By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: ****

WHEN? Sunday 14 December 2025, to air at 10pm on BBC2 on Christmas Eve RUNTIME: 30 minutes

Christmas just isn’t Christmas without the now annual Mark Gatiss ghost story airing late on Christmas Eve on BBC2.

• Read on for reasons including how this Christmas tradition is just a part of festivities as It’s A Wonderful Life

Gatiss, shortlisted for Best TV/Film Actor of 2025 for his Bookish, has this year chosen E.F. Benson’s A Room In The Tower as his source material and loved his Mapp and Lucia.

Gatiss’ Tower has been given a 1940’s framing device where Tobias Menzies (The Other Place, National Theatre) Roger Winstanley is explaining his recurring dream – an invitation by Joanna Lumley’s chilling Mrs Stone to spend the night in the titular room in a mysterious house – to Nancy Carroll’s (Marjorie Prime, Menier Chocolate Factory) attentive servicewoman on a Tube platform during an air raid.

He tells her in his waking life, a friend named Clinton played by Ben Mansfield invited Winstanley to his family’s house in the country. Everything there matched his nightmare, except for the names and personalities of the family.

The visit was enjoyable until his friend’s mother, played by Bookish‘s Polly Walker, offers him the room in the tower where he finds an ancient portrait of Mrs Stone from the dream.

Of Lumley, Gatiss says: ‘She was just fantastic. I’d worked with her a couple of times and she was everything I hoped she would be. She said yes straight away, did it for tuppence ha’penny and had to spend 4 hours in make up looking like Miss Havisham.’

Mansfield remembers they shot in Cobham Hall, a country house in Kent which looks extremely imposing on screen, and says: ‘It’s a wonderful place, a real labyrinth.’

Gatiss describes his now annual Christmas Eve slot as a ‘pleasing terror’ and having watched The Room In The Tower the diversity it brings to the season makes it just as much part of festivities as classics like It’s A Wonderful Life.

For half an hour as Christmas Eve toys with becoming Christmas Day, there’s no-one in whose company we’d rather be than the spine-tingling Mark Gatiss and his take on a dark, mysterious ghost story.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy BBC2 and Mark Gatiss Tickets
• Have you seen a Mark Gatiss show before and what did you think of this 1? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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