TELEVISION

FT’s very own couch potato, STU NEVILLE, casts an eye over the small screen’s current fortean offerings

The Mezzotint

Isn’t Mark Gatiss a busy chap? Everywhere you look, there’s something on that he’s in, or has written, or directed, or all three, while all the while being in/writing/directing something else for later in the year (and no doubt finishing a still life in acrylics and a symphony for concertinas). Idle he isn’t. What’s daunting is how good he is at all of these things. His pedigree with the rum and macabre is equally wellestablished, and as I’m fond of MR James, I was looking forward to A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Mezzotint (BBC)

Teeing off in resplendent moustache and tweed plus-fours, Williams (Rory Kinnear) natters with a golfing companion about his new-fangled iron and how moving with the times jars with tradition (“Oh bad luck, Binks!”); then, cut straight to Williams on the Bakelite phone discussing why the museum he curates is only interested in English topographical subjects, and so won’t accept porcelain. Gatiss’s ear for effortlessly realistic dialogue guarantees that at no point does this seem

Gatiss’s pedigree with the rum and macabre is equally well established

forced, but in the space of one minute and 25 seconds (yes, I timed it) character and period are established. While declining the Delft, Williams spots an engraving of a country house offered by a dealer and is drawn in, noticing details that subtly change on repeated viewings, and we watch as Williams, completely convincingly, becomes utterly obsessed, with friends and colleagues discovering more and more about the house, its history and a curse with a long reach that I won’t spoilerise further.

There are pitch-perfect performances, especially from the always reliable Kinnear, although when Williams is being tetchy he sometimes appears to be channelling John Cleese, spitting out terse rejoinders from under his moustache: you half expect him to point out that the house is over there, between the land and the sky. Frances Barber, as an over-diligent librarian, and Robert Bathurst, the natural heir to John le Mesurier in the well-bred, louche affability stakes, also shine, as does the overall look and sound of the production: it’s very easy for 1920s English affluence to unconsciously lurch into PG Wodehouseesque self-sabotage, or go the other way and become irredeemably stiff and formal, but this was both nonanachronistic and yet timeless, the occasional deft use of 20s phrasing emphasising the era rather than distracting. What shone most for me was the writing, though: a miracle of economy, as the whole story is told in under half an hour. In an age when many producers still balk at anything under 48 minutes for a one-off drama (30 mins is a bugger to schedule if you’re putting adverts in it, making it hard to sell to commercial channels abroad) it’s good to see that in the right, less-is-more hands, MR James can still scare you.