#BBC Ghost Stories For Christmas

[oculus-de-malus]

BBC's Ghost Stories for Christmas: The Signalman (1976)

[oldtvandcomics]

Getting ready for some quality Christmas ghost stories / horror. It is still a bit early for it if you ask me, but then again, so are the shops trying to sell us stuff.

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

A Warning to the Curious (Lawrence Gordon Clark, 1972)

[quillandrapier]

So what was the point of Last Resort?

[mariocki]

A Ghost Story for Christmas: Lot No. 249 (BBC, 2023)

"Well, I've given you my opinion. I stand flat-footed upon the ground and there I must remain. The world is big enough for us; no ghosts need apply."

[cor-ardens-archive]

Stigma (1977, Lawrence Gordon Clark)

[sixminutestoriesblog]

Christmas ghost stories

I hope that you are, each and every one of you, having a special day today, whether you celebrate anything or not. I hope that you get to spend today with people you care about, doing things that make you happy. I hope you get what you need, whether it can be wrapped or not and I hope that when the night falls, it falls with peace for you. If I was a magical saint I would make sure those were the gifts I gave today.

But, since I'm not a magical saint, just a blog on tumblr, I'll give you a small thing instead and hope for the bigger ones.

We all know the Victorians had some weird ways of celebrating things, from spending parties setting up macabre scenes for a photo shoot to trying to talk to the dead complete with slime trails to adults playing hide and seek so well that they'd got a story about a bride getting locked and lost in a storage trunk, the Victorians certainly had a Halloween kind of bent to a lot of their celebrations. And Christmas is no different. Sure, Christmas trees were coming into vogue thanks to Queen Victoria's German husband and, by now, we've seen what they considered festive holiday cards but there were still a lot of traditions they celebrated back then that didn't make it into modern day holiday traditions. And while I am very glad that we don't regularly participate in putting flaming raisins in our mouths anymore as a party game, I do miss one of the 'round out the night' traditions most Christmas gatherings had way back in the when of Victorian times.

"There'll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago."

One thing the Victorians did that we do not was to end Christmas eve with a proper ghost story. After the festivals had slowed down, and everyone that had needed medical care was treated, it was time to gather around the fireplace in comfortable chairs and settle in for a story designed to set your hair on end. We think Dicken's A Christmas Carol is a Christmas story that happens to have ghosts in it but originally, it was a ghost story that happened to be a Christmas one. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James even prefaces the actual ghost part of the story by starting things off as a tale told between friends on Christmas eve. Telling stories around the fire, surrounded by the cold dark, has to be one of the oldest human traditions and it certainly was a part of any truly memorable Victorian holiday gathering.

So.

Merry Christmas eve if you celebrate it and merry greeting in the dead of winter if you don't. Let's gather around a fireplace together, with out tasty cups warm in our hands, the thick blankets tucked in soft around us, the steady back of a cushioned chair to keep up safe and someone's familiar, welcome voice in our ears. My Halloween ghost story is here

but maybe we also want to hear our story tonight.

From a familiar voice on this darkest of nights.

[owllog1991]

A Ghost Story For Christmas

The Stalls Of Barchester

[oculus-de-malus]

BBC's Ghost Stories for Christmas: Lost Hearts (1973)

[cultfaction]

Cult Faction Podcast Ep. 79: 100 Years of the BBC (Part 1)

Cult Faction Podcast Ep. 79: 100 Years of the BBC (Part 1)

This week’s episode is the first part of our celebration of 100 years of the BBC aka the British Broadcasting Corporation. We look back at what programmes stood out for us and why! Expect conversations on Rentaghost, The Box of Delights, Neverwhere, The Children of Green Knowe, Moondial, The Witches and The Grinnygog, The Worst Witch, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Running Scared, M*A*S*H, Fawlty Towers,…

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

A Warning to the Curious (Lawrence Gordon Clark, 1972)

[eurofox]

Damn, the BBC ghost story this year was a letdown.

I like a swedish setting and the one they did last year, the mezzanine, was quite good and a bit different storywise, so I had high hopes but this wasn't anywhere near as interesting.

They tried to do WAY too much scene setting when they only had 40 minutes of runtime to play with. Not enough time to care about the characters or build up suspense about the ghost. It had one mild jumpscare and that's about it for the creep factor. Also it may as well have been set in England for how swedish it felt.

It turns out the BBC has wanted to adapt this story for about 45 years, so I don't get why they settled on something so mediocre.

If it had been split into 2 hour long episodes they probably would have had something interesting but this was just so rushed and painfully mild. Shame 😞

[nestofstraightlines]

Had a gander at the BBC Christmas line-up with a particular view to how Auntie will be attempting to put the willies up us this festive season.

It’s churlish of me to note that’s there’s another M. R. James adaptation with anything other than gladness that the BBC continues to put money into ghosty drama, I just wish these adaptations weren’t the exclusive franchise of Mark Gatiss. His passion for horror in general and James in particular is clearly huge but maybe that’s the problem. The whiff of desperation.

But I’m much more optimistic that his fellow League alumni will actually  be capturing the chilly spirit (SPIRIT!) of A Ghost Story for Christmas with a spooky  special of Inside No. 9.

[mariocki]

A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (BBC, 1974)

"In what other parish church in the advowson of the good Abbot Thomas shall we find Bartholomew, Jude, Simon and Matthias all together in one window?"

"Not the 'good' Abbot Thomas, Peter. That was never suggested, not even by himself."

[filmhoundsmag]

Ghost Stories for Christmas (Blu-ray Review)

Ghost Stories for Christmas (Blu-ray Review)

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