Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without Chimes of Midnight. It’s my annual tradition. For the last several years, it’s been my Christmas Eve tradition. Christmas dinner, tea, and Chimes of Midnight.
In that same spirit, we present an updated and expanded version of my Chimes of Midnight review. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without James talking about Chimes of Midnight.
“There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good comfortable things all the time, for we are telling Winter Stories—Ghost Stories, or more shame for us—round the Christmas fire.”~Charles Dickens, “Telling Winter Stories.”
The greatest problem with reviewing Chimes of Midnight is that it’s impossible to talk about without spoiling it—not in the “I know the plot now” way, but in a way that materially reduces the first impact. It doesn’t hurt you to know Rocky loses. It hurts The Prestige to have its carefully constructed magic trick revealed beforehand. One is plot. The other is theme, construction, and design.
To reveal the workings of a magic trick is to ruin it.
But allow me to give you a context for enjoying Chimes of Midnight. A framework for Shearman’s story to slip inside.
We love our Victorian Christmases, so long as they aren’t too Victorian.
We will gladly take the wrapped gifts, the carolers who match our conception of just what carolers should be, the trees dressed just as we think trees should be dressed, the dinners and guests and party games. We may dispense of some dishes too wild for our processed tastes, and we might have passed from candles to fairy lights, but those traditions have survived unchanged.
But there is another tradition, dead in America and all but dead and dying in Britain, of the Christmas ghost story. References in old books are puzzling, to say the least.
When Henry James wrote, “The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child”…
We are left to wonder why Christmas Eve in an old house would be gruesome.
When M.R. James wrote he mainly produced his ghost stories “at long intervals…and mostly at the season of Christmas”…
We are left with the puzzle of why anyone but a Scrooge would be handing out horror for the holidays.
Even the American songbook gets into the act. Andy Williams tells us “scary ghost stories” are part of “the most wonderful time of the year.”
We are often unconvincingly told it is specifically and only a reference to A Christmas Carol, or The Holy Ghost (who, at any rate, isn’t scary in that sense).
All of that is patent nonsense. To the Victorians, and still to the Edwardians, Christmas was a time for ghost stories. The entire season was rich with goblins and poltergeists, as October is for us, but the season’s zenith was Christmas Eve. It’s more naturally suited to it than the last day of October. There are historical reasons October 31st was selected, but it carries no thematic weight. But the ghost story tradition benefited from being moored to Christmas Eve—
There is no reason you should stop being haunted on November first, unless your ghost is a very well scheduled ghost. There is an excellent and obvious reason you should stop being haunted on December twenty-fifth, plain as the writing on your calendar.
Late at night, the hearth warm but just starting to die down, family and guests would gather and tell stories. It was good form to tell a true story, or at least a “true” one made up of distant relations and friends of friends. Chestnuts would roast. The material world would be comfort, while the mental landscape would run to terror…
When the family gathered ‘round the fireplace on Christmas Eve, the stories could be terrifying—the horror had an expiration date; the tales could be gruesome—the gore washed away rather effortlessly with the coming sun; any panoply of fright could be presented without it sticking. Murder, violence, the hungry dead, spectral monsters—their magic couldn’t resist the “deeper magic” of Christmas Day.
This is, incidentally, what Philip Sandifer misses in his essay on Chimes of Midnight. Ignorant of the Victorian ghost story tradition, he thinks it an exceptionally mean-spirited story that’s lashing out against society, Christmas tale morals, and Doctor Who itself. He takes the horror at face-value, absent any notion of the genre and themes backing it, and only sees angry nihilism.
He is looking at Christmas, and Chimes of Midnight, the wrong way around. The story can be nasty because the nastiness is overwritten (literally, in this case) with the coming of Christmas Day—not because Shearman is being hateful. It can be brutal because the brutality is undone—not because Shearman thinks brutality is all there is. It can be grim, and ghastly, and ghostly because there are more powerful ghosts at work.
It is not a spoiler, in the sense that matters, to say that Christmas Day does in fact wash away Chimes of Midnight’s darkness. What Sandifer sees as pat and misleading is entirely the point. Shearman is aware of the traditions. He is aware of the themes. Christmas Day is as surface-level a solution in Chimes of Midnight as it is in A Christmas Carol. Because Christmas Day, for Shearman and Dickens alike, is a symbol.
The Day’s victory is pat because it’s a borrowed victory, from long ago; it is also pat because it a symbol for kindness, and peace, and charity. The resolution is not different, in kind, from A Christmas Carol. The abused person is exalted; an unnecessary, future death is prevented by kindness today. Edith is not abused as a commentary on the period, to be the rot under the traditions. Edith is abused in the same way Bob Cratchet is–the same point, without the immediate social realism. Kindness, mercy, and charity change lives for the better; if you do not extend these things to others, you’re no better than a parody of life.
Chimes of Midnight, then, should not be understood as part of the cynical, modern “anti-Christmas story” trend in film and prose (“anti” here signifying “a Christmas story that runs opposite of traditional Christmas stories, usually invoking a large degree of darkness, doubt, and brutality”).
It is instead a resumption of an older, purer tradition that runs through the whole Victorian ghost story genre in text or subtext—Christmas Day, if only you can reach it, overrules all the misery and terror Christmas Eve can offer. Christmas Day overrules all misery and terror.
There are two ways to make your audience cry.
The first is the easiest. Manipulate their emotions. Present them with something sad. It’s cynical; a desperate attempt to invest the audience by abusing them. Consider Joss Whedon’s penchant for killing developed characters when it’s necessary to retain the audience’s interest, or for an easy way of moving the plot forward. It’s cheap.
The second is the hardest. Present your audience with a situation, not necessarily a sad one, and let the emotional depth and the situation’s reality settle upon them. I don’t think I know a single person who isn’t made at least misty at the final episode’s extended fade-out. It’s far from sad. It’s triumphant. And yet…
When they visited, recently, I had my family listen to Chimes of Midnight.My father stared off into the middle distance, visibly moved. My mother cried. It was earned emotion. Something very few stories do well.
If we may briefly turn to the episode itself:
Personally, I rank Chimes of Midnight as not merely one of the greatest Big Finish episodes to date, but one of the five best Doctor Who stories yet made. I rank it perhaps second or third. But more than that, for something so self-consciously reviving a dead genre and tradition, Chimes of Midnight outdoes itself as one of the finest Victorian ghost stories. It outpaces the majority of the genre in weight, meaning, characterization, and style. Only the great handful still retain their holly crown.
Chimes of Midnight is a story you owe yourself to pick up.
Download it tonight, and listen to it this Christmas Eve.
And remember you are safe from the dead, and the terrible, because of the day that’s swiftly coming.
Merry Christmas, from the Time Travel Nexus.
Get Chimes of Midnight for $2.99 from BigFinish.com
- The Chimes of Midnight (Doctor Who – Main Range #29)
- Written by: Robert Shearman
- Directed by: Barnaby Edwards
- Starring: Paul McGann (The Doctor); India Fisher (Charley Pollard); Louise Rolfe (Edith); Lennox Greaves (Mr Shaughnessy); Sue Wallace (Mrs. Baddeley); Robert Curbishley (Frederick); Juliet Warner (Mary)
James Bojaciuk
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