A Christmas ghost story

With Omicron on the prowl and the nights drawing in, why not take a break from it all with a tall tale of imaginary horrors?

Stigma is an excellent half-hour chiller from the BBC archives that’s just landed on iPlayer. Part of the old series A Ghost Story for Christmas, this compressed drama isn’t especially seasonal but it is genuinely creepy. Unlike the older, familiar ghostly masterpieces of M.R. James, Stigma is made (and set) in 1977, and features a modern, middle-class family – mother, father (Peter Bowles), and teenage daughter Verity – who live in an old country cottage. They decide to dig up an ancient menhir in the back garden… It doesn’t go well.

If this whets your appetite, another minor classic in the same vein is Robin Redbreast from 1970, which is itself a precursor to The Wicker Man, made just three years later. What made the Seventies a golden decade for this kind of horror? Discuss. But first, draw the curtains, turn down the lights and enjoy…