Christmas time. Mistletoe and wine. Children singing Chriiiiiiistian rhyme. But what is this? Beneath the unrecyclable wrapping paper stirs a sense of unease. For here comes the BBC’s annual Ghost Story for Christmas, a brrr-inducing, Mark Gatiss-helmed adaptation of EF Benson’s The Room in the Tower, starring Tobias Menzies and Joanna Lumley.
The festive schedules have, of course, long played host to ghost stories; the season lends itself as readily to the shrouded and malign as the baubled and mulled. But which are the finest of TV’s many Christmas chillers?
Let us clamber into our Vauxhall Trepidation and, screaming pre-emptively, explore.
A Warning to the Curious
BBC, 1972
“It’s Chriiiiiiiiiiiiiiistmaaaaas,” observes Noddy Holder in Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody, a howl of midwinter dread that may well have been prompted by an incautious, late-night viewing of this, the second (and arguably best) of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas. The plot? An amateur archaeologist (Peter Vaughan) digs up a Saxon crown, an act that – thanks to the artefact’s undead guardian – ensures he is sadly unlikely, this Christmas, to be “hanging up his stocking on the wall”.
Inside No 9: The Devil of Christmas
BBC, 2016
The climactic twist may have been too unpleasant for some [waves] but this was in every other respect a belter: a brilliant pastiche of low-budget 70s horror anthologies, forged in ketchup and molten knitwear, the whole thing lurched with the biliousness of the era. Ding dong merrily? Not here, pal.
Ghost Stories for Christmas
BBC, 2000
MR James (Christopher Lee) reads a selection of his short stories. Yawnsville? Au contraire. While the sparse, candlelit setting provided the perfect backdrop for James’s tales of supernatural torment, the lingering closeups invited viewers to marvel at the astonishing architecture of Lee’s head; a vast, sepulchral edifice that would surely have elicited whispers of sorcery were it to have been discovered in a tropical thicket by a malarial Victorian in a pith helmet.
The League of Gentlemen Christmas Special
BBC, 2000
Welcome ye to Royston Vasey, where among those sharing festive yarns of horror with an unsympathetic Rev Bernice (Reece Shearsmith) are a tramp who’d suffered Herr Lipp’s (Steve Pemberton) vampiric advances and a hapless Mr Chinnery (Mark Gatiss), who bringeth the gift of surprise in the form of an ossified monkey scrotum.
The Woman in Black
ITV, 1989
Few sights are as conducive to “simply having a wonderful Christmastime” as that of a Victorian phantom shrieking towards the camera, her gums bared like the “before” photo in an advert for Listerine. And so it was, with this magnificently unsettling adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 novel, that the nation’s shoulder pads didst wither as one.
The Box of Delights
BBC, 1984
One of the most enduringly wonderful of all gulp-inducing “yuletide” adventures, this Bafta-winning series took in pagan mythology, puppets and Robert Stephens as dastardly occultist Abner Brown in a performance of seething, spittle-flecked enormousness.
The Signalman
BBC, 1976
Dickens. Steam trains. Bowler hats. Denholm Elliott. Self-sacrifice. Claustrophobia. Tunnels. Danger. Eyeless prophets of doom. Mute terror. “Below there!” Death. Bloody – and, if you will – hell.
Bergerac: Fires in the Fall
BBC, 1986
“The 1986 Bergerac Christmas special?” you splutter. “Scary?” To which I bellow: “Yes.” Here was a wholly unexpected case for offshore leisure cop DS Jim Bergerac (John Nettles), his leather blouson wilting in the ensuing firestorm of deranged arsonists, narked-off spirits and – the marmalade-dropper – a graveyard loiterer in a shroud.
The Stone Tape
BBC, 1972
Yes, the acting is large, the “attitudes” wearisome and someone really should have asked goateed protagonist Michael Bryant to use his INDOORS VOICE. But Nigel Kneale’s tale of boffins uncovering “recordings” of ancient horrors remains uniquely disconcerting, its atmosphere of suffocating dread accompanied by unearthly blips, sniggles and skrrrreeeeeeeps.
Whistle and I’ll Come to You
BBC, 1968
Here comes Michael Hordern, jowls flapping like windsocks as he’s chased along a beach by what appears to be a bedsheet making slowed-down cow noises. Despite its unfestive origins (it was first aired in May 1968), Jonathan Miller’s adaptation of MR James’s short tale is perhaps the quintessential winter ghost story – a panorama of existential unease encompassing social awkwardness, unnameable evil and the ageless horror of an underwhelming lunch (“I told them I didn’t like tomatoes”).
A masterpiece, obviously, with (slowed-down cow) bells on.
