A Ghost Story for Christmas: Lot No 249, BBC Two, review: Mark Gatiss remains the king of spooks
Since his days dispensing gothic laughs in The League of Gentlemen, among the strings Mark Gatiss has added to his bow is petrifier-in-chief and scholarly professor of shrieks. In the last decade his ghost-story adaptations have become an annual treat which pay homage not only to MR James but also to television’s bygone era of half-hour chills. This year marks a departure. A Ghost Story for Christmas: Lot No 249 (BBC Two) is from the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle.
Published in 1892, it’s a High Victorian tale set in an Oxford college where Egyptology is a new-fangled product of empire – Egypt had been occupied by the British 10 years earlier. From this geopolitical fact Conan Doyle’s imagination conjured up what is acknowledged as the original mummy horror story.
The bandaged cadaver in question – the titular lot no 249 sold at auction – lies inertly gurning in the rooms of Edward Bellingham (Freddie Fox), a secretive orientalist who professes ignorance when creepy things start happening in the night, first to his pretty protégé Monkhouse Lee (Colin Ryan), then to stolidly unsuggestible medic Abercrombie Smith (Kit Harington).
Gatiss, as we know, has had previous dealings with Conan Doyle. While the source material has nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes, he can’t resist a tempting referential wink. Smith tells the whole tale to an unnamed friend (John Heffernan), a cool-headed rationalist who is thinking of moving to new rooms in Baker Street and proposes that they co-habit.
But this is a genre which has no business with detection, so this prototype Holmes is merely a curious listener. And anyway, Smith won’t be able to move to Baker Street or anywhere else. Bellingham, forced by Smith to destroy lot no 249 and all associated papyruses, turns out to have a lot no 250.
The mummy, embodied in rags by James Swanton without a stitch of CGI, makes for a satisfying ghoul. The night-time settings and yards of wood panelling add atmosphere. And Fox is a blissfully sinister foil to Harington’s stolid homo Victorianus, whose reserve dissolves into a weird, horrified laughter in the final image. How scary the story actually is might be better answered by those in the age bracket that Gatiss belonged to when he first got obsessed with horror. The biggest shock I got was hearing the phrase “colour me intrigued”, from a construction whose first usage was cited in 1962.
