An Evening’s Entertainment

On Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee (2000, BBC Scotland)

This essay is intended as a light introduction to a series on the ghost story writer M.R. James, some of his stories, and their television adaptations, as well as some related texts and phenomena, which I hope to post fairly regularly over the next few months.

*

In 2000, on four evenings over the Christmas period, BBC2 aired a series of half-hour programmes entitled Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee.

In a previous essay, I wrote a little about my childhood introduction to ghost stories.  I’ve spoken on podcasts about my near-lifelong love of Hammer films.  It will be no surprise then that 24-year-old me tuned in to this series, and recorded the episodes on a home VHS recorder.

Three of the episodes have long been available on the various versions of the BFI DVD/blu-ray box-set of television Ghost Stories for Christmas, whereas one – ‘The Ash Tree’ – was never released owing to rights issues over music used in it.  The BBC – with its special rights arrangements – used part of the musical score by Howard Shore for the 1986 film The Name of the Rose in the background of the Ash Tree episode, which subsequently made it impossible to release commercially.  The episode has since been repeated – for the first time in years – on BBC Four, as part of the resurrection of the whole idea of British television ghost stories at Christmas which began in the mid-aughts.  For a while, however, the only way people could see the Ash Tree episode of the Christopher Lee Christmas Ghost Stories was the rip of my own old VHS recording which I uploaded to YouTube.

While I was already enamoured with ghost stories and Horror in general, it was this 2000 series which began my fascination with the work of M.R. James.  With respect, I am not so interested in the man, except insofar as his life illuminates his work.  (L’homme c’est rien—l’oeuvre c’est tout, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle misquotes Flaubert in ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League’.)  But this television series was a quiet revelation to me.  A slow revelation too, as it only gradually dawned on me how great it was, and how great was its source material.

These episodes are the greatest screen adaptations of the work of M.R. James.  That is a bit of a claim, given the love and esteem in which the 1970s Lawrence Gordon Clark films are held.  Before I (sort of) defend it, let me talk around the issue a little.

As mentioned above, in the early aughts the BBC suddenly decided to remember its old tradition of adapting ghost stories – most famously the work of M.R. James – for Christmas dramas, and to resurrect the tradition.  (The early aughts were, of course, famously the moment when the BBC resurrected one of its other vintage series, with great success.)  The resurrected Christmas ghost story drama genre soon came under the stewardship of Mark Gatiss, and he also presented a documentary about M.R. James.

In 2000, it was far too early for such a resurrection.  While firmly in the past, the ghostly BBC dramas of the 1970s – largely produced and directed by Clark and mostly based on stories by James – were also too close in time to be reappraised, rescued, brought back, continued.  They were still in that strange uncanny valley of temporal distance – in the past but not long enough ago; recent but not recent enough – that keeps things from being part of the cultural cycle, from being allowed into main focus zone of cultural memory.

But for all that, the 2000 series is clearly indebted to the dramas of the 1970s.  It focuses on James, after all, and three of the stories it adapts are stories which were dramatized in the 70s by Clark, to wide and lasting acclaim.  The 2000 series is an attempt to do something of what the 1970s shows did, for a 2000s audience, and on a much smaller budget.

This series does not dramatize stories but rather purports to dramatize the occasions when M.R. James himself would tell his stories to students on Christmas Eve.  Christopher Lee plays James, and the episodes consist almost entirely of him sitting in a chair narrating a memorised version of a James story – complete with his own errors of memory – to a silent audience of young undergraduates.  Lee’s total lack of resemblance to James matches the total lack of resemblance of the events we see to the actual Christmas meetings of the Chit-Chat Club/Society.  In the television episodes, Lee’s James is playing it dead straight, refusing to break character from the fictive narrator of his own text, refusing to break the frame of the story he is relating.  He might almost be claiming to be relating actual events.  The extras playing his audience react in wordless, nervous awe.  In reality, meetings of the Chit-Chat Club were rambunctious social events, and it is hard to imagine that anyone – including James – treated his readings as deadly serious and terrifying rituals.  But that is how these pieces of television from 2000 chose to reframe them.  The reflexive element introduced by making adaptations of James’ readings rather than dramatizations of his stories themselves does not, as might have been feared, lead to any kind of smug, knowing distance.  Products of a moment just before the last vestiges of British television Gothic became finally and forever irony-and-nostalgia-poisoned, these adaptations seek to straight-facedly convey the effect of the stories while evoking something of the delicious fictional atmosphere of dreaming spires in the bleak midwinter in the early, pre-Great War twentieth century.  Made at the turn of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, they are part of the wave of BBC television programmes of those years – People’s Century, Renaissance, The Adventure of English, etc – which seek to mark a simultaneously vast and bathetic calendrical shift with ponderings on equivalent ‘bookmark’ moments in the past.

Lee’s style in these performances is fascinating.  To understand it, one has to understand what it isn’t quite.  And to understand what it isn’t quite, one has to know about the tradition – once very common and venerable on British television – of TV shows in which a person simply sits or stands (or even walks around!) in front of the camera and tells a story.  These days, even television drama hardly tells stories as such, preferring the centreless labyrinth of soapish, Netflixified, eternally-blocked, endlessly-rambling plot to anything with an actual coherent and aimful narrative.  (One is tempted to adapt E.M. Forster’s sad joke from his book Aspects of the Novel and remark “yes – oh dear yes – the television programme tells a story”.)  I grew up watching shows that were basically nothing more than an actor, on their own, telling a story to the audience via the camera.  I believe they still exist, in a very altered form, in television for small children.  Once, they were also made for adults.  Indeed, they were quite a common way for television to adapt ghost stories and weird tales.  Nowadays narrative television is afraid of looking cheap, of looking like television, above all else, so such shows are all but extinct.  Consisting of little more than a person, perhaps with an appropriate setting and some moody lighting, the things of today they most resemble are independent, low-budget YouTube videos.  And, mercifully, such videos are generally non-fiction in subject matter.  But they share a basic attribute: the actor or presenter looks at the camera and talks to you.  This is not uncommon, of course, but it does have a subtly different feel to it when the person talking to you is telling you a story.

Lee in the Ghost Stories for Christmas programmes is almost doing what the presenters of the storytelling shows do.  He is telling you a story in an appropriate setting.  And yet the episodes have a veneer of dramatic diegesis about them, owing to the presence of other characters, albeit silent ones, and to the fact that Lee does not address the camera, and thus does not address you the viewer.  So who is talking?  Is it M.R. James or Christopher Lee?  The title of the series certainly suggests it is Lee.  The content of the shows asks you to accept that it is James.

Who is Lee playing?  Well, it varies.  Lee is using the conceit of playing James – in his college rooms, telling stories to undergraduates – as a sort of umbrella.  Beneath the umbrella, he is also playing himself.  How can he not?  He is Christopher Lee, and he brings the entire freight of British post-war Horror with him, his screen persona inevitably combining a huge contradictory mixture of poshness and sleaze, familiarity and menace, cultural capital and low culture, repression and sex.

(It is also crucial to remember about Christopher Lee that, for all the differences, he was ‘one of us’, that is: a geek.  He was a man who knew the Sherlock Holmes canon, and Poe, and The Lord of the Rings, and – yes – M.R. James, like the back of his large and surprisingly hairy hand.  He was a fan.  An enthusiast.  An obsessive.  A nerd for Horror and Fantasy.)

Under the same umbrella, Lee also plays other characters: the characters in the stories he/James is telling.  When, in ‘The Stalls of Barchester’, Lee as James is performing a reading from the diary of Archdeacon Haynes, he (Lee/James) performs the distress of Haynes, becoming Lee/James/Haynes.  He then slips back into the mode of Lee/James to comment on the distress.  Or rather, he slips into Lee/James/Narrator, since it is by no means clear that the narrator of the story is James, despite the story being written in a style which suggests James performed it as himself telling a story he had himself uncovered.

The four stories chosen for this series of adaptations – ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’, ‘The Ash Tree’, ‘Number 13’, and ‘A Warning to the Curious’ – are all James texts which are couched in a similar way, with the unnamed James/Narrator present in the story, either relaying a reconstructed story based on documentary evidence, or relaying a cousin’s experiences.  This is surely part of why they were chosen.  They can be personally relayed by someone who, in so doing, can seem to be telling you about something real that they heard of, or researched.  Not all James texts lend themselves tonally to this kind of adaptation.  James did not always write as if he were the narrator.  He employs the omniscient third person narrator, as in ‘The Haunted Dolls House’ and ‘Casting the Runes’.  Other stories couched in a style which would have fit with the 2000 television adaptations, i.e. the conditional first person, would be ‘Count Magnus’ and ‘The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance’…  In ‘A Warning to the Curious’, the Lee/James/Narrator becomes Lee/James himself as a result of the way the story is adapted, despite the narrator of the text presenting us with another person’s account.

Lee’s performance as James – or rather as Lee/James/Narrator/Characters – is simply astonishing.  He straddles the textual and dramatic ambiguities with total assurance.  He modulates his physical performance to an immense extent – from an armchair!  His voice flits from character to character, and in and out of his Lee/James/Narrator persona, seamlessly.  He uses strange emphasis and pauses, and moments of dithering over words, to give his recitation the texture of conversation, of a raconteur remembering, of testimony, of judgement, of trauma even – and all without losing the essentially literary nature of the words he is delivering.

And this is why these are the greatest screen adaptations of the work of M.R. James: because they are essentially not screen adaptations of the stories but something we might imprecisely call ‘televised literature’.  The Clark films are just that: films.  Made on a BBC budget, in TV aspect ratio, and for television broadcast, they are, nevertheless, films.  Crucially, they are shot on film rather than video – and this is an important point which I hope to develop later, also covering the digital recording of the new adaptations from recent years.  But even more crucially, the 1970s Clark films are adaptations of the stories whereas the 2000s episodes are, as stated above, notional but entirely fictional adaptations of events when James read the stories.  As such, they do not attempt to translate the stories out of their original form: literary text.  Keeping the stories in the form of literary text (while televising them) is, in fact, the whole point.

I am not saying that it is inherently better to keep literature as literature than to adapt it to narrative cinema.  I am rather making a specific point about the work of M.R. James, about what it is and about what it does (which are different ways of saying the same thing), and about how it does it.

The ghost story – at least as form – is, above all else, defined by the somatic effect it has on the reader.  The best ghost stories – and James’ best stories are among the best ghost stories ever written; James is for the most part a clear instance of ‘believe the hype’ – tend to derive their somatic effect from a mere one or two or three lines of text, with the rest of the story being little more than a kind of scaffolding or framework which exists in order to hold in place the one or two or three lines of text which produce the somatic effect.

I will not go into detail here – since to do so would be to anticipate the series which is hopefully coming – but what we find again and again in adaptations of James’ work is that the real somatic effect of his stories is lost in translation, and that, as a result, other things are imported by the adaptors in order to fill the resulting gap.

This happens for two related reasons.  Firstly, taking him out of text form destroys the somatic effect of his prose precisely because the somatic effect is necessarily predicated upon being caused by prose.  Formally James is, above all else, a literary stylist.  This will surprise some people; critics have long been inclined to write him off on this score.  But I maintain that it is true.  Secondly (and, as I say, relatedly), the somatic effects in question are inherently linked to the verbal constructions precisely because they convey the non-visual.

James is a writer of the tactile.  In terms of content, James is, above all else, concerned with the physical and tangible, the hairy and the slimy, the papery or the textile, the wet or the sharp or the squirming.  The exemplar of the spectral, his work is fanatically material.  This is the root of the well-known supposed paradox that James, often called the ‘father of the modern English ghost story’ (etc), rarely writes about ghosts as such.  It is also the root of the canard that he is unconsciously a writer of repressed Freudian yearnings, etc.  It is also – sorry about all these alsos, by the way – why James is a writer best read as concerned with the hard and physical threats of history and structure and power… but here we will break off for now.

Strangely enough, I don’t think we will have much more to say in this series about the Christopher Lee television readings; they are near perfect in-and-of themselves and thus require little interpretation.  As I say, they are the best adaptations – they alone really capture the quiddity of James work precisely because they relate his prose – but simultaneously they are also the worst, in that they are thus not really adaptations at all.  Even in their adaptation of historical events – M.R. James reading his stories to audiences at Christmas Eve gatherings at Kings College Cambridge – they do not actually adapt but merely pretend to adapt, in order to achieve one of those scafffoldings or frameworks we mentioned above, but of a televisual kind.  They are not adaptations so much as ways in which a visual medium can carry the signal of literature.  This is not what adaptations do, even if they consciously try to do it, and think they do it.

The signals of James texts, and the ways in which those signals are modulated, replicated, and replaced, in the process of adaptation in film, will be the subject of this series.