While there is a sense that the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas is synoymous with the works of M.R. James, and indeed the majority of the official series including the new one are James adaptations, it really hit its height in 1976 when it left James behind for the first time to present a version of this classic Dickens story. While A Christmas Carol may be the best remembered of Dickens' festive hauntings, this is comfortably his scariest. The teleplay was an early writing job for Andrew Davies who would make his name as a regular adapter of literary classics for the small screen, penning the Gillian Anderson starring version of Dickens' Bleak House and the much loved Jennifer Ehle-Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice. Here, though, he worked on a much smaller scale that fit the much lower Ghost Story for Christmas budget and regular series director Lawrence Gordon Clark. The Severn Valley heritage railway provides a setting reminiscent of the cosy charms of The Railway Children (a novel also written by one of the great ghost story writers), but turns it to something sinister and foreboding. Denholm Elliott, Indiana Jones' easily lost buddy Dr. Marcus Brody, is convincingly haunted and troubled as the eponymous Signalman, who has visions of a ghostly figure going through the same words and motions before accidents occur on the line. The story was inspired by a real train accident that Dickens was involved in and has a strong sense of the dark underside of the white heat of rapidly advancing technology in the Industrial Age. Clark rings the maximum hellish quality from the beast of fire and steam emerging from the long, dark, suggestive tunnel. A railway accident is something genuinely horrific and this adaptation does a great job of indicating that without expensive large scale scenes of gore and destruction.
