TELLY TALK WEEKLY: Christmas Viewing Pick of the Year By Marjorie Fenwick, Television Correspondent, December 1985
Put the sherry on the sideboard and dim the lights. If you own a video recorder, or know a neighbour who does, there is one series you must track down before the Queen’s speech. For Stranger Things Christmas Viewing, this is the sort of eerie adventure that can turn a quiet winter evening into something far more exciting. It has had our entire office whispering, gasping and sleeping with the landing light on.
Set in the sleepy American town of Hawkins in 1983, it follows a gang of bicycle-riding schoolboys whose friend Will vanishes one dark November night. What follows is part spine-chiller, part adventure, part heart-warming friendship story, and every minute of it is compulsive.
The Story: A Missing Boy and a Very Odd Girl
When young Will disappears on his way home from a game of Dungeons & Dragons, his mother Joyce (a wonderfully frazzled Winona Ryder) refuses to accept what the police tell her. Bikes and Bogeymen quickly become the order of the day as his three friends, Mike, Dustin and Lucas, take matters into their own hands. Meanwhile, his three friends, Mike, Dustin and Lucas, take matters into their own hands and stumble upon a shaven-headed girl in a hospital gown who barely speaks and answers to the name Eleven.
She is no ordinary child. Eleven can move objects with her mind, and she is being hunted by shadowy men from a secret government laboratory on the edge of town. Add a snarling monster from another dimension, which the boys christen the Demogorgon after their favourite game, and you have the ingredients of a proper old-fashioned nightmare.
Why It Feels So Wonderfully Familiar
Among Christmas TV Picks for viewers who enjoy adventure with a spooky edge, this one feels wonderfully familiar. If you loved E.T., you will recognise the gang of cheeky boys on bicycles and the gentle friendship with a mysterious visitor. If you have ever peered through your fingers at a John Carpenter film, you will recognise the creeping dread. And if you have read a Stephen King paperback under the bedclothes with a torch, you will feel right at home in the small-town secrets and the woods that seem to watch you back.
Yet this is no mere copy, nor is it literally a Stranger Things Holiday Special. The writers have taken our favourite ingredients and stirred them into something fresh, funny and frightening in equal measure.
The Highlights
- The Children: The young cast are the beating heart of the show. Their bickering, their loyalty and their jokes about girls feel entirely genuine, like the gang you knew at school.
- The Christmas Lights: In the most unforgettable scene, Joyce covers her living room wall with strings of fairy lights and paints a letter beside each bulb, so that her missing son can “speak” to her through them. You will never look at your Christmas tree the same way again.
- The Police Chief: David Harbour is superb as the tired, grumpy Chief Hopper, a man with a sad past and a soft centre hidden beneath the moustache.
- The Music: The synthesiser score is a pulsing, chilly delight, all throbbing bass notes and eerie bleeps. Turn it up and let it creep across the room.
- The Waffles: Yes, the waffles. Eleven’s love of frozen waffles is already the talk of the playground, and we predict a run on the supermarket freezer aisle.
OVERALL: 9 / 10
Stranger Things is thrilling, moving and beautifully made, the sort of programme families will argue over and then insist on watching again. It is also exactly the sort of programme that turns television into shared family time. If the broadcasters have any sense, they will schedule it in a prime Sunday-evening slot and let the whole country enjoy it together.
Watch with: A mug of cocoa, a torch, and someone brave sitting next to you.
Available on rental from good video shops now. Be kind, rewind.
