Festive spirits

GEAP Manor is not a very desirable residence.

Never mind falling property prices and difficulty in repaying your mortgage, this is a house that seems, as someone puts it, “to attract unpleasantness”.

Over the course of three creepy nights, writer Mark Gatiss shows why, in Crooked House, a hat-trick of linked horror stories to make you sleep with the light on and the door securely locked.

The love of the genre by the North-East born writer and actor comes through in this classy retake of what’s essentially those Hammer House of Horror tales of terror.

Each of the three half-hour stories is set in a different period, revolving around history teacher Leo (Lee Ingleby) finding an old door knocker and taking it to a museum curator (Gatiss), who tells him it comes from a manor house which “had an interesting reputation”.

Flashback to 1786 where the scheming Joseph Bloxham (Philip Jackson) is having Geap Manor restored, although his coffers aren’t bottomless. He sounds like Alistair Darling when he tells the workmen “my exchequer is not inexhaustible”.

It’s not dry rot or rising damp that proves a problem. No, there’s something in the wainscoting. The walls are alive with the sound of... well, exactly what is that noise?

This is only the start, with later stories set in the 1920s and the present day, as Leo regrets answering the door when the old doorknocker he’s foolishly attached to his front door starts going knock, knock, knock in the middle of the night.

As in all good ghost and ghoulie stories, there’s a twist at the end to cause a sharp intake of breath and unsettle you further.

Gatiss, who opts for creating an atmosphere of dread rather than explicit blood-dripping gore, not only pays tribute to the ghost story genre, but contributes three superior examples for our late-night pleasure. Just remember: whatever you do, don’t answer the door.

Tribute is paid to a very different form of entertainment in Comedy Songs: The Pop Years. But what exactly, one of the first questions asks, is a comedy song?

“A song that makes you laugh,” suggests Victoria Wood. She should know, having sung dozens in her breakthrough TV gig on consumer show, That’s Life.

She’s an original whose song, Let’s Do It Again, is described as a mix of George Gershwin and Alan Bennett, as she celebrates “the absurdity of the mundane”.

Who cannot warm to a song whose lyrics include the lines “Bend me over backwards on me Hostess trolley” and “Beat me on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly”? Eat your heart out, Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The history of comedy songs reflects the changing voice of comedy in general, from music hall songs, to Peter Kay’s recent number one, as Geraldine with The Winner’s Song.

Writer David Quantick traces the origins of the comedy song back to “some pillock in a jester’s hat with a lute, singing about his genitals to the king, making it up as he went along”.

One thing about comedy songs is that they may be irritating, but you can’t stop singing them. The skiffle era gave birth to such memorable ditties as Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour On The Bedpost Overnight? What sort of mind comes up with a lyric like that?

The birth of the singles chart in the early 1950s meant that comedy songs could make money. The Barron Knights and The Goons had hits. There were topical songs at the start of TV’s That Was The Week That Was, and Benny Hill sang about Ernie, who drove the fastest milkcart in the west.

Many songs came from TV shows like The Two Ronnies, The Goodies (doing the funky gibbon) and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum duo Don Estelle and Windsor Davies duetting on Whispering Grass.

Comedy songs gave hits to people who wouldn’t normally expect to make the charts. Barry Cryer recalls having a number one in Finland 50 years ago with a cover version of Purple People Eater – which, on reflection, sounds like something you might find in Crooked House.