Ghost Stories for Christmas

In this BBC series of four episodes Christopher Lee plays the role of M. R. James, an academic who worked at Eton and Cambridge. He wrote his ghost stories between 1911 and 1925 and was in the habit of reading them aloud to an audience of his friends and some students on Christmas Eve.

The introduction to each episode includes eerie choir music and night time shots of the roofs of old college buildings, which nicely sets the atmosphere, followed by a close up of James pouring sherry into glasses in front of the fire while he waits for his audience to arrive. The stories are presented simply, consisting only of M. R. James (Christopher Lee) recounting them to a silent audience of students sitting round his room, with occasional shots of their faces to show their reactions. The drama is provided by the stories themselves. They are, in a sense, historical dramas since they are all set more than 100 years ago.

Lee is the perfect actor for this series, partly because of his previous association with horror films, but also because his resonant voice and use of pauses and changes of tone to build tension as each story progresses is exactly right.

The only flaws I can see in this series are in the stories themselves. Number 13 has a somewhat weak ending and The Stalls Of Barchester is over wordy and this mutes the tension and slightly tests the listener's patience. Other than that, they are excellently chilling entertainment. Myself, I wish Christopher Lee had been able to make more than four of them.

It is currently (December 2024) possible to find all four episodes on Youtube.