Lot No. 249

Mark Gatiss should be applauded for keeping the BBC Christmas ghost story tradition going in a time of budget cuts. I fear that this might be the last for some years by the BBC.

At least Gatiss has skated around the low budget by gathering a classy guest cast in this short story by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Medical student Smith (Kit Harington) gets involved with unearthly happenings at his Oxford college.

A foreign student Monkhouse Lee nearly ended up dead. He had fallen out with fellow student Bellingham (Freddie Fox.) The louche Bellingham is an expert on Egyptology. He is in possession of a creepy mummified body and a strange Egyptian manuscript that he obtained from an auction.

Smith decides to confront Bellingham and get him to end his revenge on those who have crossed him.

It is not quite a mummy story, although a shadowy mummy coming to life is heavily implied.

It really harks back to the 1970s BBC ghost stories strand. There is plenty of atmosphere, although Gatiss cannot avoid putty a naughty easter egg with a teasing Sherlock Holmes mash up.

I'm a bit of a devotee to the Christmas horror story, that is somewhat a BBC tradition. I've certainly seen and reviewed the contributions that Mark Gatiss has made to this run, though I'd be the first to say that I haven't liked all of them. I'm afraid that, for me "Lot no. 249" is another one for the disappointment file.

Abercrombie Smith (Kit Harington) appears at the house of his friend (John Heffeman) terrified and recounts a story about a fellow student at Oxford. Smith is training as a doctor and was called to the chamber of Edward Bellingham (Freddie Fox) an Egyptologist, as he has passed out. Whilst reviving him, he notices a sarcophagus and mummified occupant. Later, Smith hears strange noises coming from Bellingham's room and, in an incident that evening, another student, with whom Bellingham has a longstanding grudge is attacked. Smith comes to believe that the Mummy is the perpetrator of the attacks.

I think maybe some of the issue with this is with me and my expectations. As I've got older, the alure of Christmas TV has waned and these horror specials are one of the few things I look out for. So, I don't think that this is "bad" - it's just lacking in the sort of surprising or clever elements that I was after. I do think the decision to stray away from Conan Doyle's even more anticlimactical ending was a good one, but even this version I found lacking.

I think perhaps this one suffers from being a bit too explicit, in the sense there's never really another plausible explanation offered for the attacks. The reason for them too, feels like a bit of a stretch, though maybe that half an hour run time meant that further exploration of that wasn't possible.

Again, I don't think this was bad, and I'll be back in twelve months for the next one, but something a little more genuinely scary, or clever, would be welcome.

This is my least favourite of the revival 21st century BBC 'Ghost Story for Christmas' TV specials with very few admirable qualities but a range of unsatisfactory elements.

Characters are boorishly two dimensional and played with an according simplicity by the small cast. The production fails to generate a sense of authenticity which leaves it unable to function as a ghost story of a personal experience of the intrusion into the world of a malignant "other" force.

It is written in a way that suggests that initial on paper cleverness did not translate to the finished screenplay with ideas that should have been jettisoned after writing them up to a complete script being retained into production.

The mangling of a Sherlock Holmes cameo where Holmes fails dreadfully, indeed completely, at aiding a friend in need, unable to meet this request in any way leaves an odd smell behind. This is due to writing that should have not gone past a first draft.

This series seems to be running out of steam and this installment was so close to unwatchable that I couldn't imagine ever making a repeat viewing whereas some of its stablemates could sustain a second watch.

There are signs to me that the BBC can only make drama by rote, or by checklist, and that it is now a defacto Sunday School whereby the plebs can receive positive reinforcement from their social betters in the form of social morality parables delivered as inane TV programming. There is little other explanation for the writing and production decisions made in this adaptation that I can fathom, or speculatively guess at.

Certainly there is no sign of a ghost story motif in this: no sufficient effort is made to establish the normal, or natural, tempo for the world on view, as such inauthentic invasions don't seem weird and unsettling, we are just told that they are by explicit character exclamatory expositional dialogue. Without this sense of creeping weirdness into a hitherto normalcy there is no sense of growing fear, threat, menace for the suffering characters to endure in their mental experiences until the monster is finally made manifest to them and causes their ultimate dred and possibly expiry.

There is however sign aplenty that this has been put together to satisfy production criterias instigated in order to create a morally satisfactory cumulative effect on the audience: cognitive reinforcement of good and bad values. Sunday Schooling by TV drama.

As such it is both dim and dreary.

I rate at 2.5/10 because there were a handful of moments when the actors did enough with the dreck they were playing to hold my interest and suspend my disbelief enough to anticipate what will happen next in a scene. This seemed to me to be an occasional virtue of the actors rather than the writing or direction.

But honestly, aside from the decor and the resulting atmosphere, what a waste of half an hour! The story is downright simple-minded, like something a schoolboy horror fan would dream up, with no attempt to make it more believable or to explain why any of the characters behave as they do. And in the end you're left saying, "Wait. You mean, that's IT? That's all there IS?? Where's the story?"

I should add that "Oxford," as depicted in this little tale, seems to be -- even in an age before electricity -- a place badly in need of lights, since virtually all the rooms and corridors we see are shrouded in darkness.

Another of Gatiss's flaccid christmas chills from a bygone age. Here you have Conan Doyle's short story about a mummy's curse and stretched out to half an hour it definitely feels like a case of "more is less". There's even a clumsy nod to one of Doyle's more obscure characters. Some... detective chap... which feels rum and misjudged. Up there with his "Thomas Thomas" reference from Doctor Who. These specials are only really worth a hoot because of the casting and the strange plummy dialogue. Always period accurate, but rather stiff sounding. Perhaps he should go back into the old comedy or do a Lucifer Box show instead.