Terror in the house haunted by a Claudia Winkleman from Hell

Few things are scarier than a demonic undead child. But one of them is his mother. Denisa, the unquiet soul, haunted the corridors of a Scottish country house in Ghost Story: The Small Hand (C5) singing Gaelic folk songs. with her heavy black eyeshadow and thick dark fringe, she looked like Claudia winkleman from Hell.

This adaptation of her own book by the mistress of the supernatural, Susan Hill, delivered the frights we long for at Christmas.

It was filled with far more shivers than the Beeb’s effort on Christmas eve, Martin’s Close on BBC4 — not to mention BBC1’s abysmal Christmas Carol (in fact, let’s never mention that again).

Dougie Henshall, best-known as the morose detective in Shetland, is always watchable even when he’s saying nothing.

He was cast well here because, as Adam the specialist in rare books, he was on screen in virtually every scene and barely spoke.

There wasn’t much he could say. From the moment a cold, invisible hand grasped his fingers and dragged him towards an empty mansion surrounded by overgrown gardens, everything was too weird for words.

At one point, after he ran over the ghost child in his car on a dark Highland lane, Adam did manage to gasp: ‘what the hell is going on?’

But that hardly summed up the chilling strangeness of it all: the bloody corpse in the bath, the dreams of drowning, the creepy monk, the radio-controlled car that trundled through the empty rooms on its own . . .

From the moment Adam’s satnav lured him to the house — scene of a family tragedy that he’d wiped from his mind — we had no choice but to surrender to the paranormal. It was no good wondering why Adam insisted on buying the house even after the dead boy pushed his girlfriend down the stairs and broke her neck.

That would tend to put off most potential buyers.

And it was thoughtless of him to have guests to stay, without mentioning the apparition in the bath-tub that liked to seize unsuspecting visitors by the throat.

All we could do was suspend disbelief and enjoy. woody Norman as the ghost child was especially menacing. If you knew his face, it might be because earlier this year he was eleanor Tomlinson’s sickly lad in The war Of The worlds.

Or you might recognise him as the zombie playmate of your nightmares. either is possible.

For the nicer sort of child, not intent on murder, this week has been crammed with TV treats. They’ve had The Tiger who Came To Tea on C4, plus Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s The Snail And The whale on

BBC1 — and a host of repeats for that duo’s other tales, such as The Gruffalo and Room On The Broom.

The quality of children’s animations has improved sharply in the past decade, and Mimi And The Mountain Dragon (BBC1) was as good as any — not because of the drawings, which were pleasant though lightly sketched, but because the story was so well crafted.

Author Michael Morpurgo, who also wrote war Horse, narrated at the start, but the picture soon took over as a sort of silent movie unfolded, about a shy little girl who finds a baby dragon and decides to take it back to its mother.

Her parents and the rest of the Alpine villagers were preparing a drum-banging ritual to keep the avalanches away, which just goes to show how stupid grown-ups can be. Luckily, when your home is buried under snow, a friendly dragon is exactly what’s needed. All quite charming.