What Mark Gatiss appeared to be aiming for with his doorknob is...

'...an expression which no-one had ever seen on a woodchuck before.' Indeed.

Rub your clothing and skin with tiger balm and spring onion before listening to this. Mutter 'Syboes...syboeman' throughout. Nae-hoom's final speech is worth repeated listenings whilst smashing mince pies into your forehead. Drink a dry oloroso whilst intoning 'Dolorous...monocerous.'

Why are so-called scary stories so appropriate to the season? Because they disturb our creation of a notional equilibrium: God and sinners reconciled. Because the membrane between our beliefs in the natural and the supernatural always feels more tearable when a year clicks by, and so we imagine we can hear noises through the tear.

We get so busy ascribing what we think of as benignity to that which we've invented but do not understand -- God becoming a human infant -- that we forget we must therefore be separating off what we think of as malignity, and heaping it up in the back of our heads.

MES gets to play the Signalman here, directing us back to the corner of the room and chortling. Which I don't remember from the Dickens, but then I don't remember anything much. It's as though a large area of my memory has been replaced by a bright light, a colour...