The Bride’s Chamber: a 169-year-old Dickens thriller gets a dark revamp led by 'The Hobbit' star

Martin Freeman has quietly reinvented himself over the last decade or so, hasn’t he? We all know him as the bloke from The Office, or the put-upon chap in Sherlock and The Hobbit, but lately he’s traded in his nice-guy routine for something a bit thornier. Take his tense performance as an exhausted Scouse copper in The Responder, or his turn scaring the life out of people in Ghost Stories – there’s clearly been a shift towards the unsettling. Which is probably why he feels right at home in his newest project for the BBC, although the source material might catch a few out.

The Beeb have officially unveiled this year’s entry in their cult seasonal slot, A Ghost Story for Christmas. The special, titled The Bride’s Chamber, is being written and directed by Mark Gatiss and stars Freeman, with Jim Broadbent also along for the ride. Freeman’s playing Goodchild, a traveller who winds up at some dodgy inn for a night he really wishes he hadn’t. The rest of the cast isn’t too shabby – Adrian Scarborough, Joe Armstrong (out of Happy Valley), India Fowler, and Lewis Shepherd are all in the mix. For a show that’s usually a compact half-hour, that’s a lot of seasoned actors on one call sheet.

Now here’s where it gets interesting: not only is the source material one of Dickens’ lesser-known works, it’s positively obscure – most people have never come across it. The story first appeared in 1858, buried inside The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, which Dickens co-wrote with Wilkie Collins. It ran in the magazine Household Words, and the two leads (including Freeman’s Goodchild) are basically thinly-veiled versions of Dickens and Collins mucking about as fictional mates. So, top trivia point for later: Freeman is, in a roundabout way, playing Dickens as he saw himself, mucking about in the fog.

The Bride’s Chamber was originally printed in 1858 as part of Dickens and Collins’s serialized travelogue, not as a standalone short.

Filming wrapped earlier this year at Ingatestone Hall in Essex, which has previous form when it comes to creepy period telly. The finished episode will turn up on BBC Two over Christmas, and stream on BBC iPlayer for anyone dodging the family over the holidays. There isn’t a firm air date yet, and it’ll probably appear somewhere between mid-December and New Year, but nothing has been set in stone. If you’re in the US – tough luck for the moment. BBC Studios is flogging it round the festivals and to international buyers, but it doesn’t have a streaming home stateside just yet.

Classic chillers, revived

For anyone new to A Ghost Story for Christmas, this is a tradition with proper pedigree. The run kicked off in 1971, when director Lawrence Gordon Clark adapted The Stalls of Barchester for BBC One on Christmas Eve. Through the 1970s, we got a string of genuinely unnerving M.R. James adaptations, then the tradition faded to repeats and archive showings for a while. The last decade or so has seen Mark Gatiss bring it back with fresh scripts and some heavy nods to the vintage stuff – this will be his ninth go at the format since 2013.

It’s not the only Dickens content on the way this festive season, by the way. Alongside The Bride’s Chamber, the BBC is slapping together a three-part documentary that goes rooting around the darker, soot-filled corners of Victorian London to see how real-life nastiness found its way into Dickens’s work. On top of that, they’re mounting a mini-series adaptation of A Tale Of Two Cities with Kit Harington (himself fresh out of Game of Thrones) out front. Still, it’s the Freeman-Broadbent chiller that’s got most of the early buzz from those who follow these things.