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22 December 2022

Mark Gatiss has become the modern master of Christmas ghost stories. Not only does he star this festive season as Jacob Marley in his own theatrical retelling of A Christmas Carol, he also serves up the latest of his classic M.R. James adaptations, Count Magnus.

Mark Gatiss turbocharged his career as a dramatist on Sherlock and Doctor Who, and Count Magnus is the latest of his ghost tales that have resurrected and reinforced a much-loved Christmas tradition.

Back in 2019, Gatiss told the Radio Times: “The one everyone has always wanted to do is Count Magnus. Unfortunately it's set in Sweden - but it's possible!”

The half-hour drama, set in 1863 and based on a 1904 short story by M.R. James, is a highlight of this year's festive schedule. Gatiss says:

“It’s an absolute thrill to be bringing one of M.R. James’ most beloved tales to life for this year’s ghost story.

“The Count casts a long shadow and I hope we can all relish being in his thrall this Christmas.”

Count Magnus follows the success of James adaptations The Mezzotint (2021), Martin’s Close (2019) and Tractate Middoth in 2013, and original scripts The Dead Room (2018) and The Crooked House in 2008.

For a flavour of the ghost story experience ahead of the 23 December debut of the new story, The Dead Room, The Mezzotint and Martin's Close are all available to watch on iPlayer.

In Count Magnus, Jason Watkins (W1A, The Crown) plays Mr Wraxhall, an inquisitive character who becomes fascinated by the long-dead founder of a Swedish family and discovers that the dreaded aristocrat may not lie easy in his tomb.

Watkins said of his character, “he has this really unhealthy fascination with things that you should be leaving alone”.

“There are red flags waved in front of him all the way through that he doesn't read,” he told ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio Four’s Today programme.

“He is not particularly emotionally intelligent, but he has this sort of fascination with Count Magnus and the family.”

These modern adaptations by Mark Gatiss embrace the reticence of the original strand that aired in the 1970s, primarily on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ.

Those spooked the young Gatiss, and ultimately inspired him to continue the tradition. They were mainly directed by , who appeared in Ghost Writer, Mark's 2013 documentary about M.R. James.

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Arts spoke to Gatiss as production wrapped on The Dead Room in 2018, to try to get to the heart of what makes the tradition special - and necessary.

“There is no music. The score is entirely created from sound effects. I love that about Clark’s Ghost Stories. They’re very spare.

“You don’t see the ghost for a long time, and there’s a slow accumulation of dread. It really does exert something very special if you get it right. If you don’t overdo it, it brings you to a very particular place of fear.”

The rules of the genre

Not far into Mark Gatiss’s supernatural tale The Dead Room, the lead character, a seasoned ham called Aubrey Judd played by Simon Callow, decides to explain the essence of the ghost story.

Aubrey, an actor no longer at the peak of his fame, has been “bringing mild disquiet to radio listeners since 1976”, and he understands the formula.

First of all, there must be calm. “And into this apparent calm... the Bad Thing rears its ugly head.”

The story, to work, requires restraint. “Hold back,” Aubrey suggests, “always hold back until the climax.”

The innuendo is deliberate, of course, because Aubrey is an inappropriate old luvvie, and Gatiss is using him to explain the rules of the genre as set down by M.R. James. Gatiss recalled:

“I used to do The Man in Black on Radio 4 Extra. That was a big moment for me, because Valentine Dyall did it during the war and it was a very famous thing. The producer was always asking me if I’d write one of the stories.

I said, 'All right, I’ll do the very last one - I know what it will be. It's called The Dead Room, because it's set in this radio studio, and it should be about me being haunted, so it’s a completely meta thing.'”

The idea lay dormant for a while, and then sprang to life when Gatiss was offered a low-budget commission by ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Four. Suddenly, filming the making of a radio show made sense.

He said, “It's modern, so I want to make it about sound. Applying M.R. James’s rules, he thinks the ideal ghost should be from about 30 or 40 years ago. That means that the ghost needs to be from the 1970s. I don't think I’ve ever seen a ghost from the Seventies, and I thought, 'Hmmm, interesting'.”

Other rules set down by James suggest that the ghost must be malevolent. “He had no time for friendly ghosts. And one of his big things is, of course, no sex. I broke that rule.”

For Gatiss, repression is clearly a a big part of James's work: “Modern psychologists have a field day with James's stories. There's an extraordinary moment in one of them when the protagonist puts his hand under the pillow. He’s telling it to a friend, and he says: 'It was a mouth, with teeth and hair, but not the mouth of a human being'. That’s one of my favourites. It’s entirely . He’s afraid of hairy things, of women, definitely.”