I have to admit I’ve been enthralled by the BBC’s wonderful A Ghost Story for Christmas series ever since I was old enough to stay up to watch, and to be troubled by, “The Signalman”, a relatively early edition broadcast in (looks it up on Wikipedia) crikey, 1976. Compared with the Hammer movies that were shown so often on late-evening telly at the time, these adaptations of classic ghost stories were infinitely more chilling than the various antics of Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, and dear old Count Dracula. It’s the difference between horror and terror, I suppose – camp versus insidious.
“The Signalman” is a tale I only vaguely recall, but have never completely forgotten. Nigel Farage, I might add, isn’t the only one to find himself haunted by nasty things that happened (or not) some 49 years ago.
A recurring, terrifying dream is also the theme of this year’s tale. It’s written and directed with his usual care by Mark Gatiss, and based on an EF Benson original (from 1912). It stars Tobias Menzies (the silken-voiced Prince Philip in The Crown) as a perfectly ordinary middle-class chap, Roger Winstanley, whose entire life has been inexplicably blighted by an awful nightmare. “My story I can find no explanation for,” he confesses to a stranger, deep in a Tube tunnel during the Blitz, as he unburdens himself, conscious of his own mortality.
He cannot even guess at its origins, save that his hallucination features only one person he knows, a slight school acquaintance named Jack Stone. In the recurring dream, Jack comes from a landed family living from late Victorian times until just before the Second World War, and he invites Roger home for tea in their fine Tudor mansion. The family are almost always silent, unsmiling, and sitting stiff and posed, as if in a period photograph.
Roger finds himself petrified by Jack’s mother, a steely old matriarch – Mrs Julia Stone. She is the only person ever to speak in the nightmare, and is played with some considerable force by Joanna Lumley. Her recurring line, laced with what Roger recognises with a sinking heart as lethal menace, is: “Jack will show you your room. I’ve given you the room in the tower.” It turns out that Roger’s dream is a premonition, and when, thanks to a real invitation to tea from a real friend, he does eventually try to get some kip in that very room in the tower, he finds himself being stared at by a Goya-ish self-portrait of Mrs Stone.
Among many other achievements – from the atmospheric, fish-eye-lens filming to the unobtrusively suspenseful score – some of the scripting in this Benson/Gatiss story is beautifully, and fittingly, antique in style. Of Mrs Stone’s image, Roger says: “There was a dreadful exuberance and vitality shining through an envelope of withered flesh, an exuberance that was wholly malign; vitality that foamed and frothed with unimaginable evil.”
Too right, Rog. Now, I won’t share Roger’s other discoveries here, but needless to say, Mrs Stone becomes all the more horrifying, giving a performance that I can only describe as Miss Havisham meets Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. Dame Joanna Lumley will be 80 next year, and is plainly still up for anything.
Don’t sit down to watch this on Christmas Eve expecting everything to be perfectly resolved and the elisions between the supernatural and the real made fully transparent. Such mysteries cannot, and should not, be all logically tied up at the end because, after all, there are no such things as ghosts, premonitions and the like, even at Christmas time. But there is such a thing as an annual instalment of exquisitely polished, gem-like entertainment from Gatiss.
Even with the BBC in another of its perennial crises, I hope we can enjoy these intricate little spooky mysteries for a long time to come. We can but dream.