Kay Harker and Cole Hawlings Picture accessed via BBC There are few things more Christmassy than the opening few bars of the theme tune to The Box of Delights . In fact, the tune is based on Victor Hely-Hutchinson's Carol Symphony and had been used in radio adaptations of the same novel years earlier than the 1984 television series. Clearly, everyone already knew that you just couldn't improve on that sound to evoke the magic of Christmas which - for me and for many - is so wonderfully explored in John Masefield's story. As a viewer, one of the things I enjoy most about the television series of The Box of Delights is the acting. Child actors are precarious things: too sweet and they're almost unbearable to watch, not sweet enough and they're unbelievable. They must walk that fine line between the two, and it is a perilous one! Most young actors fall into the first category, where their on-screen presence is almost dangerously saccharine. Not so the child actors ...
Review When you love a book, there are two differents approaches to reading it and, after reading The Alchemist , I realised that I do both - depending on the way the story moves and inspires me. The first is to gobble up the book: tearing through the story and utterly immersing yourself in the world it creates. I often do this when I'm reading my sisters' writings for the first time, but I also do it with Neil Gaiman's work and (randomly enough) Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. The second is to eat it a little piece at a time, to make it last as long as possible. Roald Dahl described this perfectly when Charlie (of eponymous Chocolate Factory fame) nibbles his one bar of chocolate to make it last as long as possible. Before reading The Alchemist , I had only ever thought of myself as a gobbler. Books I absolutely love always got read very quickly. But you don't want to do this with this gem by Paulo Coelho: you want to eat it slowly and feel yourself graduall...