"For around four hours transport yourself back in time to a dimly lit room with just the sound of a valve radio for company by listening to this selection of rare vintage recordings. Almost guaranteed to make your hair stand on end and compiled with those long and gloomy winter months in mind, especially suited for the final hours of Christmas Eve night. Featuring engagingly effective radio dramatisations of stories all created with the Yuletide season in mind, Casting the Runes by M.R. James, The Wondersmith (re-titled 'The Doll') by Fitz-James O'Brien and The Signalman by Charles Dickens. Added to these are dramatic and intimate readings of Dickens' A Christmas Carol and Hans Christian Andersen's sad, tragic and disturbing The Fir-Tree, given by Frank Pettingell and Boris Karloff respectively. Performed directly to the listener, it could almost be that these veteran actors are momentarily resurrected and are standing in the room with you. Supporting these thought provoking and chilling tales is a range of evocative and mood setting music which is suitably old English or European in origin and feel. A carefully compiled selection of the more meditative and antique carols is provided by 60 year old recordings of the Choir of King's College, Cambridge. As featured in A Festival of Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve and opening with the traditional and always haunting rendition of Once in Royal David's City. There is a complete reissue of the very atmospheric 1961 recording of Christmas at Notre-Dame featuring the Paris cathedral's organ and choir performing classical music from Bach, Daquin, Lebègue and stirring traditional French carols. Countertenor Alfred Deller with Desmond Dupré on lute provides two authentic Elizabethan Christmas song recitals. Please note that the sound quality in some cases will be reflective of the vintage archive nature of these recordings."