Jan 10, 2024
A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Signalman (BBC, 1976)
"The tunnel collision is the worst to be feared. Your nightmares would go hard to equal it. The wreckage becomes hideously compressed in the confined space. If fire breaks out, the tunnel and its ventilating shafts become furnace flues. You cannot see in the dark to get the wreckage and the bodies out. The screams of the injured and dying echo in a most... persistent way. It's the shape of the tunnel, you see, sir."
#a ghost story for christmas#the signalman#charles dickens#single play#horror tv#1976#bbc#classic tv#andrew davies#lawrence gordon clark#denholm elliott#bernard lloyd#reginald jessup#carina wyeth#rosemary hill#holds a very special place in my heart as not only the first of the LGC Ghost Stories i ever saw (a late night bbc repeat many years ago#and before they were all so readily available) but also as perhaps the first ghost story i ever read: i was gifted a book of ghostly tales#as a small child (a bizarre choice as i was a trembling flower of a child who feared absolutely everything) and i have never forgotten the#cover‚ an illustration of the titular signalman waving his flag in thick mist or smoke. it has remained a favourite tho‚ perhaps bc#it hits on some of my very favourite ideas and tropes in horror fiction: the self fulfilling prophecy‚ the inevitability of an event and#the echoes it casts‚ backwards as well as forwards; horror as a cycle or ouroboros‚ where the victim and the monster (for want of a better#term: the supernatural perhaps) are one and the same but the realisation comes too late. Davies' script works hard to pack a lot of this in#to a modest running time (a notable early work from him and one of his first adaptations of a victorian work‚ something that has become#in many ways the focus of his career and at which he truly excels). largely a two hander between Lloyd's well meaning skeptic and the#peerless Elliott as the troubled railwayman‚ but Clark is working as hard as ever to make the setting and the decor into just as vital#characters (could a more foreboding and significant looking train tunnel even exist? a spectacular find by someone at the bbc)#not perhaps the archetypal LGC ghost story for christmas (it's not a James story for a start) but a genuinely superlative example of#the ghost story as told for the medium of television.