This was a perfectly enjoyable half-hour, with a nice turn from Watkins. It transpired that the count was a feudal tyrant and, since his death, several people who’d trespassed on his memory (or his property) had come to a sticky end. The year was 1863 and Wraxhall was in Sweden, investigating the history of a noble family, whose founder, Count Magnus, the locals were reluctant to talk about. He played Mr Wraxhall, an ageing travelogue writer “possessed of some private means”, and a familiar James type: the donnish, rather bumptious inquirer who digs too deep for his own good. This time, in Count Magnus, based on James’s 1904 story, it was Jason Watkins. The series has drawn on the BBC’s A-team of character actors (in the past we’ve had John Hurt, Peter Capaldi and Rory Kinnear in the main roles). But Mark Gatiss, with his taste for macabre Victoriana, has arguably made it his own. Since it was revived in 2005, several directors have tried their hand at adapting a story by MR James, the Cambridge medieval department’s answer to Stephen King. This month it’s been nigh on impossible to walk into a theatre in London without ending up at a production of A Christmas Carol – a reminder that, in the days before Love Actually and the John Lewis ad, the festive season was also considered a time ripe for supernatural intrigue.īBC Four’s A Ghost Story for Christmas, a nod to this tradition, has now been going longer than its original 1970s incarnation.
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