A Christmas Tale                    
By Bill Murphy                      

In 1980 we were asked to do a Christmas Special with Ryans Fancy, a period piece. Producer Jack Kellum decided to do the show at King's Landing Historic Village near Fredericton, N.B.  We had done a Summer Special there a few years before, well known New Brunswick author Alden Knowlan wrote the scripts.

We set the shoot date for late March expecting lots of snow and clear sunny, days. Lighting Director Les Button and I set off across Nfld by truck with all the equipment and had a smooth ride to Fredericton without running into any winter storms.

We got to Fredericton and met up with Jack,  Sylvia Odom our script assistant, Ryans Fancy, Lee Cremo a Micmac fiddler from Cape Breton and fellow Nflder Beth Harrington.  I believe Beth played Dermot's wife, he was the village merchant.
Sadly Lee Cremo, who played a guide to Denis the trapper, died just a few years ago he was only in his fifties!

We went out to the site to check things out and found everything covered with a lovely blanket of nice, clean snow, we returned to our motel, anxious to start shooting the next day.  But things went downhill right from that point! Overnight we had a heavy rainstorm that took away most of our lovely snow!  Being used to working outdoors we simply moved indoors to do some scenes and waited for the next snowfall, Fredericton gets a lot of snow.  It never snowed again for the entire shoot so we wound up bringing in truck loads of snow from a nearby hockey rink and spreading it carefully around areas where we had outdoor scenes. It had to be tramped down by foot and with horse and cart of course, we couldn't have tire tracks in a show set in the 1850!  There were other little problems as well, someones wig caught fire when they backed into a light and the transmission failed in our rental truck. 

Despite these minor setbacks the show went well,  we had great meals provided for us
at Kings Landing everyday and the motel owners hosted a couple of great  parties for us!


The special went over really well, I believe I still have a copy of it today !