The latest Ghost Story for Christmas (BBC Two, Sunday, 10pm) from writer and director Mark Gatiss is a spooktacular serving of seasonal fun. It features a haunted sarcophagus, a surprise Sherlock Holmes cameo and Game of Thrones actor Kit Harington dashing about with an epic gentleman’s moustache plastered to his face.
What more could you want? How about a killer mummy, fresh out of its wrapping and eager to crash the party? That is the villain who pops up at the end of this cosy yet creepy adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1892 short story, Lot No 249.
Thanks to Gatiss, A Ghost Story for Christmas has become a Christmas Eve fixture. It has also helped revive the Victorian tradition of the Yuletide chill. That concept of an uncanny Christmas obviously goes back to Dickens and a Christmas Carol.
But Dickens wasn’t the only one to have held a torch for midwinter scares – for instance, Anglo-Irish writer Charlotte Riddell published the wonderfully eerie A Strange Christmas Game in 1868. So we’ve been hunkering down to a horrid little Christmas for quite some time. Still, Gatiss has been a fantastic recent ambassador for the genre. He’s on top form here – though it helps that he is working from a fantastic Arthur Conan Doyle yarn.
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Harington plays Abercrombie Smith, a stiff-upper-lipped Oxford undergraduate who finds himself shacked up alongside decadent Egyptologist Edward Bellingham (Freddie Fox). With his louche manner and mocking gaze, Bellingham is clearly a wrong ‘un – though it falls to the sensible Abercrombie to point this out to their mutual pal Monkhouse Lee (Colin Ryan).
Bellingham has in his possession an ancient Egyptian relic – a mummy from antiquity. But this is a relic with motives of its own. The violent death of another student confirms that evil is aboard (there is the subtle implication that the sins of empire are returning to haunt green and pleasant Oxford). Pursued by the blighted beastie, Abercrombie beats a retreat to the nearby residence of an erudite pal (John Heffernan).
The friend is never named. Yet he gives the game away by announcing his intention to shortly take up lodgings at 221b Baker Street. By Sherlock! Gatiss is squeezing in a backdoor tribute to the great detective.
Gatiss has expressed his fear that this might be the last of his Ghost Stories for Christmas. It’s getting harder and harder, he says, to scrape together the budget for a 30-minute special based on a Victorian short story (previous tales have been adapted from MR James). What a shame it would be if this is the end: Lot No 249 is a gift-wrapped helping of yummy mummy mania and, as Christmas Eve draws in around us, the perfect way to kick on to the big day itself.
