head approximately once a week called ‘I’m my own grandpa’.

Adam: What??

Willow: Well precisely Adam, you’ve really hit the nail on the head there.

Ren: But yes, Box of Delights, we watched this when we were children. How about you Adam, did you watch this as a child?

Adam: My mum claims I did, but I don’t remember watching it. What I do remember is my grandad reading me parts of the book. But I do remember the term scrobbling, which was a common playful threat of my childhood.

And I never really knew what it meant. I sort of imagined it as a combination of tickling and… being assaulted, I guess? Really violent tickling.

Willow: Although in context it does seem to just mean kidnapping. Although perhaps a tad more whimsical.

Adam: A whimsical kidnapping. I don’t know if it has to involve the bag over the head?

Ren: It does seem important.

Willow: The magical flying car is also possibly important.

Adam: Can you scrobble without a flying car?

Willow: Was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang a film about scrobbling?

Adam: Should the Childcatcher actually be called the Childscrobbler instead?

Willow: Oh, I think so!

Adam: So I remember some of the images, like rat, and some of the characters, but only in this very vague nebulous way.

Ren: Okay. I’ll give a sense of the plot. The Box of Delights itself is a magical item, that can make people go small, and can make people go swift, among other magical properties.

The owner of the box is Cole Hawlings, a Punch and Judy man who is also the creator of an elixir of life that has kept him alive for the past 700 years. But as our story begins, a villain named Abner Brown, posing as a reverend, has his eyes on the box and the elixir and so the old Punch and Judy man entrusts it to a schoolboy, our protagonist, Kay Harker.

Willow: I mean, I know that Kay is technically the protagonist, but I really feel like Maria ‘I don’t get afraid’ Jones is probably the true star of the story.

Adam: Well I thought you two whippersnappers would like creature of disorder Maria! How is it pronounced?

Ren: Mar-iah.

Adam: Maria the Pariah.

Willow: Maria ‘I don’t get afraid’ Jones. She’s great.

Ren: So I have a section in my notes called ‘Maria is the best’. She’s Kay’s cousin. His cousins have been invited to stay for Christmas.

Willow: ‘’The blessed Joneses’

Ren: And Maria is the adventuring rebellious tomboy of the cousins. Who after she’s been introduced says: ‘my idea of a Christmas treat is if a gang of robbers burgled the neighbourhood and we battled it out with revolvers!’

Adam: And this isn’t wholly hypothetical, because she does have revolvers. Shown to be on her person at all times, including within the church.

Ren: She is a gun wielding child.

Willow: And she has an amazing line: ‘Well, I didn’t join their gang. What’s for dinner?’

Ren: We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, but yeah, Maria is a joy, and we’ll come back to her.

The villains, Abner Brown played by Robert Stephens is the head villain, who’s just a wonderfully villainous villain. A bully who’s by turns snarling and smarmy, he poses as the Reverend Bottledale, to be above suspicion. He’s accompanied by his wife, Sylvia Daisy Pouncer, played by Patricia Quinn, who is —

Willow: — in the Rocky Horror Picture Show!

Ren: Oh really, who is she in that?

Willow: She’s the maid with the big hair. Yep. I was excited to learn that. I can see how her particular style of… not overacting, but acting A LOT help her in both of those.

Ren: Yeah, so she’s a drawling vampy kind of woman, who was formerly Kay’s governess.

Willow: If I might quickly say, as a teacher I really enjoy some of her descriptions of children. She describes Kay himself with ‘the utmost detestation and contempt’. Mmm. Some good teacher vibes there.

Adam: Regular coffee room chat.

Willow: The staff room, I can say, is full of detestation.

Ren: This forms a major plot point in that she believes Kay to be such a terrible and imbecilic child that she assures Abner there is no chance that the old Punch and Judy man has given him the box.

Willow: Because Abner reports that according to Pouncer, Kay is an ‘idle muff’.

Adam: Is that like a polymath, when you’re so good at being idle you can do it in four ways at once?

Ren: I believe it is a ‘muff’.

Adam: Not an idlemath.

Ren: Or an idle mutt.

Willow: No, and idle muff. Which I really enjoyed. Do you put your hands in inside to get warm. Is that a muff? What ever kind of muff he is, he’s not very energetic.

Adam: Although in defence of Kay, he’s also not put out of joint very easily. I was thinking about whether this is scary, and it is to a point, but the thing is that none of the children ever seem particularly bothered. Like Maria, how old is she meant to be? 8 maybe?

Ren: No, no, like 12.

Adam: Well, even so, 12. But there’s a whole bit where she’s taken off to this den of ne’er do wells, and doesn’t come back for two days, and all the kids are like ‘eh, she’ll be fine’.

Willow: ‘What’s for dessert?’

I was thinking about this and their imperviousness to everything, and I think it has to do with their unreasonably high levels of pluck.

Adam: I was going to say the casual entitlement of the rich, but okay.

Ren: Yes, they are both posh and plucky and it seems to give them a shell of imperviousness to danger and threat.

Willow:Something about this does feel intensely English. The 1930s setting, and the poshness and pluckiness of the characters. It reminded me of the Mitchell and Webb sketch where they’re listening to a Sunday evening relaxation tape and it says (relaxation tape voice) ‘Exclusive footage of a beefeater being hosed down with cream…’ It’s that English.

Adam: It’s kind of like Enid Blyton without all the hate, which is nice.

Willow: I mean, there’s plenty of classism.

Adam: Well, it’s a very paternal classism.

Willow: Yes, Kay is nothing if not paternally classist. And such a young patriarch at that. As the master of the house, a lot of adults seem to defer to him. Like, ‘Oh, Master Kay you’ll make all the decisions!’ Say two adults who should be looking after them.

Adam: When Master Kay wants his posset, he gets his posset, DAMMIT.

Ren: We’ll come back to the posset.

Willow: We will. At one point he talks down to Ellen, the housekeeper, because she left the house to check on her mother. He doesn’t know that at the time, but he says (angry, scolding) ‘Why did you leave the house, Ellen?’.

Maybe she had to go outside?? Crikey Moses.

Adam: There’s a bit where they’re playing out in the snow, and Ellen asks them to come in, and Kay’s like (fuming) ‘God! The rules and restrictions of this place! Who do you think you are?’

Willow:Leaving the house! Telling us what to do!

Adam: But he is willing to supplicate himself in front of authority, because the police in this are shown to be relentlessly ineffectual. Just absolutely useless, and yet he has a lot of faith in them.

Everytime things go wrong they’re like, ‘Yep, we should probably tell the police’, and then they go to the police and the police do nothing. And next time something goes wrong they’re like: ‘Yep. Go to the police’.

Ren:An actual quote from this policeman: (attempt at West Country accent) ‘Sometimes the law has to put its foot down, and sometimes the law has to shut its eyes’.

Willow: Yes, I found that rather alarming as well.

Adam: And it seems that when the law shuts its eyes is when the crime is seen as ‘ragging’, which is basically if the perpetrators are posh enough, then the crime’s not a crime, it’s just high spirits.

Willow: He was convinced at various times that it was just high spirits either from the people at the RAF base, or the theological college. Both of which I’m sure are full of pranks.

Adam: Pranks such as kidnapping an old man!

Willow: Sorry, I’m going to have to stop you there, it’s scrobbling.

Adam:Sorry, yeah, scrobbling an old man, which I guess technically isn’t on the law books.

Ren: Looking through the dictionary of crimes ’S.. Sc… Scr… Nope, scrobbling’s not there, I’m afraid.’

Willow: He loves to talk about the law, he talks at great length about the law and what it does, and when it does it.

Adam: The law, magic tricks and possets, essentially, is his repertoire.

Willow: Strange pronunciations of words. ‘Hobsession’, ‘Heggs’.

Ren: Aeeeerrrropllane. A big slab of ham and cheese acting.

Adam: Is there any subtle acting in this?

Willow: I believe the Archbishop could be an Archbishop.

Ren: I think the old Punch and Judy man is fairly subtle, does a lot of twinkly eye acting.

Willow: But everyone else is acting to the rafters.

Adam: Very much in pantomime mode. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It seems fitting.

Ren: Yep. So Abner also has two underlings, who are also posing as clergyman. Who are Joe and Foxy-faced Charles. Anyone want to do a ‘haha what?’

Willow: Hahaha what?

Ren: Haha what? That’s his catchphrase. They do most of the dirty work for Abner, including the aforementioned kidnapping, or scrobbling. There’s also a few early appearances from Rat, a human-sized rat who sneaks information for Abner and is rewarded in green cheese.

Adam: I’ve highlighted the first meeting of Rat in the book. Rat apparently first appears in the prequel, well, I saw prequel but Box of Delights is apparently a sequel. It came after John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk and Rat in that is basically a spy for hire, so he’s a mercenary, not necessarily on the side of evil, and Kay is the one that hires him in that first book.

Willow: So they have a pre-existing relationship?

Adam: Yeah, yeah, so he’s quite surprised to see him. Like ‘Oh, Rat, I didn’t think you’d turn against me, but I guess you’ll do anything for the green cheese’. So Rat is a pre-existing character.

Willow: I wonder if Kay had much character development over the two books. Is he plucky and precious over the whole thing?

Adam: Yeah, that would be interesting to see. Well, I’ll read the introduction of Rat, mostly because I want to do a Rat voice, to be honest.

"‘Is that you, Rat?’ Abner asked.

‘Ah, it’s me,’ a surly voice answered, ‘and what’s the good of being me? Up in the attic and down in the cellar, all weathers, all hours, for one who’d sell his mother, if he had one, for what she’d fetch as old bones. And what do I get by it? Bacon fat, you might say, or the green of that cheese the dog won’t eat, or the haggie that made the hens swoon. But I don’t, my Christian friend. I get rheumatics; that, and the dog sickt at me. That’s what.’

‘As a matter of fact, I’ve got some green-looking cheese for you,’ Abner said. ‘Look here.’ There was the scratch of a match; Abner lit a candle-end. Kay found that he could see through a hole in the wall right into the ruin.

There, blinking at the light, was a disreputable Rat whom he had known in the past but had not seen for years. He was now much more disreputable than ever before. Kay had heard that everybody had dropped him, and that he had gone pirating. But there he was again; and a sickening object he looked.

‘Ah,’ Rat said, taking the cheese, which Kay could smell even in that cold weather. ‘And you wouldn’t give me this if you could sell it to a Tourists’ Rest.’

‘You’re right,’ Abner said. ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘I understand you, Abner, and you understand me,’ Rat said. He was eating the cheese with a sort of sideways wrench, while his little beady eyes stared at Abner. ‘That man Joe, you’d better look out for, Abner,’ Rat said. ‘He’s putting in for chief: likewise the “ha-ha, what?” man.’

‘What d’you mean?’ Abner asked.

‘That’s what,’ Rat said. Here he dropped his cheese on the floor; he picked it up and ate it without wiping it. ‘Ah, that’s what,’ he repeated.

‘What’s your report?’ Abner said. ‘Him what you wot of,’ Rat said, ‘is a getting rid of his Dog this evening.’

‘That’s nothing,’ Abner said. ‘A lady friend will take the Dog. There’s many a Dog as I’ve loved more than that one now lies in a watery tomb with a stone round his neck. But some who claim to be friends never take a hint. That’s what…’"

So he goes on.

Ren: Good Rat voice, I enjoyed it.

Willow: Also we learned he did some pirating, like the other pirate rats.

Adam: Yes, which I expect was a bit of autobiographic material from John Masefield —

Willow: — he was a pirate rat?!

Adam: Not exactly, but he did go off sailing when he was just a teenager. He became an apprentice on a boat by 13/14 and went off on voyages as a teenager which is where he started writing poems and collecting sea shanties and tales the sailors would tell.

He had quite the life actually! He was a very busy man. There’s a whole section on Wikipedia about when he started beekeeping. Quite the guy, and was Poet Laureate of the UK from 1930 all the way to 1967, which must be the longest run of Poet Laureate this country’s ever had.

Willow: Do you think they forgot that he was Poet Laureate?

Adam: Yeah, maybe. But that’s one difference between the book and the TV show. You get a few snippets of these poems in the TV show, some characters singing them to themselves, but in the book you get a lot of poems, breaking up the chapters.

It doesn’t often give much rhyme or reason for them, but there are loads of them.

Ren: So the major arc of the story is the villains trying to get their hands on the Box of Delights, not realising that Kay has it. And the sequence of scrobblings, first of the Punch and Judy man himself, then Maria. Kay’s guardian, Caroline Louisa, a Bishop. Lots of choirboys.

Willow: Many clergymen.

Ren: And eventually Kay’s cousin Peter.

Willow: Who we all miss terribly.

Ren: I don’t know why Kay kept inviting Peter on his midnight explorations when there was Maria there.

Willow: It’s a really good question.

Adam: (septical) Hmmm. Maria is a bit of a wild card, you too!

Willow: But Peter’s like a foil for Kay, except he’s exactly the same but a little bit less keen to do stuff, and has a more entertaining selection of words to say.

Adam: Maria did wreck the bishop’s car, I’ll remind you. I don’t know what she was doing driving in the first place. And has been expelled from three schools on three separate occasions.

Ren: The headmistresses still swoon when they hear her name.

Willow: I enjoyed that phrase very much.

Ren: Okay. Maybe Peter is a more sensible adventuring companion, but it would have been more exciting with Maria.

Willow: Can we talk about some of the 1930s slang? As we brought up Peter, Ren, you made a point about something that Peter is trying hard to do.

Ren: Yes, Peter is trying very hard to make ‘the purple pim’ happen. To the extent that when they finally release him from the cell in the flooded dungeon at the end he says ‘well, wasn’t that the purple pim!’. Like alright Peter, we get it.

Willow: Oh you’re back, great. So Kay gets told off at the beginning for saying ‘I haven’t a toss to my kit’ to which Caroline Louise says ‘You know you’re not allowed to use slang!’.

Ren: (extremely drawling voice) ‘Kaayyyyy! You know you’re not allowed to use slang!’

There’s certain phrases from this series that I get stuck in my head. And that is one of them.

Willow: Oh, oh, another thing that’s great about Maria is that calls the police officer ‘a stupid man’. Which is very accurate.

Adam: Yeah, unlike Kay she doesn’t really curtain to authority, it’s fair to say.

Ren: So there’s the purple pin, the aforementioned phantods —

Willow: — which he was given by the sight of the theological college.

Ren: And ‘I haven’t a tosset in my kit!’

Willow: And there’s also some amazing turns of phrase. One of my favourite things about this is some of the turns of phrase. For example Joe is described as ‘hot for mutiny’. Which I would like as a badge.

Ren: Did you two notice the Sylvia Daisy Pouncer and Abner Brown weird endearments scene? They’re talking about their plans and giving each other increasingly strange pet names.

It starts ‘my star-bright Abner!’, then ‘my precious pearl, my blue and yellow sapphire’; ‘my emerald, my ruby!’. Until we get to eventually: ‘my golden idol, my graven image’.

Willow: Also ‘my celestial one’.

Adam: He’s very unctuous, isn’t he?

Willow: They also really like using the possessive for each other: ‘my Pouncer’. Which Foxy-faced Charles takes over when they betray him: ‘you’re my Pouncer now’.

Why can’t she be her own pouncer?!

Adam: Abner, I think is quite insecure as a villain really. I never really understand why he wants the Box of Delights so much. Because mostly it’s just used to make you small or really fast. Apparently it can do more, but we don’t really see it. Maybe it can transport you into a magical wood?

Ren: You can go into the past, and then stay there forever.

Willow: Also a good option.

Adam: I quite like the bit in the penultimate episode where Abner has this moment where he’s like ‘I could just retire’. Like, ‘why am I doing this? Maybe I should just take all of the ridiculous amount of riches I have and retire and not bother about the box’

Willow: (Unctuous Abner voice) ‘My rubies and sapphires!’

Ren: Well, I think he mostly wants the elixir of life, but that’s not actually in the box.

Adam: I think it’s already been drunk, hasn’t it?

Willow: He offers it back to Cole Hawlings in exchange for the elixir of life, but if he’d got the box he might not have got that anyway, because Cole could have just said no.

Adam: And he’s obviously quite scared of Cole, because there’s a bit where Joe challenges him and asks why he hasn’t tortured the information out of him, and Abner’s like ‘You don’t understand, this guy’s an amazing wizard. I’m too scared to do that’, basically. But he’s constantly getting a bit of lip from all his supposed insubordinates.

He conjures up this green boy —

Ren: — My second favourite character

Adam: Who is apparently cursed to sit under a waterfall, but even so this green boy spends all his time being surly and refusing to answer Abner’s questions.

Willow: High quantities of sass. To which he threatens to have him pegged under the waterfall forever.

Ren: snorts

Willow: Which I’m sure has many meanings.

Adam: There goes our listening for kids.

Ren: Willow, bringing the tone down.

Willow: My apologies.

Adam: Don’t worry, I’m sure the iTunes algorithms won’t pick up on it. The heteronormative algorithms!

Ren: It surprised me on rewatching that the boy under the waterfall is only in two short scenes. He made quite a big impression. He’s one of the things I remember most vividly.

Green-skinned and impish, and covered in weeds and water snails, and wearing a kind of skimpy leotard made of leaves.

Adam: He looks like he’s just come out of Derek Jarman’s adaptation of The Tempest, actually.

Willow: And he’s shrunk. When he gets released he gets to grow. And they do the fun thing where he hits his head and they cut from live action into some kind of animation.

Adam: Okay, so, the animations here are a little confusing. This programme was one of the first to extensively use Quantel Paintbox, which was an early digital editing software platform, which was used particulary for television.

It’s shown off a lot here, so you get a lot of frames within frames, and a great deal of effectively blue-screen effects. Which would have been done with travelling mats on film, but here is being done with digital video editing.

So often the characters have a faint sheen around them, or a slight fuzziness. The sometimes don’t feel fully integrated into the landscapes. Which creates a slight odd sense of dislocation, or things being a bit disjointed. Which might add to the dream-like quality. It makes things feel a bit out of joint, and odd. There’s a lot of overlaying of imagery.

Ren: There’s a collage effect, like when Kay goes into the box and meets Herne the Hunter there’s a kind of overlapping paper vignette effect, and then goes into the drawn animation of the forest. I find it quite pleasingly cut-and-pasted of combination of stuff.

Adam: It’s quite scrapbooky, in a way.

Willow: And it feels quite evocative, watching it of this form of animation that also appears in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

Adam: It was the same production company, and also using Quantel Paintbox for the effects.

Willow: There’s definitely a similar feeling between The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and The Box of Delights. I can see why they would have both used it.

Adam: Yeah, there’s a similar struggle, or tension between pagan beliefs and Christina beliefs. The idea that England is a land of old pagan magic that Christianity has built itself upon. I think for CS Lewis, the Christianity always has to be on top. So however evocative some of the more pagan aspects in the Narnia books are, they tend to be obscured by all the ‘Great Aslan is God!’ stuff. Whereas I think Box of Delights allows for more of that old magic to be present, perhaps.

Ren: Yes, and it’s represented in Cole Hawlings, the old Punch and Judy man, who says a couple of times that he has been around since pagan times. And Kay is met by Herne the Hunter when he goes into the box.

Willow: And of course the Archbishop meets Herne the Hunter at the end. But he doesn’t seem too fussed about it. He doesn’t have a crisis of faith or anything.

Ren: No, Herne the Hunter helps them get to the cathedral on time for the midnight mass.

Willow: A beautiful coming together of the pagan and Christian beings, I guess.

Adam: Although sadly in the TV programme you don’t get Herne’s dolphin chariot. There’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between waking life and dreams, and in a way most of the incident in the story is just things going wrong. As in, Cole gets Kay his Box of Delights pretty early on, and then Kay has to look after it. And for most of the running time he manages to keep hold of it. So mostly what happens is that various family members get kidnapped, and Kay seems not nearly as troubled by this as he probably should be.

Willow: He drags Peter all the way along and then they split the party, which is never a good idea.

Adam: And then Peter gets kidnapped. But there’s this bit where he goes back in time, there’s some quite confusing magic lore about how you can use the Box of Delights to go back in time, but you can’t take the Box of Delights with you. So Kay goes back in time to find the original creator of the Box of Delights.

Willow: Who is excellent, in an unnerving way.

Adam: Arnold of Todi. Who is apparently a great philosopher. But has clearly become unstuck in time and is on a strange desert island of the past and his mind has become quite confused with all this shunting back and forth through time.

Willow: He has some quite particular views about English people having tails, that he keeps coming back to.

Adam: Yeah! I don’t know what that was in reference to, if anything.

Willow: I had a little look… there’s some stuff about people in parts of England saying that people in other parts of England had tails. Particularly people slurring the Cornish used to say they were betailed. But maybe they made it up.

Adam: So in the programme this debate over the English having tails leads to a big falling out between Kay and Arnold of Todi, and Arnold zaps Kay with magic lightening, and then Kay is rescued. Actually things remain a bit more amicable in the book, and Arnold comes with Kay back into the 1930s, and they’re both rescued by Herne the Hunter coming in on this dolphin chariot.

So I thought I’d read this bit and the subsequent poem because it’s not in the programme and it’s pretty delightful:

Soon, they were speeding level with the chariot, going swifter and swifter, racing fish against fish, while the woman called to the team and sang to them:

"‘Fin on, leap, skim the foam, Swim the green toppling comb Of blue seas rolling home Under the west wind From Yucatan to Ind. Shear the sea-flowers to stubbles, Crush the blue floor to bubbles, Gallop, forget your troubles, Skimming in gladness The salt sea’s madness. Come, flying fish, come, whales, Come, mermaids with bright scales, Come, gulls that ride on gales, And albatrosses That no gale tosses, Speed with us as we thrust The blue ways none can trust, The green ways without dust, The salt ways foaming; Attend our homing.’"

I thought that was rather lovely and evocative!

Willow: It is. I mean, dolphins aren’t fish, but apart from that it’s a great poem.

Adam: Well, the dolphins shot to the surface beside them.

Willow: Talking about animation, I really enjoyed the playing with size, and picturing some of the sets that they must have made. Giant pieces of rag for Kay to wrap himself in, and a giant step he can pointlessly climb up before remembering that he can fly.

Adam: Big railway ticket.

Ren: He climbs this big step with much effort, and then gets swept off by a broom.

Willow: And then climbs up again and remembers that he can fly to anywhere in the house that he wants.

Adam: Yeah, my mum watching it did say ‘why didn’t he just fly there in the first place?’

Willow: It’s not Cinema Sins! We’re not going to go there.

Adam: So, Ren!

Ren: Yes?

Adam: I hear you can make a posset!

Ren: Indeed I can, Adam!

Willow: (In the same oddly resentful tone that Kay uses) I wish you would.

Ren: Maybe I will. I’m going to go and make my posset.

(Interstitial posset making music plays)

Ren: I am back, with a posset!

Adam: A pocket full of posset.

Willow: I should hope so too, I hope you were faster about it than you were with the door.

Ren: So this is part of the plot where Kay goes to the policeman again, to describe the latest kidnapping he’s witnessed. The inspector goes on at some length about how all he needs is a posset, to settle him down of a night.

Adam: And what, pray tell, is a posset?

Ren: Well. A posset is a beaten egg in warm milk, a spoon of black treacle and some grated nutmeg.

Willow: Wow. It’s got a raw egg in it.

Ren: Yeah. I guess it’s a bit cooked by the milk, but yeah.

Adam: A lukewarm egg.

Willow: What a disgusting idea.

Adam: Well, well, I can’t help but think that the programme was partly funded by the posset board.

Willow: Big Posset. In the pocket of Big Posset.

Adam: (laughs a lot) Sorry, that really tickled me.

Ren: But, I have one here, in a mug, and it’s not bad.

Adam: Wait you already started on it?! I thought we were going to have a big drumroll!

Ren: Oh alright, go on then.

Willow: Pretend you haven’t.

(Willow and Adam make trumpety noises)

Willow: Oh wait, I’m doing Star Wars.

Ren: Thank you! I’m now going to take my first sip of this posset. It’s not bad!

Willow: Yayyyy.

Ren: You can’t taste the egg!

Adam: So it’s not like eggnog then?

Ren: Well maybe, I’ve never had eggnog. It tastes like warm milk with treacle and nutmeg. *

Willow: Is it undoing all that learning you’ve been doing? Because that’s what’s kind of implied by the inspector. Kay has been learning far too much —

Adam: — from books.

Ren: It is making me forget everything I’ve learned from a book.

Willow: Are you losing your hobsession?

Ren: I am, my hobsession is disappearing away into this warm milk egg concoction. And as we alluded to, he asks the servant, Ellen, to make this posset in the most passive aggressive way possible.

Adam: To be fair, maybe the child actors were getting a bit cranky at this point. It might have been a long day of filming.

Ren: That might be it.

Willow: You get to watch a lot of the process of making it in the show, it’s like a how-to.

Adam: I’m surprised it doesn’t come up with ‘You can make this at home, folks!’. It really does feel like that.

Ren: And I finally have. So there you go.

Willow: And all the listeners to this podcast can now make it as well, and have the experience alongside.

Ren: Not the vegan ones, though. Sorry.

Adam: Well, you said that the egg isn’t adding much, and I’m sure that vanilla flavoured soy milk —

Willow: — almond milk would probably be better, maybe oat.

Ren: Mmhmm. So that was Recipe Corner, here on Still Scared.

Adam: Shall we got into Texture of the Week?

Ren: Why not, why not.

(Assorted banging and rattlings)

Willow:Adam:Ren:: Texture… texture….. texture of the weeeeeeek!

Adam: Oh maybe we should have sung it to the tune of a Christmas carol!

(Sings to the song of O Come All You Faithful) ‘Texture O Texture, Texture Texture, Texture O Texture Of The Week’.

Willow: I mean shouldn’t it be to the tune of The First Noelle?

Adam: Oh how do we do that?

(Discordant warbling as we all attempt to do that)

Ren: Yeah. Just like that really! Willow, do you want to go first as you’re the guest.

Willow: I’d love to. I had a couple, can I say two?

Adam: Have two, have two.

Willow: The initial one, which I think is quite a strong obvious contender maybe, is the green cheese.

Adam: Ah well, yeah, I was thinking of that.

Willow: It’s some kind of plasticine they use, it’s very green. The other one I don’t think anyone will have chosen, unless there’s some weird sibling thing going on. But this is where they turn from humans into stags, and they go through this strange malleable drawn state, where they’re not one or the other. And from a texture perspective it was pretty interesting.

Ren: Ah you’ve really got the hang of this, you’re a natural.

Adam: It’s a bit like that bit in Ponyo, the Studio Ghibli film, where Ponyo is transforming in the tunnel, and she’s half fish and half girl and looks really weird and amorphous.

Ren: That’s a good one.

Adam: Well, I was going to say the green cheese too, but also combined with the dribbly drool of Rat, because he’s salivating over this green cheese and it’s all caught in his bristly whiskers and it looks particularly foul. The general texture of Rat, I think. Who looks both bristly and sweaty and stinky, mottled and just generally looks pretty foul.

Ren: It’s a memorable costume and demeanour.

I did also have the green cheese.

Willow: That’s three for three on the green cheese!

Ren: But my backup texture was the scrounger, which Pouncer threatens to put Maria in. We haven’t mentioned it, but they kidnap Maria to see if she’ll join their gang, because they get the whiff of pre-teen rebellion off her. But she doesn’t want to. But the scrounger is what they threaten Maria with: ‘we put you in it, and it has a thing in it that goes round, and round. And presently you come out as a dog biscuit’.

Adam: That’s particularly odd. It’s not dog meat, it’s a dog biscuit. How do they make a body so dry?

Willow: We can only imagine. Scrobbled and scrounged.

Adam: I think generally it’s slightly Roald Dahl-like, some of the language. Very adjective heavy and onomatopoeia.

Willow: And the villains being so intensely villainous is quite Dahl-ian as well.

Adam: Although I will say, Roald Dahl wouldn’t have let Joe and Charles get away with it all!

Ren: Yeah! So I’ll just describe the ending of the series:

Kay works out that Abner’s base of operations is the theological training college, and goes to scope it out with Peter. But then says ‘Oh you wait over there, Peter’, while he takes the Box, so you know he can go small and he’s fine, but Peter gets scrobbled instantly.

Kay sneaks around the college in small form, listening in on Abner. Abner meanwhile pulls an Amontillado on Joe, ‘come and see my dungeons, why don’t you look in here?’

Willow: Not just ‘my dungeons’ (unctuous Abner voice) ‘My precious dungeons!’

Ren: Well, quite. And locks him up.

Sylvia and Foxy-faced Charles realise that Abner was going to double-cross them and decide to take the jewels for themselves.

Willow: They’re also having an affair, it is intimated.

Ren: Abner brings up his waterfall boy to try and find out where the Box of Delights is, and the boy tells him that he will ‘have it under his hand’ that day.

Willow: Which Abner is pig-headed in his determination to interpret metaphorically. Two people say it to him, and he never considers it is not a metaphor.

Ren: Whereas in fact, it is literally under his hand.

Willow: But it’s very tiny!

Ren: Very tiny. So Kay is sneaking around in the upturn of Abner’s trouser.

Willow: Ooh could we mention the demons. I wanted to see if we had a different favourite of the three demons.

Adam: I thought it was just the same demon in slightly different forms! It didn’t occur to me that it was three different demons.

Willow: He summons first the Slave of the Night, and then (Abner voice) ‘Crrrreaaaaaturrrre!’

Ren: And then the last one is (Abner voice) ‘Aaaaaannnnimuusssss’

Willow: Yes, and I highly recommend that if you don’t watch all of the episodes on YouTube, you at least go to the final episode and watch these three pieces of beautiful drawing and admire their creatureliness.

Adam: It all goes a bit end of Fantasia.

Ren: The last episode has most of the horror, I think.

Adam: It’s weird because Abner clearly has lots of demonic powers, or at least demon-summoning powers, but you don’t really see them for a long time. He spends a lot of time not doing any magic at all.

Willow: Very Game of Thrones. They hook you in with all the intrigue and then they’re like ‘Aaanimmuss!’

Ren: So yes, he sends these three demons off to stop the clergymen getting to the cathedral for the midnight service at Tatchester Cathedral. He’s already captured the Bishop. But he’s just making sure.

Willow: I feel like for a demon, eternal creature of dark power, you might feel a little cheated that what you’re doing is stopping some trains from running so that priests can’t come to the service.

Ren: Yeah, well, one of them stops the trains, one of them stops the roads, and one of them makes a snowstorm.

Adam: To stop the skies.

Ren: So he’s definitely delegating.

Willow: (nasal voice of the talking head in the show) ‘But you cannot take life’

Ren: And after consulting his boy under the waterfall, he’s now consulting a disembodied bronze head.

Willow: Played by someone whose name is Nicholas Chagrin. Great name.

Ren: So this bronze talking head with swivelling eyes.

Adam: It looks like it’s been transplanted from a steampunk show!

Willow: Or the film Metropolis maybe.

Ren: Oh yeah! But then disturbingly, he gets annoyed with the head talking back to him, so he puts it upside down where it makes these horrible rasping and rattling noises like it’s choking.

Adam It really does not like being put upside down.

Ren And it’s like (choking voice) ‘Urghh don’t leave me like this!’, but hauntingly, no-one goes back for the head.

Adam Not even Kay!

Ren Not even Kay, who saw Abner do this.

Willow It’s best not to reflect what happens to the head when the whole Abbey floods. Although, hopefully floating the right way up?

Ren We can hope. Unless he suffocated before then. Poor bronze head really gets a rough deal of it.

Willow: If you’re wondering my favourite was Creature in the middle. Long limbs.

Ren They look kind of like Pokemon evolutions of the same creature, maybe.

Adam More Digimon, I think.

Willow You mean Digimon are the champions?

Adam Yeah, I do.

Willow: Excellent.

Ren So Abner goes down to the old Punch and Judy man’s cell, just to taunt him, and says ‘I’ll have the box tonight, see, this waterfall boy told me so’. And then he conjures the waterfall boy again, who takes great delight in telling Abner that actually he had it under his hand, but he didn’t realise it. So hah!

Willow And he puts his thumb on his nose and gives his hand a wiggle.

Ren And in Abner’s despair at having missed his opportunity to get the Box of Delights, he decides to flood the whole basement full of prisoners.

Adam And explode other bits of the castle too!

Willow: Because the bl-l-l-loodhound of the law has turned up. The police have turned up by this point, they’ve finally arrived. Due apparently to Kay’s persistence they eventually decided to come and check Abner out.

Ren So Sylvia and foxy-faced Charles release Joe from his cell, and the Bishop and the clergyboys as well —

Willow — Oh! This is not in any chronological order, but we just mentioned Joe and his first line is (extremely smarmy voice) ‘Snow. I like snow’.

Ren It is amazing how he sneers that line. ‘I like sneww’.

Adam But anyway! They get away with it. There’s no judgement brought down upon their heads.

Ren Sylvia foxy-faced Charles and Joe merrily fly off in their caroplane-aeroplane, dripping in burgled jewels, unpunished for kidnapping many small children.

Willow: But releasing them.

Ren Yes, releasing them at the end. But Joe throws a bag of flour at Abner, from the aeroplane, which hits him on the head and he falls backwards into the flooded basement and, we assume, drowns.

Adam It’s quite a humiliating way for the arch villain to be killed. Bopped on the head by a bag of flour.

Willow From your really not very intelligent ex-lackey. I was interested to learn that The Box of Delights was a U rating. That means that I could show it to my class of 4 and 5 year-olds. I don’t think I will. But I could. You’re not allowed to show PGs in schools, but you can show any Us. And usually Us are more Shaun the Sheep and less ‘Annnimmmussss!’.

Adam So you’re saying, Willow, that you could just splice the sequence with the demons and Abner’s drowning and just show that on repeat and you’d be absolutely fine and no-one could stop you.

Willow: I don’t think I’d be fine. I think I might have to do some discernment as well. I think they would mostly find it boring, and then briefly terrifying. But I love it!

Adam Does it give you Christmassy feelings watching it, or did you just watch it all the time, not necessarily at Christmas?

Ren I think we restricted it to around the Christmas season. It definitely gives me Christmasy feelings, the arrangement of The First Noel by Victor Hely-Hutchinson I find very Christmasy and associate with the smell of radiators.

Adam Christmas radiators?

Willow This is a shared association that me and Ren have — the smell of radiators turning on is very exciting.

And the music throughout is very evocative. And it really helps to make that childhood magical adventure feeling.

Adam It’s this lovely mix of organic, woodwind percussive instruments and synthesized BBC radiophonic workshop sounds.

Willow: The synthesisers go really hard when they are fish and birds. You can tell it’s made in the ‘80s then. Which I didn’t realise as a child. I don’t think I had much of an idea about decades, but I didn’t realise that this wasn’t made at the time it was set. Which is perhaps worrying, but at least goes to show how dedicated they were to creating the 1930s feeling.

Adam Well, don’t worry, my sister watching this didn’t seem to realise previously that phoenix’s aren’t real, so. We all have blindspots, clearly.

Willow Lifelong learners, that’s us. Also they were in a glee club, and I thought that this was a recent televisual invention, but apparently not.

Adam The police officer right, says that he was in a glee club with the villain?

Willow Yes, as the Reverend Bottledale. So let’s hope they make it all the way to regionals, eh?

Ren I just wanted to mention the boldest claim of the episode, which is when they’re escaping from the flooded cellars —

Adam — is this a new section? Boldest Claim.

Ren Maybe it could be, if people continue to make claims like this. The old Punch and Judy man turns his hat into a boat, and they are facing a steep incline upwards to get out of the cellar, and he says that it doesn’t matter because ‘what a salmon can do, a man can do!’

Adam Yeah, take that Jordan Peterson, with your lobsters.

Willow That is a good claim. I quite enjoyed it when Kay was being lightening attacked and Arnold of Todi was doing the emperor to him, and lightening-bolting him, and he says ‘I hope everyone starts calling for me’. He was really putting it out there, really saying what he needed to happen.

Adam That special effect reminded me a lot of Knightmare, the old TV gameshow for kids where you have one kid with the helmet going into the dungeon, and the other kids are instructing them ‘go left!’ ‘No, go right!’

Willow: (Abner voice) My precious dungeon!

Adam The kind of special effect you’d get on that.

Ren I enjoyed Kay, when he was getting ready to leave saying ‘Come on, Box!’ to the Box of Delights, as if it were a dog.

Adam Aww.

Willow He does seem to have bonded somewhat with it. In the same way that Abner had bonded with his diamonds. And every time Abner is on screen, and is demolishing the scenery with his teeth, it’s so good.

‘One last night great wickedness before I go!’

He even indulges in some third-person monologuing.

‘Abner… but Abner, what about Pouncer?’

Adam You too just want the Abner and Maria spin-off show.

Ren I think Pouncer can come.

Willow: Pouncer and Hahaha What can come along as well.

Ren See Adam, it’s not just me. It’s clearly a genetic love of doing silly voices on this podcast. (Drawling Pouncer voice) ‘Abner, my very own’

Willow ’You mustn’t, you simply mustn’t think of getting rid of Charles’

Ren Okay. Thank you Willow for joining us for this episode!

Willow Thank you very much for having me, it’s been a lot of fun.

Ren Do you want people to find you anywhere or do you just want to disappear into the ether?

Willow: No, I think as a teacher it would be weird if I told you where I did my work. But nice to be on here, and in all of your ears. That’s a weird way of saying that.

Ren Adam, do you have a sign-off for us?

Adam I do! Godspeed creepy kids, because time and tide and buttered eggs wait for no man.

Willow Hahaha What?

Ren See you next time!

(Outro music plays)

  • Truth be told, after recording this podcast I lay down on my bed and accidentally fell asleep for four hours in the middle of the day. So there might be something to it.

Comments

by DC on
Hello, this series was not well known in the states, but it was broadcast on a children’s network in the late 80s. The nightmare scene after the posset (your description of the posset is gold btw) traumatized me as a kid when I just happened across it. That white ghost woman (Lady of the Oak) walking toward the camera was just too much. It too gave me the phantoms. About a year later I stumbled across the book at my library. Being a kid, I had my fears from that nightmare scene stirred from seeing this book. But I did pick it up, read it, and it soon became one of my most endearing books to this day. I still purpose to read it and watch the series every Christmas. I’m hoping it continues to get more recognition here in the states. Enjoyed this podcast!!!
by 1984 Child on
Great job! I really enjoyed this, thanks. All those memorable phrases! Having grown up in the Shires and being fairly well acquainted with most of the areas where this was filmed, I find myself wondering, "where did they film that demon-conjuring scene?" 🤔 Does such a frightfully specialist occult chamber, designed for such purposes, exist within the walls of Eastnor Castle, or another similarly discreet stately manor, perhaps...?? As for your mutual appreciation of Pouncer's seemingly bizarre list of affectionate terms for Abner, it struck me whilst watching this again recently that they are all descriptions of Lucifer from the Bible. Pre-rebellion against the LORD God, he was outstandingly beautiful and adorned with precious jewels. The other terms of "bright star," "graven image," "golden idol" and "celestial one" are also scriptural references pertaining to his former state of glory in the heavens ('the bright and morning star') and his desire to be worshipped as god, thus perverting the course of worship, causing idolatry of a created being (i.e. himself) rather than worshipping The Creator, Yahweh. As per Abner - pride was indeed his downfall (pardon the pun)! Somehow, my mum and I thought it suitable bedtime watching for my 5yr old niece, having only fond memories of watching it during the somewhat more 'innocent' era of mine and my sister's childhoods. Thank God, my niece wasn't remotely interested - as we'd forgotten how dark and steeped in the occult it was in parts! Needless to say, my mum and I were enthralled. Who could ever forget that haunting theme music...

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About this podcast

A podcast in which one film lecturer and one scaredy-cat discuss creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and tv.

by Ren Wednesday, Adam Whybray

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