The ghost story, first as an oral tradition and later as a literary genre,
remains among the most long-lived and flexible of narrative forms, proving as
popular on the small screen as at the cinema, in the theatre or on the page. The
supernatural was a regular feature of classical drama - ghosts are crucial to
the dramatic development of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth for instance -
but the ghost story only emerged as a distinct genre in the Victorian era, with
its fascinations with spiritualism.
In 1843 Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol forever tied the festive season
to the genre. The dozens of TV adaptations and parodies include the musical The
Merry Christmas (ITV, tx. 21/12/1955), Carry On Christmas (ITV, 24/12/1969),
with Sid James as Scrooge, and Blackadder's Christmas Carol (BBC, tx.
23/12/1988), but the BBC's more faithful A Christmas Carol (tx. 24/12/1977),
with Michael Hordern a near-perfect Scrooge, is probably definitive. Dickens
wrote several Christmas ghost stories, and Andrew Davies' adaptation of The
Signalman (BBC, tx. 22/12/1976) is one of the most frightening television works
of its kind. Dickens also inspired other writers to write supernatural stories,
and Leslie Magahey chose one of these, by J. Sheridan LeFanu, as the basis for
his intriguing Schalcken the Painter (BBC, tx 23/12/1979).
However, the most influential writer in the genre remains Montague Rhodes
James, not least because he devoted his entire fictional output to the ghost
story, commenting late in life that he "never cared to try any other kind". One
of the first British television adaptations of his work was Two Ghost Stories by
M.R. James (BBC, tx. 14/10/1954), produced by a young Tony Richardson, with a
great many others following in its wake, including four episodes of Mystery and
Imagination (ITV, 1966-70) and Jonathan Miller's magnificent Whistle and I'll
Come to You (BBC, tx. 7/5/1968), with Michael Hordern starring as a kind of
James surrogate. The latter's success led to the Ghost Story for Christmas (BBC, 1971-78)
strand, which featured five superlative adaptations of James' stories: Stalls of
Barchester (tx. 24/12/1971), Warning to the Curious (tx. 24/12/1972), Lost
Hearts (tx. 25/12/1973), The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (tx. 23/12/1974) and The
Ash Tree (tx. 23/12/1975). Christopher Lee played James reciting his own stories
in Christopher Lee's Ghost Stories for Christmas (BBC, 2000).
James established the style of the traditional ghost story, set in the recent
past and full of barely-glimpsed horrors in often isolated locations, his
innocent but flawed protagonists frequently coming to very sticky ends. A modern
approach for the post-war, post-nuclear age was established by Nigel Kneale, who
provided scientific rationales for a variety of psychic phenomena in such
groundbreaking works as Quatermass and the Pit (BBC, 1958-59), the sadly
unrecorded The Road (BBC, tx. 29/9/1963), in which the terrifying monsters turn out
to be time-traveling flashes from the 20th century, and the magnificent The
Stone Tape (BBC, tx. 25/12/1972).
Other writers who have brought a more modern sensibility and a greater
seriousness to the genre include Don Taylor, whose terrifying The Exorcism (Dead of NightBBC, tx. 5/11/1972) is both a Marxist tract and an ingenious haunted house story, feminist
author Fay Weldon, who has contributed such memorable plays as 'Comfortable
Words' (Menace, BBC, tx. 17/5/1973) and 'Watching Me, Watching You' (Leap
in the Dark, ITV, tx. 5/10/1980), and Kingsley Amis, whose sly wit is evident in 'The
Ferryman' (Haunted, ITV, tx. 23/12/1974) and, especially, The Green Man (BBC, 1990),
starring Albert Finney in a darkly comic fantasy set in a Hertfordshire pub.
The genre's flexibility has seen supernatural comedies prove almost as common
as stories intended to frighten. Oscar Wilde set the style in The Canterville
Ghost, which has been adapted several times, most memorably with David Niven
(ITV, tx. 31/12/1974) and Ian Richardson (ITV, tx. 26/12/1997). The comic
potential of the genre has been further explored in Nöel Coward's classic farce
Blithe Spirit (ITV, 17/8/1964, starring Hattie Jacques), in the amiable
supernatural private eye hybrid Randall and (Hopkirk) Deceased (ITV, 1969-70;
remade BBC, 2000-01), and in such children's series as Richard Carpenter's
delightful The Ghosts of Motley Hall (ITV, 1976-78) and the rather less subtle
but hugely popular Rentaghost (BBC, 1976-84).
Many popular children's series have explored the boundaries of the
supernatural, from the highly original fantasy The Owl Service (ITV, 1969-70) to
the more traditional The Clifton House Mystery (ITV, 1978). Other examples
include Emily's Ghost (Channel 4, tx. 9/4/1994), the adaptation of Terry
Pratchett's Johnny and the Dead (ITV, 1995) and the sitcom My Dead Dad (Channel
4, 1992). Supernatural sitcoms aimed at adults include the popular
Jewish-mother-from-the-grave series So Haunt Me (BBC, 1992-94), and Mulberry
(BBC, 1992-93), with Karl Howman eventually revealed as an apprentice grim
reaper sent to bring an aging lady back with him.
But the most common home for ghostly tales on television have been anthology
series, among them Saturday-Night Stories (BBC, 1948-49), with Algernon
Blackwood reading his own work, Late Night Horror (BBC, 1968) and Playhouse: The
Mind Beyond (BBC, 1976). Late Night Story (BBC, 1978), had tales read by Tom
Baker, while Siren Spirits (BBC, 1994) collected stories by women from Africa,
Asia and the Caribbean. Attempts at traditional episodic television formats have
usually failed, a case in point being Haunted (ITV, 1967-68; 1974), starring
Patrick Mower, which had its original run curtailed. Recent attempts include
Stephen Volk's superior Afterlife (ITV, 2005), starring Lesley Sharp as a
troubled clairvoyant.
Volk's Ghostwatch (BBC, tx. 31/10/1992), like The Stone Tape, is a
traditional haunted house story given a technological twist (it masquerades as a
live broadcast), and is one of the few feature-length ghosts stories that is
able to sustain its running time (another is Kneale's The Woman in Black, ITV,
tx. 24/12/1989) and which has proved to be remarkably prescient in the light of
the popular 'reality' cable series Most Haunted (Living TV, 2002- ).
The genre has returned to its roots recently, with such efforts as the Doctor
Who (BBC, 1963-89; 2005- ) episode, 'The Unquiet Dead' (tx. 9/4/2005), featuring
Simon Callow as Charles Dickens investigating ghostly activities at Christmas,
while the BBC has also revived its Ghost Story at Christmas strand with a new
adaptation of an M.R. James story, A View from the Hill (BBC4, tx. 23/12/2005).
Sergio Angelini
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