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.
