To celebrate the release of our second Self Made Hero book of M. R. James adaptations – Ghost Stories of an Antiquary Vol 2 – we’re going to be counting down to Christmas in true Jamesian style, with a new haunting image and nugget of info every day.
On top of that, we’ll be giving away a copy of the book via Twitter every Sunday in the lead up to Christmas. Check the #MRJ2GIVEAWAY hashtag for details of how to take part.
In 1968, Jonathan Miller defined the traditional ghost story at Christmas on television with his adaptation of M.R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ for BBC Omnibus. Miller was radical with James’s story, psychologising it and imbuing it with an ambience derived from the East Anglian landscape.
And yet, thanks to Screen Archive South East, we can watch a much earlier and, in some ways, astonishingly similar adaptation of James’s spooky tale, made in 1956 by the North Downs Cinematograph Society – more than a decade before Miller’s version.
Read on and watch the 1956 adaptation of James’ ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ on www.bfi.org.uk .