12 Movies of Christmas: The BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas
For many centuries, long before the printing press, the advent of winter meant that the veil between the realm of the living and the spirit world grew thinner as the nights lengthened towards Yuletide, the shortest day of the year. During these deep dark evenings, religion and superstition became intertwined and our distant ancestors warmed themselves by the fire while telling ghost stories and other ghoulish tales.
Charles Dickens is credited with helping revive the tradition, and Christmas in general, in the mid 19th-Century. Over the course of his career he wrote over two dozen ghost stories, some woven into the narrative of larger novels, and his most famous, A Christmas Carol, was published in 1843. Although it didn’t make him rich, the novella was an instant hit and has never been out of print since.
40 years later on a dark and chilly October evening in 1893, the well-mannered gentlemen of Cambridge University’s Chit-Chat Club gathered for their usual round of dining and discussing scholarly pursuits. With Halloween just around the corner, one of its senior members had something special planned: Montague Rhodes James, a respected authority on antiquity, was about to unveil his first tale of ghostly terror.
Skip forward another six decades or so and the pastime of telling ghost stories at Christmas had once again faded, perhaps discarded after the very real horrors of two World Wars. For many homes in the UK, sitting by the fire had been replaced by gathering around the glow of the TV, and the BBC brought back ghost stories once more to deliver a delightful chill at Christmas.
Inspired by the success of Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968), the excellent Omnibus adaptation of M.R. James’s signature tale starring Michael Hordern, the original run of A Ghost Story for Christmas ran between 1971 and 1978. All but the last (The Ice House) were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark and, fittingly, the first five films were based on stories by James, who by that stage had become known as the master of the modern English ghost story.
The Stalls of Barchester (1971) gets us off to a bit of a stodgy start as we meet Dr. Black (Clive Swift, better known as Richard Bucket from Keeping up Appearances) as he is rummaging through the library of Barchester Cathedral. He’s not very impressed by the collection until the custodian offers him access to the papers of Archdeacon Haynes, who perished under unusual circumstances 50 years earlier.
Things pick up when we flash back to the earlier period and meet Dr. Haynes (Robert Hardy), an unmarried deacon whose ambitions within the church are hampered by the longevity of his superior, archdeacon Pulteney (Harold Bennett). In the present, further scrutiny of the papers suggests that Haynes took matters into his own hands and secured promotion after Pulteney’s supposedly accidental death. However, back with the new Archdeacon, we see that the strange carvings on Dr. Haynes’s stall in the cathedral appears to manifest a ghostly presence that preys on his conscience.
Like all the films in the original series, The Stalls of Barchester was shot on 16mm. The format works superbly for the kind of small and intimate ghost stories that M.R. James specialised in. His supernatural goings-on were often focused on a somewhat solitary character, and the boxy ratio hems us right in with Haynes as his mind unravels and his nightly terror grows.
James often wrote about scholarly men like himself whose curiosity or greed unwittingly unleashes supernatural forces. Archdeacon Haynes was perhaps the most purely villainous main character in his stories, a hypocritical and scheming go-getter played to tight-lipped perfection by Hardy. Clark shot in and around Norwich cathedral to portray its fictional counterpart, and its shadowy cloisters are a wonderfully atmospheric setting as we anticipate Haynes’s comeuppance.
Next up is A Warning to the Curious (1972), not only one of the scariest entries in the series but also my personal favourite. It was shot on the East Anglian shores that I remember so fondly from day trips as a kid, so it’s a piece that I can feel in my bones. This is the classic Jamesian set-up: The ever-reliable Peter Vaughan plays Paxton, a down-at-heel amateur archaeologist who ventures out to the coast in search of a long-lost Saxon crown that reputedly protects England from invading forces.
Naturally, Paxton succeeds in finding the crown but soon wishes he hadn’t when he is stalked by the ghost of William Ager (John Kearney), the last in a family line who guarded the crown for centuries. Frightened by the menacing spirit dogging his steps, Paxton beseeches Dr. Black (Clive Swift again) to help him put it back. As we see in the startling opening scene, however, Ager is not easily appeased and violently objects to looters digging on his turf.
I love this film. Clark uses the wild and lonely coastline to his fullest advantage, creating a rich and eerie mood of isolation under the big East Anglian skies. It was the last entry adapted by the director himself, and he wisely ditched James’s odd framing narrative which tells the story third-hand by a character who wasn’t involved at all. This gets us straight to the spooky action and puts us into the frantic headspace of the ill-fated Paxton. Innovatively, Clark chose the sparse, discordant works of avantgarde composer György Ligeti to heighten the sense of unease.
Robin Chapman took over screenwriting duties while Clark remained at the helm for Lost Hearts (1973), the first of the original run to air on Christmas Day. It’s a change of pace for James, switching the protagonist from his usual fusty scholars to Stephen (Simon Gipps-Kent), a very polite orphan sent to live with his eccentric distant cousin Mr. Abney (Joseph O’Connor) on his remote Lincolnshire estate. Stephen is approaching his 12th birthday, a date that is of particular interest to his new legal guardian – as, it seems, is the boy maintaining healthy circulation.
As Stephen explores the mansion and the grounds, he becomes aware of a ghostly young boy and girl trying to attract his attention. Grilling the kindly housemaid for info, these apparitions appear to correlate with the sudden disappearances of two other orphans who enjoyed Mr. Abney’s hospitality in the past.
At a short, sharp 35 minutes, Lost Hearts wastes no time revealing the ghosts or the real reason why Mr. Abney is so keen to celebrate his young cousin’s birthday – the clue’s in the title. But the film is atmospherically shot as always and the ghosts are extremely creepy, building up to a gruesome money shot accompanied by a little hurdy-gurdy music.
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1974) is a fun one. James’s stories were full of hidden or lost artefacts watched over by malevolent spirits, and this tale features a proper treasure hunt and one of the author’s most ghastly guardians.
With the story relocated from Germany to the cloisters of Wells Cathedral for budgetary purposes, Michael Bryant plays Reverend Somerton, a wily clergyman who stumbles upon a centuries-old text that refers to a great treasure hidden somewhere in the cathedral grounds. Together with his aristocratic young colleague Peter (Paul Layers), the Reverend follows the clues and discovers the hoard’s secret resting place, only to find that the Abbot’s dire warnings of a magical protector are not just to scare away the superstitious.
John Bowen’s adaptation sensibly does away with some of James’s clunkier literary devices and also adds an entertaining opening scene with Peter’s domineering mother and a bogus clairvoyant. This helps establish the Reverend’s skeptical approach to the supernatural, which of course comes back to bite him in the seat of his vestments when he finds himself hounded by the ghostly abbot and his slimy sentinel.
The last story from M.R. James in the original series is The Ash Tree (1975) and, unfortunately, it’s the weakest of the adaptations based on his works. That’s a great pity because it was always one of my favourite James stories, with an ending that genuinely made me shudder when I first read it.
This time we’re off back to the mid-18th Century to meet Sir Richard (Edward Petherbridge) of Castringham Hall, a wealthy lord who makes the mistake of disturbing the grave of Mistress Mothersole (Barbara Ewing) to build a family pew for his fiancee at the local church.
Through a confusing flashback structure that doesn’t always make it clear which period we’re in, we discover that his ancestor Sir Matthew (Petherbridge again in a dual role) died mysteriously after betraying the seemingly harmless cunning woman to a witchfinder after an implied affair.
It’s all rather awkwardly done and lacks the steady build-up of claustrophobic dread that the previous entries evoke so well. This comes as some surprise as it was adapted for the screen by playwright David Rudkin, who penned the brilliant Penda’s Fen for the BBC a few years earlier. Aside from the clumsy structure, the low-budget special effects simply can’t handle one of the most gruesome deaths in the whole M.R. James canon.
Thankfully, the series rights itself with a transition to Charles Dickens for The Signalman (1976), arguably the best film of the lot. Dickens first published The Signal-Man in the Christmas 1866 edition of All the Year Round magazine, and since then it has become widely regarded as his finest ghost story. The isolated location and haunted protagonist is the perfect fit for these small-screen adaptations and Denholm Elliott is superb as the titular custodian of a lonely signal box situated next to a tunnel in a narrow railway cutting.
It’s a mundane and solitary job, but also one that places a great burden of responsibility on his shoulders, and he initially seems alarmed by the arrival of a passing Traveller (Bernard Lloyd). Settled by the fire over the course of a few evenings, the signalman confides to his guest about two fatal disasters that were preceded by a terrifying phantom harbinger. Frequently disturbed by an alarm bell that only he can hear, the signalman fears that the ghostly presence will appear again to warn of another catastrophe that he’s powerless to stop.
The Signalman is such a simple story yet so effective. You can almost smell the damp in the sunless gorge and feel the chill of the fog that wreathes the countryside as night falls. What is more, the two men’s conversation mirrors the way ghost stories were traditionally told in Dickens’ day - in hushed tones beside a crackling fire.
All the BBC’s ghost stories for Christmas have respected actors of stage and screen in the lead roles, but Elliot’s quietly resigned performance is especially convincing. We find ourselves leaning in closer to hearing what he has to say and hanging on his every word. It’s a brilliant slow-burner that culminates in one of the most unnerving images of the whole series.
Unfortunately, the quality dropped off significantly when the series switched to modern times for two original stories written for the screen, Stigma (1977) and The Ice House (1978). The contemporary settings only serve to date the films far more than the period pieces, and the tales simply aren’t all that good. Indeed, the BBC axed the run after the latter.
The format lay fallow until the Beeb resurrected it once more in 2005 with sporadic new entries, once again digging into the back catalogue of M.R. James’s spine-tingling tales for the most part. It has become more regular festive viewing in recent years since the involvement of Mark Gatiss, who has also branched out into stories by the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edith Nesbit. With bigger budgets and higher production values, however, the new versions fail to capture the stark atmosphere and creeping fear of the originals. Even after five decades, they still provide a pleasing terror on those long dark winter evenings.
P.S. At 20:00 on the 20th December, BBC's Radio 4 will air A Ghost Story for Christmas, exploring the history of the tradition, from its pagan origins to Dickens, Susan Hill and 1970's folk horror television.
