Meet the enigmatic Christmas Traveller

 

 

Last week I complained about how banal the Christmas specials of the 1970s were. I still maintain that’s mostly true, but it’s been pointed out to me that at least some people tried. The Christmas Messenger is one of those experiments to make something slightly more worthy.

 

The emphasis is on experiment. This 1975 special is one of those stories where a live action story bookends several animated sequences. Let’s start with the animated sequences. Each one attempts to illustrate a popular Christmas carol or song, like “We Three Kings” or “I Saw Three Ships” or “Good King Wenceslas”. Except they don’t actually sing the lyrics—they speak them and sound somewhere between William Shatner and the Royal Shakespeare Company. As a kid I used to watch this and get really annoyed they weren’t singing. Now I find it oddly compelling.

 

And yet the animated sequences are rather brilliant. They’re vividly depicted and weirdly mystical too. A friend suggested that they were like an illustrated version of a Yes album cover, which seems apt.

 

The live-action sequences are set in Victorian times and feature Richard Chamberlain—sometime after Dr. Kildare but a while before he became King of the Television Miniseries—as the eponymous Christmas Messenger, an odd, serene looking man who always smiles and has something soothing or meaningful to say, usually incredibly cryptic. It’s pretty obvious who they intend this guy to be, but as a kid I was also slightly creeped out by him. Richard Chamberlain is far prettier than any man has a right to be and that was never more the case than in 1975.

 

The overall result is something with a sort of twilight quality, hovering somewhere between dream and nightmare. And to top it off, it’s narrated by British pop star David Essex.

 

See:

See:

 See: