A Ghost Story for Christmas - a tribute

The very first entry was 1970's The Stalls of Barchester

NOTHING says Merry Christmas like spiders the size of kittens - plump and mewling - scuttling up the boughs of an ageing ash and in through a bedroom window. 

The nightmarish experience of a country squire is one of the stand-out moments of the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas strand.

Elsewhere in its annals, a terrible vengeance is visited on a treasure-hunter whose night-time dig disturbs more than just the earth, and an orphan boy wakes in darkness to hear the horrid sound of music and laughter.

It was 2004 when I came across the long-running series via a set of late-night repeats on BBC4. In fact I was steered that way by my Dad, who had watched the episodes on transmission 30 years earlier. Somewhat scarily several decades now stand between me and my sixth form self tuning in to watch The Ash Tree for the first time.

Interest in the episodes from the 1970s was enough to persuade the BBC to commission a brand new instalment - the first since the original run - the following year. And the stories have continued intermittently ever since.

Most of the entries in both the original and the revived run adapt the works of Montague 'M.R' James - a writer utterly synonymous with seasonal spine-tinglers.

In his day of course the stories were read to a select group of guests invited to  James' chambers at King's College, Cambridge over the festive period; you can just imagine the crackle of the hearth and the flash of flames on glass as the port is passed around. 

Capturing the cosy closeness of the fireside was always going to be a challenge when the stories made the leap to the screen more than half a century later. 

But they took full advantage of a TV landscape that looks entirely alien today - no iPlayer, no catch-up, no home releases. How and when a show would be seen was solely down to its makers. There was but one a year. Each stood alone from the others. You could not watch them in daylight.

"Broadcast in the dying hours of Christmas Eve," is the rather evocative claim from the British Film Institute (BFI), instantly conjuring the image of fairy lights and light heads amid the odd stillness that settles on that particular night. Couples sit alone without children. Perhaps, when winters were colder than now, there is the beginning of a frost outside.

Evocative, but not entirely accurate. A quick look online reveals that, unlike James himself, schedulers were not wedded to a December 24 telling. While the first couple of stories were indeed shown on that day, beyond that it was as likely that the Radio Times would have the programme listed a day or two earlier - or later.

But it is certainly true that a late-night airing (or as late as was possible in the days when we still had shutdown) was a must.

This meant that many of those who watched the stories in the 70s would have seen them just before bed, leaving the often unsettling images to linger behind the eyelids as they drifted off to sleep.

And they certainly were unsettling. This might have been the era of Mary Whitehouse but don't let that fool you into thinking the tales of the time were tame - many are in fact profoundly disturbing.

In one story a man turns to murdering children to give power to his pagan rites, in another a clergyman who has played a part in the death of his predecessor is plagued by more than just a guilty conscience.

It helps of course that the stories call for spirits that are almost always utterly malevolent. James once admitted he had no use for a helpful spook and invariably the apparitions which emerge from the darkness have little left that marks them as human. Forget grey ladies, these are creatures of shadow and bone and stormwinds. Of gallow trees soaked in blood and curses laid on riches. The children have nails like cut-throat razors. And the babies have too many legs...

Imagining these visitations on a licence fee-funded budget must have seemed daunting and the series sensibly keeps the creatures out of sight. Tensions are allowed to build, as strange noises and distant figures trouble our unfortunate protagonist.

It is often in the closing frames we get a proper look at their tormentor. The vivid red of a torso torn open, a grinning skull or - in one especially memorable climax - a creature of mould and slime, stay long in the memory.

Each entry also benefits immensely from extensive location filming, perhaps taking in the cloisters of one of England's great cathedrals or the windswept beaches of the north Norfolk coast. 

The country landscapes in particular provide the productions with a rather timeless quality and avoid the stagey feel that plagues many programmes of the period. Even with the stories rooted as they are in some slightly hazy past, there's a backdrop that still seems entirely familiar from seaside holidays or trips to market towns. Unlike cities there are corners of the country which never quite seem to change. 

And all of this lends the series the ever potent sense that this is the sort of thing that might just happen if one isn't careful. A feeling once again reinforced by the quiet and darkness which surely comes after first the TV and then the bedroom light clicking off.

It is always going to be hard to recapture the haunting quality of the old episodes - which at least in part comes from the fact that they are now in fact very old and have that slightly eldritch quality that comes with that - but I think the more recent stories do a fine job.

Indeed they have carried the terrors of Ted Heath's England - all picture rails and brown carpets - into the 21st century, just as effortlessly as the 70s stories tapped into an Edwardian sense of unease.

It helps that for the past 10 years or so the adaptations have all been written and directed by Mark Gatiss, a genuine lover of the English ghost story tradition. MR James remains the core of his offering, but he has also, just like the original series, flirted with contemporary tales or those from other writers - tomorrow's offering is based on Edith Nesbit's Victorian chiller Man-Size in Marble.

Yes, some of his more recent adaptations lean into more modern sensibilities. Women appear rather more regularly (Monty may have known they exist, I can't imagine he spoke to all that many). Music intrudes more often, where perhaps the quiet of the cloister may suffice. And inevitably you can catch the stories again on iPlayer - and thus in the safety of daylight. 

In other respects though, these are very much in the spirit of the previous stories. The spectre is saved until the last. Nasty things happen to our leads - whether they deserve it or not. And if you're brave enough to watch as intended, inside the intake of breath on the night before the day itself, the story will follow you to bed. 

Sweet dreams, and remember to shut the window...