Passions: I'm dreaming of a fright Christmas with TV terror tales - Martin Gray

The BBC’s festive short dramas are always worth a watch... with the lights off

Freddie Fox faces fear in A Ghost Story for Christmas: Lot No. 249 (Picture: BBC)

A sad tale’s best for winter,’ wrote William Shakespeare, but I’m down with Charles Dickens, who embraced the tradition of festive ghost stories with A Christmas Carol. The first edition of 6,000 copies, published on 19 December 1843, sold out by Christmas Eve. It’s kept on selling.

His later short story, The Signal-Man, wasn’t a seasonal tale but it’s become a Yule fixture thanks to its adaptation for the BBC’s A Ghost Story For Christmas strand. Telly tremblers appeared regularly between 1971 and 1978 and the format has been revived in recent years by Sherlock and Dracula’s Mark Gatiss.

Most of these have involved tales by Montague Rhodes James, a Cambridge teacher who straddled Victorian and Edwardian times and found the fear in every library corner, every church nave. MR James would invite friends and students to his quarters each Christmas Eve, narrate his newest tale and send them to bed swearing never to go near an antique object or mummified body part.

The TV versions haven’t all had the same effect on me – the creeping horror, the building dread of his prose doesn’t always translate to the screen, even with actors as great as Michael Hordern and John Hurt, who starred in BBC takes on Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad in 1968 and 2010 respectively. An academic finds an ancient whistle on a beach and something follows him home… so far as I could tell, it was a flapping hankie. I’m sure the prose tale, experienced in a dark dorm, is better.

Mind you, another MR James drama scares the bejabbers out of me – there’s something truly frightful about 1973’s Lost Hearts, in which a lonely boy keeps seeing two gypsy children. Director Lawrence Gordon Clark builds a truly uncanny mood, the hurdy-gurdy soundtrack is spookily catchy, and the final image… you may not sleep.

And Gatiss gave us a satisfyingly freaky version of James’s The Mezzotint – a haunted painting – in 2021.

This year Gatiss is eschewing James for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lot No.249, set firmly in James territory, but here the threat to academics is rather more substantial than Monty’s subtly malevolent fare. Oh mummy!

A Ghost Story for Christmas: Lot No.249 is on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer from 24 December at 10pm