Mark Gatiss looks splendidly dapper as he joins Empire for tea on the manicured lawn of Cobham Hall, Kent. Dressed in a light jacket, navy trousers and Colgate-white trainers, he strokes his closely clipped beard and removes his sunglasses to squint into the April sunshine. “It’s very spooky, ghastly,” he says with a mischievous grin. “E.F. Benson I was a big fan of. I read a lot of his as a child. And this one really scared me.”
The English actor, comedian, screenwriter, director, producer and novelist – who has built up a legion of fans with The League of Gentlemen, Doctor Who, Sherlock and so much more – is referring to Benson’s short story The Room In The Tower. First published in 1912, it presents an unnamed man who is haunted by a recurring dream in which he stays at a friend’s manor and is afforded the titular bed chamber by matriarch Mrs. Stone. As he enters the room he is overcome with a sense of dread. Who or what lurks there is never revealed in the dream, but the foreboding each time remains the same even as the faces of the dream-family grow older over the passing years. Then the terror ratchets up a notch when the man accepts an invitation to a friend’s house in real life, only to find that everything matches his spin-cycle nightmare. A thunderstorm gathers, and his friend’s mother offers him the room in the tower.
“I’m going to use a technical term – it’s a headfuck.”
Chilling? Sure, which is just what viewers want and expect from the BBC’s A Ghost Story For Christmas series. Originally running from 1971 to 1978, such classic instalments as ‘The Stalls Of Barchester’, ‘A Warning To The Curious’ (both based on M.R. James stories) and ‘The Signalman’ (Charles Dickens) showed that short television films could ice spines as effectively as the oral tradition of creepy yuletide tales spun by crackling fires. Gatiss heroically resurrected the tradition by adapting M.R. James’ ‘The Tractate Middoth’ in 2013, and has since made original story ‘The Dead Room’, James adaptations ‘Martin’s Close’, ‘The Mezzotint’ and ‘Count Magnus’, Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Lot No. 249’, and last year’s adaptation of E. Nesbit’s Man-Size Marble, retitled ‘Woman Of Stone’. ‘The Room In The Tower’ marks his eighth Ghost Story, meaning he’s overtaken original ’70s director Lawrence Gordon Clark, who made seven for the BBC.
“Yes, indeed, I’ve surpassed him,” grins Gatiss. “Well, in terms of numbers. He’s a huge hero of mine and a huge influence. To carry on the tradition… The thing I’m proudest of now, touch wood, is making it regular, because the first one I did was in 2013, and then I wanted to carry on and it was explained to me, many times, ‘There’s no money, it’s an extinct form – the half-hour play.’ Eventually I browbeat them for so long that in 2018, Cassian Harrison at BBC4 said, ‘Can you do it for x amount of money?’ I said, ‘Yes!’ So I wrote ‘The Dead Room’, a three-hander. And now it’s become an IP again.”
Today Cobham Hall is partying like it’s 1939, all gold-framed mirrors, deep rugs and a grand piano. Outside, between perfectly clipped hedges, the crew spread out a vast picnic blanket, then lay out wooden chairs and cushions. China cups and a silver teapot adorn a tea trolley, while a table is laden with cakes, biscuits and a Battenberg sponge. Gatiss’ father-in-law stands by in waistcoat and tails, playing a butler.
Gatiss calls “action” and our dream man, now named Roger (Tobias Menzies), arrives in the grounds and is guided towards the picnic by his friend, John (Ben Mansfield). The camera dollies across the lawn, tracking them towards a group of figures. Cricket jumpers, tweed suits and white plimsolls are the order of the day, and both Roger and John sport dashing moustaches. “That’s all Tudor, until the Georgian addition,” John says, waving nonchalantly at the manor. Roger looks to the sky and mutters, “I wonder if we shan’t have a storm later.”
“What we usually try to do is find a big house,” explains Gatiss, himself now waving at Cobham Hall. The red-brick structure was built in 1584 and currently serves as a boarding school for 11 to 19 year-olds; the production is shooting during Easter break. “We had a college for ‘Lot No. 249’. ‘Mezzotint’ was the school. It’s like finding a mini-studio. That’s what you need because time is the enemy, and if you’re moving around, you lose it.”
‘The Room In The Tower’ might lend itself to being filmed in one location over a five-day period (“One day more than we used to have – it’s luxurious,” laughs Gatiss), but the story spans from 1906 to 1944. As well as the various dream sequences from over the years, there is the real-life frightmare that takes place in 1939, and then the framing device, as Roger recounts the uncanny tale while hunkering in a bomb shelter in 1944. All these time changes mean that the makeup and wigs room is a veritable menagerie of hairpieces, while 13 rails of clothing cater for costume changes.
“I’m going to use a technical term – it’s a headfuck,” says Gatiss. “And it’s been a headfuck for everyone. If we had all of the time in the world, you’d just lock off the camera and do it all one [time period] after the other. But we’ve been nipping back and forth. Yesterday, in the tower, we went from 1906 to 1930 to 1918. It’s tough.”
Ah, the tower. Empire asks if a peek into the malevolent room that thrums at its uppermost reaches might be granted, and is met with a grin. It’s soon clear why: here is the spiral staircase, but it’s really just a couple of curves that will be shot again and again to mark the steep ascent. And here, on the ground floor, is the room at the top: single bed, marble dresser, wardrobe, bedstand, lamp. It’s here that Roger will meet… well, no spoilers, but safe to say it’s a shattering climax.
“Hopefully it offers some genuine chills that’ll make viewers stay a few more minutes by the fire.”
“I’m on the receiving end this time, and it’s about time – I probably deserve it,” chuckles lead actor Tobias Menzies, who is best known for playing bad guys such as Jonathan ‘Black Jack’ Randall in Outlander. Menzies’ Prince Philip in The Crown is arrogant, sexist and unfaithful, while even Game Of Thrones’ Edmure Tully, a well-meaning lord who cares about the common people, is naïve, bumbling and incompetent. “It’s fun to be on the other side! This a genre piece so we try and make it as hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck as possible. Hopefully it’ll get under the skin of audience.”
As for Mrs. Stone, the woman who allocates Roger the room in the tower in his recurring dream, she is being played by none other than Joanna Lumley. “She’s absolutely fabulous,” says Gatiss with what can only be described as a cackle. “Such a gorgeous person, doing it for tuppence ha’penny.” Sadly Lumley has already finished her scenes and exited Cobham Hall. “She loved it. She was excited by the prosthetics. She hasn’t done much. She did a little bit on Ab Fab and a little bit on James And The Giant Peach, but not much. She was pulling all kinds of wonderful faces in the make-up test. She’s a legend.”
Gatiss is clearly excited by the horrific final scene in his latest adaptation, and is keen to speak of it while being careful not to give anything away. “What I’ve learned, through brutal experience, is to start with [the finale],” he says, explaining that it was shot three days ago. “For instance, at the end of ‘The Mezzotint’, when the creature comes through the window, we did that last. And I thought, ‘Why have we done this?’ So now it’s, ‘This is the important scare, we do it first, we can compromise later on.’”
Menzies chuckles. “Hopefully it offers some genuine chills that’ll make viewers stay a few more minutes by the fire, and not go to bed.”
And will there be a twist ending to surprise even those who have read the story? Gatiss is renowned for them, after all. “Oh, maybe! We love to do it. Weirdly, a lot of the [literary stories] do just tail off. On the page that’s OK, but my adaptations have a strong whiff of EC Comics. They’re about people being punished far too severely for a very minor incident, or for nothing at all.” He slides his shades back on, ready to return to work. “It’s like a joke. You have to have a punchline.”
A Ghost Story For Christmas: The Room In The Tower airs on December 24 at 10 PM on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer
