A Ghost Story For Christmas… December 23, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Horror , trackbackWhat was that?
That…that something that skittered quickly across the room, just there by the window. No, no - I can’t tell you what it was exactly, I only saw it from the corner of my eye and only for a second, it made a sound like someone running. Could you not hear it? No, not truly like footsteps, but the merest echo, the smallest scintilla of a shadow, of a tread. And now it’s stopped. But it is nearby, I can feel it. Quite nearby.
When I looked up, it wasn’t there. But, I know this; it’s in the room with us, a formless, nameless, something. I can feel it, that prickling sensation on the back of my neck. So close, it’s within touching distance. Right here. Right now. With me.
My heart is pounding so hard that it seems to fill my gullet, constricting my throat, I can’t breathe properly, getting light-headed, suffocating in here.
It’s…it’s over there. I know it’s over there, reaching out, getting closer now. So close.
It’s nothing. All I have to do is turn my neck and look. That’s all I have to do…
Holding your breath? Well, I tried. I’m not a skilled enough writer to find the words to scare the bejeesus out of you. That task is best left to the masters of that particular black art, Henry James, Charles Dickens who penned possibly the most famous Christmas ghost story, A Christmas Carol, and without doubt the finest author of such tales, medieval scholar Montague Rhodes James who wrote his 30-odd skin-crawlers basically as entertainments for his companions. The gift of terror at Christmas.
James, like old ‘Boz’, followed a fine Victorian English tradition of telling hair-raising Christmas Eve tales. He would gather his guests, students and colleagues (he was Provost at both King’s College, Cambridge and Eton), around a crackling Yuletide hearth and chill them to the very marrow, reading aloud some of the most flesh-tingling narratives of malevolent and supernatural horror written, stories that took place mostly in broad daylight in locations many of those listening knew well.
Dark, dark forces in the most familar, ordinary places. Very English indeed.
The BBC transferred the tradition to television in 1971, possibly inspired by their 1968 adaptation for the Omnibus strand Whistle and I’ll Come To You, broadcasting the first of what became an annual ‘ghost story for Christmas’ with The Stalls of Barchester. This series of chillers, most based on MR James (he rid himself of punctuation marks as a literary affectation) stories but including a couple of original scripts and one particularly effective adaptation of Dickens’ The Signalman, ran annually until 1978. Since then, we’ve had to make do with repeats, plus a brief series of chilling fireside tales told in typically avuncular manner by Christopher Lee some six years ago now (and which thoroughly deserve their own DVD release). They weren’t, by the way, ever officially titled ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’, but for eight Christmases running they arrived on our screens like little seasonal gifts from Auntie Beeb, very welcome, but always a trifle unexpected. Until we began to expect them. And then they stopped.
That is until last year when the increasingly excellent BBC4 broadcast The View From The Hill during their Christmas schedule, and followed it up this December with another MR James story, Number 13; fairly successful stabs at recreating what made the ’70s series so effective - a glimpse ‘from the corner of the retina’ of dreadful shades, a mere hint of something truly awful from beyond the grave.
It’s disappointing that, thus far, only two of BBC ‘ghost stories for Christmas’ have made it to DVD, plus the superb Omnibus film, all courtesy of the BFI. Fortunately, they are all rather good. And handily, the British Film Institute,has also just released a quite wonderful DVD of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, from Henry James’ novel The Turn of The Screw, another very British ghost story by way of a very American screenwriter. Have yourself a scary little Christmas…
Whistle And I’ll Come To You (1968)
‘QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT’
‘I ought to be able to make it out,’ he thought; ‘but I suppose I am a little rusty in my Latin. When I come to think of it, I don’t believe I even know the word for a whistle. The long one does seem simple enough. It ought to mean: “Who is this who is coming?” Well, the best way to find out is evidently to whistle for him…’MR James
Oh, Whistle And I’ll Come To You, My Lad.
Based on the MR James story, Oh, Whistle And I’ll Come To You My Lad, but very much director Jonathan Miller’s interpretation, Whistle And I’ll Come To You is probably the best of all the BBC James adaptations if not the most faithful. In James’s tale, ‘Professor Parkins’ is a young academic, holidaying on the east coast with a view to improving his golf game. As adapted by Miller, and beautifully enacted by Michael Horden, Parkins is a mumbling, somewhat introspective, late middle-aged eccentric, taking a winter break simply to walk, read and study; “Golf? Noooo…Not. Much” he tells the ‘colonel’, a fellow guest, relishing the words, constantly amused, and repeating phrases to no-one save himself.
Miller and Horden sketch an effective portrait of a very strange chap, one who lives almost entirely within himself and who is possibly on the edge of mental collapse. In his own voiceover introduction, Miller says that James’s story is “…a story of solitude and terror. It hints at the dangers of intellectual pride and show’s how a man’s reason can be overthrown when he fails to acknowledge those forces inside himself which he simply cannot understand.”
Parkins takes a walk along the bleak Norfolk beaches and cliffs, including a old, long abandoned coastal cemetary. One grave, at the cliff’s edge, takes his eye and he spots a bone protuding from the sandy earth. As he reaches down over the cliff face, Parkins sees something a deal more interesting; a hand-crafted whistle, a clearly ancient latin inscription, barely legible, running down its side.
Eschewing most of what he called James’s ‘ludicrously stilted’ dialogue Miller tells his story with a stripped down economy; a series of sometimes mudane - to draw us in to the ordinariness of Parkins situation and to set up our story at a leisurely pace - sometimes stunning, visual vignettes. No manipulative musical soundtrack is used, natural sounds providing their own atmosphere - the rasping call of crows, the crunch of boot on sand, the sea crashing against the groynes. Parkins’ grasp on the certainties of existence are steadily eroded, as thoughts of an afterlife, of the supernatual, which he has debunked in conversation with the colonel, become an internalised obsession. One he finds impossible to explain in a rational manner, and which leads to a deeply disturbing mental conflict.
Miller, and his Director of Photography Dick Bush, paint this picture superbly, underlining Parkins’ loneliness - and even hinting at a sexual frustration when, at dinner, he avoids a female diner’s coquettish smile - as he strides across miles of empty beach, a watery winter light bathing him in a cold, oneiric, evening glow. He’s quite alone…until he finds the old whistle, and looks back, troubled, over his shoulder. There, in the far distance, stands a deeply unsettling and shadowy figure, ominously threatening and eerily motionless against the setting sun.
From this moment on, Miller quickens the pace as the Professor’s world descends into sheer bloody terror. A number of small but unexplained incidents, a terrifying waking nightmare - complete with sparely used sound effects which have the power to make most viewers jerk out of their seats - combine to chip away at what Parkins knows to be true, to be real. And at last he’s reduced to a whimpering, gibbering, thumb-sucking wreck of a man, still denying the undeniable. As Kim Newman says in his BFI DVD liner notes, Miller doesn’t entirely abandon the ghostly and we are still left with an unanswered question: is Parkins insane, or did he really unleash some kind of supernatural force?
That Miller and his production team did all this, chilling and genuinely unnerving viewers with some backwards, slowed down ‘cow noises’ and ‘bedsheets on strings’ on a BBC Omnibus budget almost beggars belief; although, bless ‘em, it is film - no video is used here. Whistle and I’ll Come To You is still, nearly four decades on after its first broadcast in May 1968, quite spine-tingling and hideously entertaining. The BFI’s disc is excellent with a beautiful, almost unmarked transfer, the wonderful black and white, full-frame, photography rendered perfectly. I found Ramsey Campbell’s introduction interesting, though it was a little choppily edited, he does have a tendency to gabble - and I wish he hadn’t worn that T-shirt…
Campbell also reads his own MR James inspired story The Guide, on reflection it might have been better had someone else delivered it. Rather more interesting is Neil Brand’s reading of Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad, which underlines exactly how much Miller changed things, and precisely what he means by ’stilted’ dialogue.
It’s classic television, and although not part of the subsequent strand, the classic Christmas-tide ghost story, which subtlely draws the audience in, and which refuses to insult the viewers’ intelligence. Another DVD presentation the BFI can be justly proud of.
Comments»
Really good article about the BFI classic tv horrors. i remember watching them as a kid. The restrained pace and very realistic settings made them very creepy indeed. Was The Woman in Black part of this series?
No, it wasn’t. The productions were all on the BBC and were (dates are when they were originally transmitted):
24/12/71 The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral.
24/12/72 A Warning to the Curious.
25/12/73 Lost Hearts.
23/12/74 The Treasure of Abbot Thomas.
23/12/75 The Ash Tree.
22/12/76 The Signalman.
28/12/77 Stigma.
25/12/78 The Ice House
Thanks for posting.
The Woman In Black was shown on December 24th 1989 on ITV.
What might make it seem like one of the series is that a couple of years later, the BBC began repeating their classic ghost stories. Between 1991 and 1995 there were repeats of “The Signalman”, “A Warning To The Curious”, “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”, “Lost Hearts” and “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral”. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Sutton household when Christmas 1996 failed to continue this tradition.
“The Woman In Black” is also very much in the tradition of the BBC series, albeit longer, and with a clever script from Nigel Kneale and some genuinely terrifying moments, it’s probably one of the two or three best TV horrors I’ve ever seen.
Great article. I am in the middle of reading the original MR James stories at the moment, having been inspired by BBC4’s recent repeats. ‘Whistle’ is certainly the best from what I’ve seen, though A View from a Hill was pretty good. Hope that and Number 13 earn themselves a dvd release. Fingers crossed BBC4 continue the tradition this year.
I think a complete package of this series would have been a rather nice idea, don’t you all reckon…? (we can but dream)
Well, yes please. Certainly, the transfers of ‘The Signalman’ and particularly ‘A Warning to the Curious’ could be improved on, a full set including the recent productions and the Christopher Lee readings would be really rather special.
Incidentally, I taped ‘The Woman in Black’ on the night it was originally transmitted so I could enjoy it at leisure, but the tape snagged and I had to wrestle it out and get it back in. I only missed a minute or so, but when I checked later it turned out to be a crucial moment. I simply could never bring myself to watch it.
I still have the tape…but I no longer have a VHS player. And - having missed the repeat some years later - I still have never seen it.
I know, I know…
[…] The BBC begins showing some of their marvellous Ghost Stories for Christmas tonight on BBC4. The full schedule can be found here. The season kicks off with The Haunted Airman and continues with A View From A Hill, The Stalls Of Barchester, Number 13, The Treasure Of Abbot Thomas, Whistle And I’ll Come To You (reviewed by this blog here), Lost Hearts, and ends with The Signalman on December 20. […]
does anyone recall a curious supernatural tale about some folk who spend an evening in a country cottage which has ‘history’ the conclusion is a TV broadcast which mentions that a party have folk have been found dead, they have starved in spite of their being plenty of food in the house
It was a pretty heavy handed morality tale called ‘The Exorcism’, part of a short lived BBC TV series called Dead of Night; first shown 1972, and by coincidence repeated on BBC4 last week.