Worcestershire couple spend £20,000 on UK’s craziest Christmas lights for Birmingham Children’s Hospital

A Christmas-mad couple has forked out a huge £20,000 to transform their Worcestershire home into the “UK’s craziest Christmas lights display”. Malcolm Molloy, 64, and his wife Wendy, 62, have wowed their neighbours with their intricate festive illuminations for the last 20 years despite the rising energy costs.

The couple spends the weeks in the lead-up to Christmas covering their four-bedroom home in Bromsgrove with 10,000 fairy lights before encouraging passersby to donate cash to good causes after seeing the lights. Since their first-ever festive switch-on in 2002, the pair have raised more than £100,000 for Birmingham Children’s Hospital and their local hospice.

And despite the rising energy bill crisis, the couple refused to let it stop them, adding thousands more lights to make this year’s display bigger and better than ever.

Malcolm, a retired fire officer, said: “This year we sat down and thought about the cost of living and energy crisis, but we wanted to keep supporting the hospice so decided to put the lights up for another year.

“This year we have added a giant stag that turns different colours. I think we are both bonkers, but I love them. In a bid to keep costs down, the couple has switched a lot of lights to LED bulbs and are switching the lights off on New Year’s Day instead of putting them on throughout January but they still expect their energy costs to exceed £1,000 this Christmas.

Wendy, who is disabled, said: “Everybody loves them, and it cheers the village up as it is normally so dark because we don’t have any streetlamps in our rural community.

“It’s all for a good cause and we get people visiting from all over the UK.

“When you get the support from people coming to see the lights, it makes you want to continue to put them up.”

Last year, at the annual light switch-on someone even proposed to their girlfriend on the Christmas sleigh outside the couple’s house, meanwhile people come from all over the region to visit the display and have even had light-fanatics drive from London, Manchester and Liverpool.