TV MEMORIES CHRISTMAS SPECIAL -FIRESIDE GHOST STORIES ON TV.

Picture the scene - it's the last few years of the nineteenth century (or the earliest years of the twentieth), it's December. Outside the snow has just fallen and drifts of it glitter in the moonlight, whilst a freezing northerly wind rattles the doors and windows.

You're sat inside your home, sheltered against the dark with only your family to keep you company. The blazing fire you're all huddled around is the only thing holding the cold night air at bay. There's nothing to do except talk to each other. So talk you do. Eventually the conversation turns to the supernatural - ghosts, ghouls and things that go bump in the night..."I once heard a tale..." says one of your companions, and so it begins. A night of Christmas ghost stories...

Fast forward seventy or eighty years to another cold winter night with another family sat in thier home. It's now the 1970's. Instead of a blazing log fire they now have a gas fire and central heating, instead of the power of the spoken word they have television to keep them entertained...but they they still want a good seasonal scare. So it falls to the television set to fill the void.

Back in the 70's television was seen as the poor relation to film. "Mere" telly programmes weren't bestowed with the multi-million pound budgets that we see in today's Netflix dominated world. So TV producers where always on the look out for ways to cheaply fill thier programming schedules. The verbally narrated ghost story (as opposed to a full on dramatisation) was a good way of doing this.

The formula was simple - dress up a set to make it look like a cosy antiquarian study, hire a respected character actor for a day's worth of filming, sit them down in front of the camera and get them to narrate/read a classic ghost or horror story to said camera. There was also the added bonus that most of these classic tales where in the public domain and the authors where all long dead, so they didn't even have to fork out any royalty fees. A perfect solution.

Seeing as how you don't really get shows like this anymore I thought it would be nice to give a few of these programmes thier due as we find ourselves in the midst of yet another Yuletide. All the shows I'll be discussing here aired on the BBC between the late 70's and early 2000's and all are interesting in thier own way.

First up is Late Night Story which was originally broadcast over the Christmas week of 1978. This show was memorable for two reasons. Firstly there was the creepily macabre opening credits sequence which showed an animation of a young girl clutching a deformed looking teddy bear (accompanied by a discordant sounding "music box" theme tune).The girl turns round to face the camera and we see with horror that HER EYELIDS AND LIPS HAVE BEEN SEWN TOGETHER !!!! If this didn't dampen your "festive feel good vibes" then nothing would.

The second great thing about this series is the narrator - no less than Tom Baker himself. That's right - in this series THE BEST DOCTOR WHO EVER actually reads you HORROR STORIES (most specifically horror stories with the theme of childhood). It just doesn't get any better than that.

It was a pretty shrewd move on the part of the Beeb to hire Tom Baker. At this point in time he was still playing the Fourth Doctor on TV and pulling in record ratings. I'm guessing there must have been quite a few disappointed kids out there who weren't aloud to watch this by thier parents (either that or they where scared shitless by THAT title sequence). Either way Tom must have pretty much guaranteed that plenty of people would tune in for this (I don't remember watching it, I was only four at the time and wouldn't have been up at that time of night).

I only saw this series years later when it was included as an extra on the Doctor Who DVD boxset of The Key To Time saga. Baker is the perfect choice for this type of format with his booming voice, expressive face and thousand yard stare he really brings these stories to life. He also seems to revel in telling them - the mischievous grin he gives when reading the ending of Saki's story Sredni Vashtar (where a young boy trains a weasel to fatally attack his horrible nanny) really does say it all. 

The highlights of this series include the aforementioned Sredni Vashtar, Baker's reading of Ray Bradbury's The Emissary (one of my favourite horror stories of all time. God only knows why someone hasn't made it into a short film) and Mary Danby's story Nursery Tea (mainly because it's a good little festive terror tale but also because you get to see Tom Baker shout the word "titties" at one point). Tom Baker is a legend and these stories are great.

In 1980 the BBC gave us Spine Chillers which was a spin-off from thier long running children's storytelling show Jackanory (which itself employed the 'actor reading a story to camera' format). Spine Chillers was aimed at older children and each episode was only ten minutes long (I'm guessing most of the stories where abridged versions to fit into the runtime).

I do remember watching this after getting home from school on dark winter nights, it was broadcast between 17th November and 19th December 1980 and was perfect entertainment for a kid just getting into horror in the run-up to Christmas.

As with Late Night Story it again had a creepy animated title sequence depicting a dark and stormy night seen from the study of an old dark house. It certainly set the mood nicely.

The series consisted of twenty short episodes and featured stories by the likes of H.G. Wells, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, W. W. Jacobs and our old friends Saki and M.R. James (amongst others). The show had a rotating team of narrators (all respected character actors) consisting of Hammer horror star Freddie Jones, John Woodvine, Johnathan Pryce and the one I remember best of all - Michael Bryant.

All the narrators did a smashing job of selling the atmosphere but it was Bryant that stole the show - he just seemed somehow more sinister than the other storytellers - he had a commanding presence and sense of gravitas that made you sit up and listen to him. I definitely found him unnerving as a kid - he was like the strict old teacher at school that you didn't want to mess with or get on the wrong side of. Great stuff.

Six years later the BBC gave us Classic Ghost Stories. This was a five part series that featured stories that all came from the pen of M.R. James. The first episode - The Mezzotint - premiered on Christmas Day 1986 and was followed by readings of The Ash Tree, The Wailing Well, Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You My Lad and The Rose Garden on the 26th through to the 30th of December.

The narrator this time was Robert Powell who alternated between dressing like an old Victorian school master (presumably as a nod to James's background in academia) and the rest of the time wearing a rather cool velvet smoking jacket. He looked like an off duty gentleman adventurer just back from saving the world from evil spies relaxing in his study and just chilling out with some creepy tales.

This show broke from the traditional format slightly in that it featured some dramatised scenes with other actors which played out whilst Powell got on with the narrating duties.

I didn't watch this at the time but I seem to remember seeing it on a repeat season a few years later which bizzarely seemed to air in the middle of Summer. Aw well, any time of the year's good for a classic chill I suppose.

The final series I want to talk about here aired in the year 2000. Ghost Stories For Christmas With Christopher Lee was probably the best and most atmospheric example of this little TV sub-genre that I can think of.

It basically consisted of Christopher Lee playing M.R. James and dramatically reconstructed James's famous ghost story telling sessions that he used to perform to students and fellow scholars at Kings College Cambridge at Christmas time.

This one really does have all the ingredients needed. The cosy book lined study, the roaring fire, the howling wind outside, the vaguely creeped out looking students listening to the story and the smooth, deep mellow voice of Christopher Lee recounting some of M.R. James's best known terror tales (A Warning To The Curious, Number 13, The Ash Tree and The Stalls Of Barchester). 

I really can't decide which is the most cool - the best Doctor Who ever telling you horror stories in Late Night Story or the best Dracula ever telling you ghost stories here ? They're both equally great to me. I make it my business to watch both series every year at Christmas time.

Sadly the Christopher Lee series was pretty much the last time this type of thing was done on British television. It still gets trotted out nearly every year as part of the Christmas schedules of the smaller BBC channels (usually BBC Four) so there's obviously still an audience for this type of thing. Why don't they do something similar again I wonder ? I'm guessing it's because modern TV audiences probably haven't got the attention span to just sit and listen to a good actor telling a good story in a basic setting without having to fall back on CGI special effects and big explosions. It's a shame, the power of the spoken word seems to be a dying art.

Oh well, maybe someday a nostalgic thinking TV producer of the future feeling jaded with all the Netflix influenced flash, bang and wallop will find it within themselves to go back to basics and commission something like this again. That really would be a great Christmas present. We can but hope.