Mark Gatiss reveals how latest Ghost Story for Christmas reminded him of a Doctor Who classic
The "smoke and mirrors" employed on The Room in the Tower put Gatiss in mind of a 1968 Patrick Troughton serial.
The latest in the Ghost Story for Christmas strand from writer/director Mark Gatiss is The Room in the Tower, based on EF Benson's short story of a man haunted by a recurring nightmare.
In the unsettling adaptation, Roger Winstanley (Tobias Menzies) is plagued by visions of a country estate and a malevolent force that lurks in the tower.
The half-hour drama was filmed entirely on location at Cobham Hall in Kent, an English country house also previously featured in the 2008 film Wild Child starring Emma Roberts and the CBBC series Hetty Feather.
"It was an amazing location," Gatiss said at a screening of The Room in the Tower at the BFI Southbank. "Actually, we looked at it before, for Lot No. 249 [2023's Ghost Story for Christmas], and it wasn't right – and then it just popped up again."
Though we see Roger in his recurring dream repeatedly advance up the tower via a striking spiral staircase before arriving in the titular room, this journey was actually stitched together using different, discrete parts of Cobham Hall.
"It's got four towers, all of which are unsafe, so the staircase is an entirely different part of the building, and the room itself is actually on the ground floor [...] so it's all smoke and mirrors," Gatiss explained.
Although Benson’s short story was first published in 1912, the TV adaptation relocates the action to 1944, introducing an entirely new framing device. Here, Roger voices his fears to a stranger, played by Nancy Carroll, after the two take refuge together during an air raid.
"The war and the immediate aftermath I find very interesting," said Gatiss, noting how his detective series Bookish is set in the same period. "I love the Tube – and I thought, 'What if I set the framing device there, during the Blitz?'
"Of course, in the story, it's an unnamed narrator who's narrating in the first person, so he needs to be telling the story to someone, so it sort of all came together.
"The tube is the basement [of Cobham Hall] – it's just like The Web of Fear, isn't it?"
As with The Room in the Tower, classic 1968 Doctor Who serial The Web of Fear recreated the London Underground elsewhere – in that instance, when plans to film on the real Tube fell through, designer David Myerscough-Jones built facsimile tunnels at the BBC's studios.
Speaking to Radio Times last year to promote his 2024 Ghost Story for Christmas, Gatiss addressed a potential return to Doctor Who, having written and appeared in multiple episodes between 2005 and 2017.
"No one's asked me!" he revealed. "I had a wonderful run, I did nine stories and [origins drama] An Adventure in Space and Time, which is a culmination of everything I love about Doctor Who.
"But the last thing I did... I was in Peter Capaldi's last story, a regeneration story, with David Bradley, the actor I cast as the First Doctor, and I was playing the Brigadier's grandfather and I remember thinking, 'This is maybe where I should step off because it's not going to get any better than this.'"
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A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Room in the Tower airs on Christmas Eve (Wednesday, 24th December) at 10pm on BBC Two. Add to your watchlist on the Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more.
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Authors
Morgan Jeffery is the Digital Editor for Radio Times, overseeing all editorial output across digital platforms. He was previously TV Editor at Digital Spy and has featured as a TV expert on BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio 5 Live and Sky Atlantic.
