The Dead Room

"When were you born?”

“1990.”

“Christ!”

This is an admittedly cheap but well cast attempt in BBC Four where Mark Gatiss (naturally!) writes and directs a deliberately modern slant on M.R. James style ghost stories for Christmas. It’s a very good piece of drama with excellent dialogue, a superbly characterised central character, and yet... it isn’t eerie or scary. And it’s not immediately obvious why.

Simon Callow is, inevitably, spellbinding in the central role of Aubrey Judd, veteran radio teller of horror stories, while Anjli Mohindra alsonimpresses as his obscenely young producer in what is essentially a two hander on two similar sets and could easily have been a stage play. This isn’t the 1970s M.R. James adaptation so no sumptuous location filming please; we’re BBC Four.

The script is in many ways superb and literally gothic in that a sun from Aubrey’s past literally comes back to haunt him. Yet, in the wake of A Very English Scandal, there are many poignant reminders of the real dangers of being gay in the 1970s, something which works well. I also admire the light breakage of the fourth wall as Aubrey eloquently deconstructs the modern ghost story; it can’t be too modern, requires a certain distance, more or less within living memory, and a certain old-fashioned reticence in holding back the nature of the horror. You can, he claims, base a horror tale on a horror from as recently as the ‘70s!

And yet, good though this is as a little piece of drama, it doesn’t quite work. I’m not sure the script is to blame, or indeed Gatiss’ direction; I suspect it’s the case that limited resources are the culprit here, and the play just isn’t scary. And that’s a shame.