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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a family gathered around a roaring yuletide screen must be in want of a ghost story. Since 1968, therefore (or a couple of years earlier, depending on whether you count the precursor Whistle and I’ll Come to You, directed by Jonathan Miller – and who am I to tell you nay?), the BBC has sporadically provided one in the form of the Ghost Story for Christmas series. These days, it is an annual event, delivered as a half-hour adaptation by Mark Gatiss of a spooky short story from the Victorian or Edwardian archives, which gives us some shivery distraction and provides some lovely actors with gainful employment of a not too onerous kind in the lead-up to Christmas.
To begin, the recent reboot of the series comprised mostly adaptations of Gatiss’s greatest love, MR James, but there has also, as befits the co-creator of Sherlock, been one by Arthur Conan Doyle (Lot No 249). Then, last year, it was derived from a tale by E Nesbit-yes-that-E-Nesbit from the days before she was pulling in royalties from The Railway Children, and the Psammead wasn’t even a glint in Edith’s eye.
This year it is the turn of EF Benson. A prolific writer, Benson is best known as the author of the Mapp & Lucia books, but he often wrote what he called “spook stories” for magazines. Gatiss has chosen The Room in the Tower, written and published in 1912, and reset it (partly at least) during the second world war.
Roger Winstanley (Tobias Menzies, an understated actor who always makes you lean in and is perfectly cast in a part made up largely of whispered dread) is making stoic small talk with a stranger, Verity (Nancy Carroll), as they shelter in a tube station during an air raid. Does she dream, he suddenly asks her. She does. “Have they ever come true?” And we slip back to his childhood as he begins the story for which “I can find no explanation at all”.
Since he was a schoolboy, we hear, Winstanley has had the recurrent dream/nightmare that he arrives at the house of a schoolfellow, Jack Stone, and is ushered into the garden for tea with Jack’s black-gowned mother Julia (Joanna Lumley), his father and a couple of other relatives. There is utter silence until he is told by Julia: “Jack will show you to your room. I’ve given you the room in the tower.” Young Roger is filled with inexplicable terror but there is no escape. Jack shows him to the room, leaves him there – and he would always wake up just before he discovered what awful fate awaits him.
Eventually, Roger tells Verity, it was succeeded by a slightly different version: Julia was no longer there in body. Her voice, and the same feared instruction, however, remained and the rest of the hated dream continued to its usual end.
In the most recent dream, Roger has joined his jolly friend John Clinton (Ben Mansfield) for a game of tennis and John invited him back to his house for tea. Guess what? Yes indeed – they drive up to the house of Roger’s nightmares. He rallies when he sees that the family assembled on the lawn for tea is not Jack Stone’s but a far more cheerful and rambunctious group, surrounded by welcoming guests. All is well until the matriarch (this time played by Polly Walker) announces that – guess what again! Those of you who have already remembered that “Jack” is a nickname for “John” will be ahead of the pack (I had to look it up, and if you wish to escape the festivities at any point in this exhausting season, do Google it and give yourself 10 minutes of etymological satisfaction). But, yes, indeed comes the line. Jack will show him to his room. She has put him in the room in the tower.
Benson’s twist, plus Gatiss’s further turn of the screw (although we should save that description until he gets to Henry James), round off the atmospheric half-hour nicely – although you could argue that we are now entering horror rather than ghost story territory; if you are gathered for a family viewing, it may cause the youngest members to recoil. Once again, like an inoffensive second cousin round the Christmas table, you wouldn’t miss the Gatiss ghost story if it wasn’t there, but it’s always nice to see it again.
