A Ghost Story for Christmas Christmas specials

About the show

The BBC's strand of short, late-night ghost films for the Christmas season. It began on Christmas Eve 1971 with The Stalls of Barchester, directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, and ran every year to 1978: five M. R. James adaptations, Dickens's The Signalman and two original stories, shot on film on location and shown close to midnight. BBC Four revived the idea in 2005 and 2006, and since Mark Gatiss's The Tractate Middoth in 2013, and every year from 2018, Gatiss has written and directed a new half-hour tale, mostly from M. R. James but also from Arthur Conan Doyle, E. Nesbit and E. F. Benson. They are quiet, chilly and genuinely frightening, a counterweight to the tinsel in the Christmas schedules.