The Sherlock creator’s annual festive spookathon is predictably hammy and great. It’s a clever take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s mummy revenge story that’s as tight as a pair of Victorian breeches
Old College, Oxford, 1881: a mummified – sorry, rarefied – world of moustachioed men jogging around quads in white shorts. Men who understand the significance of men who drink “Scotch in the jug, Irish in the bottle”. (Me neither.) Men who dabble in the dark arts of – shiver – “eastern studies”. Basically, men … plus one mummy of the dead rather than the female variety. Auction lot no 249. About 40 centuries old. Bad teeth. May be under the command of Ned Bellingham, the kind of fanatical Egyptology student you definitely don’t want to come across in an Arthur Conan Doyle story. Could this “bag of bones” be responsible for the attempted garrotting and drowning of two students, both of whom happen to have crossed Bellingham? Great Scot, it’s Mark Gatiss’s Christmas ghost story!
Conan Doyle is to Gatiss what Sherlock is to Watson or, indeed, empire was to the Victorians. So there is something fitting about the chap who brought Sherlock back to life resurrecting a Conan Doyle horror story for the trad Christmas Eve slippers-and-scares slot. Once again, Gatiss gets it tonally bang on. His adaptation of Lot No 249, originally published in Harper’s Magazine in 1892 and considered to be the first mummy revenge story, is creepy, clever, hammy and camp, with as many delectable moments as a box of Lindt chocolates. It makes my festive bones ache for Sherlock the movie. The mummy, in full throttle, is terrifying. And, in the spirit of Inside No 9, which it also evokes, it is as tight as a pair of Victorian breeches, coming in at a very satisfying half hour.
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