I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ghost from the Seventies, and I thought, ‘Hmmm, interesting’ Mark Gatiss

Not far into Mark Gatiss’s supernatural tale, The Dead Room, the lead character, a seasoned ham called Aubrey Judd (played by a ripe Simon Callow), decides to explain the essence of the ghost story.



Aubrey, an actor no longer at the peak of his fame, has been "bringing mild disquiet to radio listeners since 1976", and understands the formula. First of all, there must be calm. "And into this apparent calm... the Bad Thing rears its ugly head." The story, to work, requires restraint. "Hold back," Aubrey suggests, "always hold back until the climax."



The innuendo is deliberate, of course, because Aubrey is an inappropriate old luvvie, and Gatiss is using him to explain the rules of the genre, as set down by MR James, whose tales formed the backbone of the BBC's 1970s series A Ghost Story For Christmas, spooking Gatiss, and inspiring him to continue the tradition.



Gatiss recalls: "I used to do The Man In Black on Radio 4 Extra. That was a big moment for me, because Valentine Dyall did it during the war and it was a very famous thing. The producer was always asking me if I’d write one of the stories. I said, 'All right, I’ll do the very last one - I know what it will be. It's called The Dead Room, because it's set in this radio studio, and it should be about me being haunted, so it’s like a completely meta thing.'"



The idea lay dormant for a while, and came to life when Gatiss was offered a low-budget commission by BBC Four. Suddenly, filming the making of a radio show made sense.



He says: "Then I thought, it's modern, so I want to make it about sound. Applying MR James’s rules, he thinks the ideal ghost should be from about 30 or 40 years ago. That means that the ghost needs to be from the 1970s. I don't think I’ve ever seen a ghost from the Seventies, and I thought, 'Hmmm, interesting'."



James's other rules suggest that the ghost must be malevolent. "He had no time for friendly ghosts. And one of his big things is, of course, no sex. I broke that rule."