Jan 1
A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Room in the Tower (BBC, 2025)
"Jack will show you to your room. I’ve given you the room in the tower."
#a ghost story for christmas#the room in the tower#bbc#horror tv#single play#2025#e.f. benson#mark gatiss#tobias menzies#joanna lumley#nancy carroll#ben mansfield#polly walker#blair mowat#eve doherty#isibéal ballance#gatiss‚ gatiss‚ what am i going to do with you#i will always champion his xmas ghost story revival‚ and im inordinately happy they continue to creep into the festive schedule each year#but the man cannot resist his baser instincts. for the most part this is a very fine entry in the canon: a thoughtful and mostly quite#faithful adaptation of Benson's short story (with the addition of a nesting narrative around the story‚ fairly common in the form)#Benson of course is best remembered for his rather camp comic novels‚ particularly Mapp and Lucia‚ but he was also a fine writer of the#spooky short story. and this is pretty great! Menzies is excellent‚ a very low key‚ quiet performance which sells the nervousness of a man#long living with a recurring terror. the emphasis is on mood and atmosphere‚ and the scares are in glimpses and suggestions which is#absolutely how this genre works best. alas. Mark cannot contain himself and has to end with a tawdry jumpscare right down the camera#pure horror‚ rather than the subtle discomfort of the well told ghost story. even as the shroud was being pulled away i was saying to mysel#(internally) don't show it‚ don't actually show it! implication always beats out direct revelation in these things. sigh. but there we go.#excepting for the very finále this is a strong play and continues the upswing in quality for this series that began with last year's Woman#of Stone (the year before having been probably the nadir of the anthology‚ the crassly executed Lot no.249)#show don't tell‚ as we all know; but in ghost stories it should be added‚ the less you actually show the better the effect
