Martin's Close, BBC Four review - where did the scary bits go?

The series of short films, A Ghost Story For Christmas, became a Yuletide staple on BBC One in the 1970s. Most of them were adapted from the works of medieval scholar M R James, and drew their unsettling supernatural aura from the understated and academic tone of the writing.

Mark Gatiss is a fan of this televisual tradition, and in 2013 he adapted James’s story The Trachtate Middoth. After writing his own spooky yarn last year, The Dead Room, now he’s back on the M R James trail with this new effort. Unfortunately it won’t be remembered as a landmark of the genre.

Perhaps it’s because all the likeliest James stories have already been given the TV treatment. Perhaps Gatiss had too much on his plate this Christmas, having masterminded the BBC’s new Dracula dramatisation as well as presenting a documentary about Bram Stoker and the creation of the sanguinary Count. Whatever the reasons, Martin’s Close was a listless, uninspiring affair. Hairs on the back of one’s neck refused to bristle. The spine remained obstinately un-tingled.

The story was set in 1684, and concerned a well-to-do young man, John Martin (Wilf Scolding), who was on trial for the murder of Ann Clark (Jessica Temple). Clark was a poor servant girl suffering some form of mental impairment, with whom Martin decided to engage upon what looked like a romantic affair. This was baffling, since he came from a wealthy family and was already engaged to be married to a glamorous young woman of similar social rank. His dalliance (or whatever it was) with Clark caused his wedding to be cancelled. She then pursued him relentlessly and became “the very plague of his life”.

Despite the dolorous performance by the prosecuting attorney Dolben (Peter Capaldi, in a farcical jumble-sale wig), the evidence of Martin’s guilt was circumstantial at best. He was charged with cutting the girl’s throat and dumping her body in a pond, but it was never made clear whether he did or not. Nor was his motivation apparent. Was he possessed by the Devil, as the prosecution alleged? Or perhaps Ms Clark was in fact Old Nick incarnate?

What was supposed to send us diving under the bedclothes was the news that Clark had mysteriously been seen alive after she was supposed to be dead, while a garbled story of a weird misshapen creature hiding in a cupboard at the inn where she’d worked hinted at the presence of the paranormal. But it all refused to hang together. One could only sympathise with the notorious Judge George Jeffreys (of "Bloody Assizes" notoriety), who presided over the case with an air of sniggering and facetious incredulity.

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