Hammer House of Horror: Guardian of the Abyss

 "Don't you know the power of positive evil?"

This episode is one of the finest yet. Written by David Fisher, who had written some impressive episodes of Doctor Who over the preceding two years, this is essentially a Dennis Wheatley pastiche, played very straight. It reminded me very much of Hammer's The Devil Rides Out (although To the Devil a Daughter is much underrated) in its structure- a devil worshipping cult, scrying glasses, cows, invetrd crosses and all the iconography, all playing out over a landscape of posh country houses and deceased decadent aristocrats.

Yet it's more than that. The John Dee connection is clever. The use of voodo dolls is creepy. John Carson is a superb villain. Paul Darrow is great fun as a creepy cultist. And the twist at the end is excellent, the perfect capstone to a fine script, very much foreshadowed and earned. I can forgive the driving with no seatbelts (hey, it's 1980) and the amusing sex scene where Mike and Alison start doing foreplay while still wearing clothes over their naughty bits in the time-honoured television fashion.

This may ebe the best yet. Not many episodes left to beat it...

The Ash Tree

“Cut it down!”

An obscure little gem, this; a thirty minute BBC drama from 1975 and the first of the legendary screenplays based on the ghost stories of M.R. James (who, alas, I have not read) that I’ve seen, courtesy of BBC 4 on Christmas Eve.

It’s well-made on location, superbly acted with a role by none other than Lalla Ward as the not-to-be Lady Fell, and uses good, economic direction to tell a rather complex, non-linear story very quickly. You have to pay attention and, I suspect intentionally, not everything gets explained- what are the creatures in the tree? What’s the connection of the tree to the witch trials of a century earlier? We get only a general gist of what’s going on, but a bit of mystery is good. It’s refreshing to watch something from a time when the audience wasn’t talked down to, earlier. We aren’t spoon fed; the only clue to Sir Richard’s time period is the clothing and the fact that Tom Jones is a current novel, and the switch between time periods is narrated visually rather than overtly signalled. Edward Petheridge, whom I know best as George III in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell, is superb both as Sir Richard and the hypocritical Sir Matthew, who directly causes an innocent woman to be hanged as a witch.

This packs an awful lot into thirty-odd minutes and is a nice little curio from the BBC of the ‘70s. I shall certainly try and watch more of these M.R. James Christmas ghost stories.