The Tractate Middoth

Hardest working man in showbiz Mark Gatiss makes his directing debut in this revival of an honorable BBC Christmas tradition: the MR James ghost story. The apparently impenetrable title refers to the book at the heart of the story: an obscure Hebrew text buried on the shelves of a university library and sought after by an elderly man with shadowy motives, but also a mysterious and elusive cloaked figure.

Caught in the middle is Mr Garrett (Sacha Dhawan), a student working at the library who becomes embroiled in concerns both supernatural (the aforementioned cloaked figure) and more prosaic (a row over an inheritance). Gatiss’s grasp of mood and tone – aided and abetted by a nuanced soundtrack from David Arnold – is so absolute that he can easily be forgiven the occasional lapse into cliché (spiders, shadows), while the inevitable sting in the tale will leave you with a delciously lingering sense of unease. Gatiss’s profile of the MR James follows at 10.05pm.