In this week’s blog, QUB’s Dr Derek Johnston discusses Christmas ghost stories on British television and the distortion of broadcast history:
To announce the forthcoming broadcast of Mark Gatiss’ 2013 adaptation The Tractate Middoth and the accompanying documentary on M.R. James, Ghost Writer, the BBC press release stated that ‘These two complementary films will reinvigorate the long and popular BBC Two tradition of a festive ghost story for audiences to enjoy over Christmas.’ Which seems reasonable enough, as a press release. It promotes new programming by emphasising how it offers something new (‘reinvigorate’) to an existing and so familiar practice: a classic advertising ploy. Memories of enjoying those BBC Two Christmas ghost stories are activated in order to draw in the audience for the new one.
The Tractate Middoth, BBC, 2013.
Only there’s a problem with this connection to an existing tradition. It’s not exactly true.
Yes, there is a long tradition of Christmas ghost stories on British television and radio, and stretching back before that through literature and oral tradition. Unusually for ‘ancient’ traditions, which usually turn out to have been invented in the 19th or 20th centuries, telling ghostly stories by the festive fire seems to be a genuinely ancient practice. What has changed seems to be the mode of delivery rather than the type of story and its connection with the season: from ‘winter’s tales’ told to family and friends, to reading aloud to the family the latest Christmas spook tale from Wilkie Collins or Charles Dickens or Margaret Oliphant, to gathering around radio or television to be presented with the chilling narrative. That part of the claim is not the problem.
The problem lies with the claim that this is a ‘long and popular BBC Two tradition’. Because it is not.
Gatiss’ adaptation drew consciously and actively on the series of Ghost Stories for Christmas broadcast by the BBC across the 1970s. Originated by director Lawrence Gordon Clarke, these were largely adaptations of the work of M.R. James, but included a version of Dickens’ The Signalman and a couple of original stories with a modern, 1970s setting. Gatiss draws on Clarke’s style and direction, itself drawing on James’ approach to the ghost story, which is strong in atmosphere and location, restrained and subtle, but with moments of direct, visual and tactile horror. In Clarke’s adaptations, such moments include a man’s face cut deeply across with a billhook, a child with his chest gaping open to reveal that his heart has been cut out, and weird spider-babies that leave a man dead and blackened in his bed. Gatiss picks up on these moments, and on the recurring spider imagery found in James’ stories, to provide a story where dust dancing in beams of light is ominous, where libraries contain terrors, where a spider crossing a threshold suggests doom will follow, and where there are moments of terrifying revelation of a decayed face. In other words, Gatiss is clearly fitting in with these earlier programmes in content and in style.
And he is not the first to do so. In 2008 and 2009 there were productions of A View from a Hill and Number 13 that also adapted M.R. James stories for the BBC, in a style derived from Clarke’s. Indeed, not only did Sarah Dempster in The Guardian refer to A View From a Hill as ‘a vintage AGSFC [‘A Ghost Story For Christmas’] production’, but BBC Four executive Mark Bell in the same article is quoted as saying that the idea was not just to start producing more M.R. James adaptations, but that ‘It’s about continuing a classic tradition.’
Yes, ‘BBC Four executive’. That’s not a slip of the keyboard. Because A View From a Hill and Number 13 were made for BBC Four, not BBC Two.
And the original A Ghost Story for Christmas productions from the 1970s were broadcast on BBC One.
This is not to say that there have not been Christmas ghost stories on BBC Two, including repeats of the 1970s A Ghost Story for Christmas programmes. The year 2000 brought Christopher Lee’s Ghost Stories for Christmas, in which Lee played M.R. James, reading a selection of his ghost stories in a very vague approximation of the way that James himself told his stories on Christmas Eve to students and friends in his study. That was a BBC Two original.
But the 2010 Whistle and I’ll Come to You was a BBC One production, back where the Ghost Story for Christmas originated. In that, writer Neil Cross went back not just to M.R. James short story, and to the Robert Burns poem that supplied its title, but also to the Jonathan Miller adaptation of ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ that he made for arts documentary series Omnibus in 1968. That production, in which Miller made significant changes to the characters of James’ tale in order to support his interpretation of ghost stories as being about fusty old academics frightened of life, was a strong stylistic influence on the 1970s Ghost Story for Christmas as well as demonstrating that this approach to these stories could work on television. It was also shown in May, so was not a ‘ghost story for Christmas’, even though the BFI included it in their Ghost Stories for Christmas DVD set.
And it was shown on BBC One.
But does it really matter that someone writing a press release decided to claim ownership of a particular tradition for BBC Two when really the tradition belonged to BBC One? Does it really matter that the BFI includes a programme in their Ghost Stories for Christmas set that was not originally shown at Christmas, especially when it was influential on the programmes that were?
This is where we come to the public history aspect of this, and particularly the concerns with how history is constructed publicly. For the purposes of marketing, both of the choices questioned above are perfectly understandable. However, in fulfilling their promotional function, they represent a distortion of history. A minor one, to be sure, but a distortion nonetheless.
These distortions can add up, building through repetition, reinforcing misconceptions and misremembering. When I have spoken publicly about the Christmas ghost story, many people have reminisced about the Jonathan Miller Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, despite it not being a Christmas ghost story. In Peter Haining’s introduction to M.R. James’ ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ in The Television Late Night Horror Omnibus he includes Leslie Megahey’s 1979 Omnibus episode “Schalcken the Painter” as a Ghost Story for Christmas. It was, in so much as it was a period adaptation presented at Christmas, and it was scheduled in part due to the success of the M.R. James adaptations in The Ghost Story for Christmas, but it was not part of that series. Haining dates Megahey’s Omnibus episode to 1977 rather than 1979, and ignores the actual Ghost Story for Christmas episodes Stigma and The Ice House (the two modern-day tales) and states that ‘Since then [1977], the every-reliable Mr James has filled the bill’, despite the series ending after The Ice House, and Haining writing in the early 1990s.
Oh, and ‘Schalcken the Painter’ was shown on BBC One.
For the historian, these popular texts and framings may be little more than slightly-irritating distractions, potentially leading to a little lost time as they present possible avenues for exploration, which turn out to be misleading when the facts are checked. The particular history of the Christmas ghost story is itself a specialist interest, although it does speak interestingly to concepts of culture and identity. And here is where it is important to be correct about which channel has been the main host to the broadcast tradition, because if it is BBC Two or BBC Four, then it can be identified as a minority tradition, but when it is BBC One then that is a channel that is supposed to appeal to a broad audience, implying a greater popularity to and significance for the tradition. Again, though, the history is fairly easy to check, particularly with the BBC making their listings publicly available through the BBC Genome website.
M.R. James
The wider issues, though, are around the communication of history, including ideas of history that are not presented as History, but are simply traditions, ‘the way things are’. While the subject may be trivial, what it tells us about culture is not. And while the popularity of the original material may help to make it more appealing to a wider audience, if the first thing that a historian has to do is to correct misconceptions, then that leads to friction between them and the audience. In particular, the comfort that people find in their favoured subject can lead to them feeling threatened and discomforted on being told information or provided with an interpretation of the material that they do not agree with. And that shows us how these small misrepresentations, particularly when repeated and reinforced, can contribute to a wider issue of distrust of academic approaches and expert analysis, because it disrupts the comforting, familiar known ‘facts’.
And so academic study is itself haunted, not just by the past, but by possible pasts, by different interpretations and by ‘facts’ that, despite being untrue, keep coming back.
Dr Derek Johnston is a lecturer in the School of Arts. English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast. He teaches on the broadcast media, with a particular focus on genre studies and on the history of broadcasting. His research to date has tended to look at genres and their development as aspects of cultural change, as expressions of the historical shifts and continuities in popular culture. This focus has been on science fiction on British television, particularly in the period of the BBC monopoly from 1936-1955, and on the seasonal horror story, which led to the publication of Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween by Palgrave in 2015, which looked across radio, television and literature to provide a historical survey of seasonal horror. More broadly, he is interested in the uses of historical narratives, both factual and fictional and including history-made-fantastical, and the ways that they are used and form a part of personal and public history and so influence understanding and conceptualisation of history and its relation to the present.
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