Leaving his ill and ageing wife in a care home, a retired astronomer revisits one of their old coastal haunts, but after discovering a ring on the beach is soon haunted himself. I saw most of these programmes when they were originally broadcast and have always wanted to see them again. A railway signalman tells a curious traveller how he is being troubled by a spectre that seems to predict calamity. R. James for the screen than Jonathan Miller, and highlighting the strengths of this first official film in the series, which he clearly holds in high regard. It's about money, of course, and it's long since been established that you've an easier sell if you're trading on an already famous name.

After an infamous demonologist is ridiculed on a television programme, its producer soon finds herself targeted by malevolent supernatural forces. With a courage which I do not think can be common among boys of his age, he went to the door of the bathroom to ascertain if the figure of his dreams were really there. Abney, combining a boffin's eccentricity with the warmth of a lively uncle to create a character seemingly incapable of harming another being, but who is clearly up to something from the moment we first meet him. Broadcast by the BBC between 1971 and 1978, and, with one exception, directed and produced by Lawrence Gordon Clark, the first five episodes were adaptations of tales by the man most disposed to trail shivers along vertebrae, M.Spectres, Spirits and Haunted Treasure: Adapting MR James (2023, 17 mins): a newly commissioned video essay by Nic Wassell exploring some of the classic BBC adaptations of the work of MR James.

A bold move perhaps, but what makes the written word and Miller's adaptation work as well as it does is not down solely to a few key components, but the manner in which they combine and unfold, and the unsettling ambiguity of the possible threat. The school term has ended, and academic Professor Parkin arrives at a seaside inn on the East Anglian coast for a holiday of rambling and reading. For items that are dispatched using our standard service, we ask that you wait 14 days from the date of dispatch before reporting any items as undelivered. R. James, the sixth is based on a short story by Charles Dickens, and the last two instalments from the 1970s are original screenplays by Clive Exton and John Bowen respectively.The film also abandons James’s layered approach to storytelling in favour of a more linear approach, but these alterations in no way detract from or dilute what made the story work so well in the first place. Literary scholars have drawn parallels between the plots of A Warning to the Curious and Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad, both of which involve the unearthing of an ancient object by an outsider to the region, who then finds himself being stalked by a potentially hostile entity. The case has been made by several commentators for reading Miller’s interpretation of the story as not a ghost story at all, but a study of a man suffering a mental breakdown and casting the apparitions as figments of his disintegrating mind. A lot of film horror has washed under the bridge since Jonathan Miller's superb 1968 TV chiller, and it was just possible that a new take could still prove effective if it approached the source material from a different angle.