Heavens! Oh, it’s you, Doctor Blathery: forgive me, you gave me an awful fright. You see it’s the queerest thing: this little stone statue I inherited with the cottage when I moved to this sleepy village from London (where everybody hates me because I’m from London), well, it seems to me … Oh, you shall call me half-mad! It seems to be moving around from room to room when I’m not looking. I swear it to you: last night, while I was reading by the fire and holding a handkerchief – which I do every night because it’s Victorian times and they haven’t invented telly yet – it was over on the dressing table, and now … why, it’s on the dining room chair! Doctor, you look shaken. Take a seat, I shall fetch you some brandy. Doctor: what happened to the charming young couple who lived here afore me all those years ago? You … you knew her, didn’t you?
Sorry, sorry. I slip into “Victorian voice” a lot at Christmas. Christmas, as you know, is the best time of the year – Coke adverts! Quality Street! One binbag for the recyclable wrapping paper and another, much plumper bag for the glossy stuff! – but it’s also a weirdly spooky one, and is arguably a better time to consume a ghost story than Halloween is. Thankfully. the BBC knows this, and so has been on-and-off commissioning a ghost story to marken the yule – no, I’ve gone Victorian again. Anyway, they started in 1971, did it until 1978, stopped until 2005, have been doing it sporadically since then, and a few years ago someone had the good sense to just hand the whole thing over to Mark Gatiss and go: “Mark, please Gatiss this as hard as you possibly can.” This is his seventh year doing just that.
No point me spoiling this year’s effort, A Ghost Story for Christmas: Woman of Stone (Christmas Eve, BBC Two, 10.15pm), but I can compliment it: as ever, the casting is exemplary, with an opening frame story featuring Celia Imrie sprawled in bed chugging on a cigarette holder and having enormous fun flirting with (the very good) Mawaan Rizwan. Then we get to the meat of it, which is a classic new-husband-and-new-wife-and-new-village-and-dour-housekeeper-and-friendly-doctor arrangement, Monica Dolan as the housekeeper against Éanna Hardwicke’s Jack and Phoebe Horn as Laura.
The whole thing is adapted from Edith Nesbit’s Man-Size in Marble, which I went ahead and read, and I think the clever tweaks make the already good story even better, more three-dimensional and textured. At some point in about 2010 some high warlock in British TV decreed: “Oh, just let Mark Gatiss do whatever the hell he wants!”, and, apart from Dracula episode three and that bit in Sherlock where he goes to his mind palace, that has been an enormous net positive for culture. This is just more of that good stuff. Give me one a year until 2100.
Actually, I wanted to talk about that: we need more geniuses given free rein to do whatever the hell they like, and we need more anthology series where great British actors chew into small one-off roles, and I don’t think it should have to be Christmas and I don’t think it should have to be Mark Gatiss for us to have that. Woman of Stone is a perfectly formed, 30-minute Christmas treat, one that sent me down a spooky yuletide rabbit hole (a previous Ghost Story for Christmas, the Kit Harington-led and Sherlock Holmes-nodding Lot No 249, is still on iPlayer; if you are brave enough, the original, terrifying Whistle and I’ll Come to You is on YouTube; I have a load of MR James audiobooks lined up for the train ride north).
Basically we need more television that makes the viewer open up a bunch of tabs, possibly illegally download a PDF, and shove extra culture into their head as a result of watching. An anthology episode that explores a weird idea to its absolute outer limits then puts it right back down again is sort of the perfect form with which to do that. I’m over TV shows that spend too much of their opening episodes building foundational relationships that might become useful or important later – if I watch another comedy where a young, chaotic lead character goes for lunch with their humourless older sibling who has their shit together I will just start screaming! In public! – and formats like A Ghost Story for Christmas just get straight to it, no messing: the doctor rides a bicycle and you never know if ghosts are real.
Yes, I know it’s a special little Christmas treat. But I want more treats! I want treats all year! Why are we only allowed to play with form during December! Why can’t Rylan interview Mariah in March!
