Posted in: BBC, TV | Tagged: A Ghost Story for Christmas, The Room in the Tower

A Ghost Story for Christmas 2025 to Star Joanna Lumley, Tobias Menzies

Mark Gatiss adapts E.F. Beneon's The Room at the Tower for this year's A Ghost Story for Christmas, starring Joanna Lumley and Tobias Menzies.

That BBC mainstay, A Ghost Story for Christmas, is back again this year, another victory for writer-director Mark Gatiss, who has been spearheading its revival for years. This year, Gatiss is adapting E.F. Benson's 1912 story A Room in the Tower, starring Tobias Menzies (The Crown; F1) and Joanna Lumley (Come on, do we really have to tell you who she is by now?). Set in the inter-war years, this is Gatiss's eighth ghost story for Christmas on the BBC. Additional cast includes Nancy Carroll (The Crown; Father Brown), Ben Mansfield (Endeavour; Sister Boniface Mysteries), and Gatiss' recent Bookish co-star Polly Walker (Bridgerton, Rome, Bookish).

For 15 years, Roger Winstanley has been haunted by an unsettling, recurring dream: an invitation to spend the night in the house of an acquaintance, where an unseen terror lurks and the figures who populate the dream seem to age in real time. Nightmare and waking life seem to finally collide when an invitation to the dreaded "room in the tower" becomes all too real…

Gatiss shared, "I've always wanted to adapt the great E.F. Benson's ghost stories, and this is one of his chilling best. I'm also very grateful to have been able to continue the most Christmassy of Christmas traditions. The Room in the Tower has been prepared for you – and with Tobias Menzies and the legendary Dame Joanna Lumley to boot!" Mark Bell, Commissioning Editor for BBC Arts, said, "Mark and the team have gathered a wonderful cast for this atmospheric treat where dream meets terrifying reality. 'I have given you the room in the tower' is a sentence nobody will want to hear once they have experienced this festive haunting…"

Previous years' stories for A Ghost Story for Christmas from Gatiss have included last year's Woman of Stone, The Mezzotint, Martin's Close, Count Magnus, and The Tractate Middoth – all of which were based on works by M.R. James. In 2023, he wrote and directed Lot No. 249 – an adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's short story.

A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Room in the Tower is a BBC Arts commission for BBC Two and iPlayer, produced by Adorable Media. BBC Studios is handling global sales. Isibeal Ballance is the producer for Adorable Media, and Mark Bell is the BBC's Commissioning Editor. Principal photography for The Room in the Tower took place earlier this year on location in Cobham Hall, Kent.

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