M. R. James (1862-1936) is the writer of ghost stories, both the acceptable literary standard-bearer for them and actually pretty bloody radical. In his youth, James saw an inexplicably horrible face through a gap in a fence. In later life, as an utterly closeted gay man who’d found his niche as an academic, his peers thought of him as jolly, and he wrote his stories to read out loud to his friends and students, inspiring probably as much laughter as horror with his expert slow builds, suggestions, and sudden reveals. Ever since Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the ghost story and the English Christmas had been intertwined, the chill and the sentimental warmth wrapped up together. James’s chosen delivery method was to increase the warmth through sharing the chill. But on the bare page, it’s often all chill, powerful and sobering. The leading adaptation of his works finds the perfect way to depict that chill: silence.
That adaptation, A Ghost Story for Christmas is a BBC series as tenuous as one of James’s half-glimpsed spectres; quasi-annual, unsure of its boundaries, with a first entry that’s not always known under that name. And yet under that banner appear to this day works of great power and acclaim. (And some real clunkers.)
The series arguably began in 1968 when Omnibus (usually an arts magazine show) produced an edition given over to Jonathan Miller’s dramatization of James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” It starred Michael Hordern as one of the author’s typical protagonists, a slightly arrogant academic who stumbles upon the unknown and suffers a close but not fatal brush with what are clearly just bedsheets (but even viewed today, very scary bedsheets). This play sets the style for the series not just in terms of subject matter, but also in the use of wild track soundscapes rather than incidental music, a tremendous sense of place achieved through location shooting. The relative silence is so odd on TV that it in itself disturbs us.
Broadcast at Christmas 1971, Lawrence Gordon Clark directed The Stalls of Barchester, the first of eight annual entries in the same spirit (of which he helmed six) put out as individual plays, often with A Ghost Story for Christmas attached as a subtitle. The first five of these were James adaptations, all of which are very strong, but of which Lost Hearts perhaps makes the mistake of showing the pursuing horrors in too much detail. The best show of this run, however, is a Charles Dickens adaptation, The Signalman, which utilises a confined setting, Denholm Elliott’s amazing performance, and a soundscape of steam engines to tell a tale of isolation and destiny. The last two entries of the 1970s run are original scripts in modern settings. Stigma is misogynistic voyeurism, and The Ice House has its moments but feels arch rather than chilling.
The year after the run ended, 1979, saw Omnibus step in once again with a Sheridan Le Fanu adaptation titled “Schalcken the Painter,” which is far closer in spirit to the James stories than the last two regular entries, yet while “Whistle” is regularly included in the Ghost Stories, for instance on the BFI DVD set, this tends not to be. (In 1972, one could have watched A Warning to the Curious on Christmas Eve on BBC1, then caught Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape the next night on BBC2.)
The 1970s Ghost Stories at their best are ambient horror, designed to be watched late after the festivities, panoramic views of a slightly threatening countryside with the only sound the wind buffeting one’s ears. We’re no longer inside with BBC variety stars or at James’s Cambridge hearth. We’re not even at our hearth with those bare pages. We’re outside, in the liminal space of Christmas, when something is coming but our pagan hearts might wonder what. We’re slightly away from the fire. For a cosily defined while.
And then there was silence.
Then, in 2005 and 2006, as part of the eruption of fantasy and SF on British TV caused by the seismic resurrection of Doctor Who, there were new James adaptations at Christmas on BBC4, under the auspices of the great BBC Fictionlab innovator, producer Richard Fell. The best of these is 2006’s Number 13, which manages to grasp the nettle of James’s drama being powered by what he leaves out, but is, like the 2005 entry, sopping with incidental music. In 2010 there followed a one-off from another team, an ill-advised new adaptation of “Oh Whistle.” There was, again, music plastered all over it.
These awkward attempts to resurrect the tradition all required political heft within the Corporation and the ability to make the best of a tiny budget. In 2013, Sherlock co-creator Mark Gatiss found himself in a position to make things happen and wrote and directed the best James adaptation in a long time, The Tractate Middoth. And from 2018–2022, his stewardship resulted in three more such adaptations and one original, modern story in the same spirit, The Dead Room. Incidental music was still to the fore at the start of this run, but by the latest, The Mezzotint and Count Magnus, every detail of the format is back in place, we’re seeing work that can compare to the best of the 1970s run, and we’re allowed to watch Rory Kinnear and Jason Watkins’s slightly bumptious characters stumble across the unknown in relative silence. There’ll be another James adaptation from Gatiss on BBC4 this Christmas.
What will modern audiences find in these plays? I think something that resonates today is that James’s protagonists are often doomed by a lack of emotional intelligence. Their academic distance has given them a disdain for the ordinary and an elitism, which in the course of the story, gets chided rather than horribly punished. (Though James isn’t above full-on horror movie endings for the greedy, as in The Stalls of Barchester, and he also sometimes has the unknown come after perfectly likeable people.) The serious undercurrent of a great many of his stories is that we need to be kinder to each other, because there are genuinely enormous forces out there that will destroy you if you spend too much time distancing yourself from other people.
James surely knew the truth of that. But he delivered his stories in such a way as to defend himself against that truth, to build community and support. At its best, A Ghost Story for Christmas allows us to contemplate the horrors of isolation and persecution. In silence.
© 2023 Paul Cornell
