12/10/2025
The Christmas TV Weebly website, a tv enthusiast's guide to festive programming across all television services, reports that gay writer and actor Mark Gatiss, is once again being entrusted with what he described as a "very Christmassy of Christmas traditions", namely the Christmas Night ghost story. Whilst we may associate the earlier festival of Hallowe'en with ghost stories, there is also a tradition in Europe and the UK of telling spooky tales at Christmas - a tradition which goes back at least as far as the nineteenth century, when Charles Dickens used the custom to great effect in hiss anti-capitalist tale A Christmas Carol. The 2025 BBC offering is A Room in the Tower, written originally by EF Benson, (1867 to 1940) a ghost story writer of some repute. The adaptation has been handled by Gatiss, and an excellent ensemble cast put together for the filming. Tobias Menzies and Joanna Lumley will bring the scares thick and fast in the creepy tale. Mark Bell, the Commissioning Editor who ordered the show for BBC Arts, added: “Mark and the team have gathered a wonderful cast for this atmospheric treat where dream meets terrifying reality. ‘I have given you the room in the tower’ is a sentence nobody will want to hear once they have experienced this festive haunting.” "A Room in the Tower" will air on BBC2 television, and the precise date and time of transmission will be confirmed by early December.
