Rather as one had feared, this adaptation suffered from the necessity of compressing an excellent but FORTY-PAGE short story into half-an-hour's airtime. This was a pity, as the depiction of the mummy itself as a shadowy (indeed barely-seen) object of deadly menace was realised very well. Credit to actor James Swanton for his convincing portrayal.

Had the events of Lot No. 249 (set in the fictitious Old College at the University of Oxford in the May of 1884) been allowed to slowly but surely unfold as they do in the original short story, a much more satisfactory result might have been achieved. As it was, the excision of characters such as Jephro Hastie (Abercrombie Smith's old schoolfriend), Harrington of King's College (William Monkhouse Lee's colleague) and, most egregiously, Dr. Plumptre Peterson (quite unnecessarily transformed into a young Sherlock Holmes) detracted significantly from the production. These excisions, plus the omission of such elements of the plot as Edward Bellingham's engagement to Lee's sister, the real cause of Bellingham's grudge against Long Norton and Smith's erroneous inference after hearing Bellingham apparently talking to himself, all contributed to a disappointing (if not entirely unexpected) outcome.

Half-an-hour is simply not long enough to do justice to this story and its development of the three principal characters and especially of the way in which the stolid, rational and unimaginative Abercrombie Smith, during that fateful month, gradually becomes aware of the terrible secret that Bellingham, through his obsessive research into Egyptology, has succeeded in uncovering. An acceptably-brief narrative voiceover, at the beginning and end of the production, could have introduced the setting and main characters and, more importantly, concluded the tale as Doyle wrote it. (After being forced by Smith to destroy the mummy, Bellingham immediately leaves the college and is last heard of in the Sudan, while Smith and Lee , who incidentally is NOT of mixed-race, remain unharmed). Such an ending, of course, would not have made as good television as Bellingham revealing both a second mummy and second roll of papyrus to enable him to wreak vengeance on his two foes. Mark Gatiss has again, as in his adaptation of 'The Mezzotint' two years ago, changed a story's ending in order that a protagonist or, in this case, TWO protagonists, come to a sticky end.

In conclusion, I appeal to the BBC to allow sufficient airtime for a dramatist more faithfully to adapt such a fine tale of the supernatural. I would also recommend reading the original story (first published in 1892 and regarded as the prototype 'mummy revenge' tale). I first read it at the age of fourteen and it remains one of the 'top ten' - or certainly 'top twenty'! - stories of the supernatural I have ever come across. Among other qualities, Doyle's tale paints a superbly-idyllic background picture of late nineteenth-century undergraduate life at Oxford in the springtime and this, contrasted with the slowly- unfolding horror and then terror occasioned by the animation and actions of Lot No. 249, only adds to the story's overall effect.

But honestly, aside from the decor and the resulting atmosphere, what a waste of half an hour! The story is downright simple-minded, like something a schoolboy horror fan would dream up, with no attempt to make it more believable or to explain why any of the characters behave as they do. And in the end you're left saying, "Wait. You mean, that's IT? That's all there IS?? Where's the story?"

I should add that "Oxford," as depicted in this little tale, seems to be -- even in an age before electricity -- a place badly in need of lights, since virtually all the rooms and corridors we see are shrouded in darkness.

This is my least favourite of the revival 21st century BBC 'Ghost Story for Christmas' TV specials with very few admirable qualities but a range of unsatisfactory elements.

Characters are boorishly two dimensional and played with an according simplicity by the small cast. The production fails to generate a sense of authenticity which leaves it unable to function as a ghost story of a personal experience of the intrusion into the world of a malignant "other" force.

It is written in a way that suggests that initial on paper cleverness did not translate to the finished screenplay with ideas that should have been jettisoned after writing them up to a complete script being retained into production.

The mangling of a Sherlock Holmes cameo where Holmes fails dreadfully, indeed completely, at aiding a friend in need, unable to meet this request in any way leaves an odd smell behind. This is due to writing that should have not gone past a first draft.

This series seems to be running out of steam and this installment was so close to unwatchable that I couldn't imagine ever making a repeat viewing whereas some of its stablemates could sustain a second watch.

There are signs to me that the BBC can only make drama by rote, or by checklist, and that it is now a defacto Sunday School whereby the plebs can receive positive reinforcement from their social betters in the form of social morality parables delivered as inane TV programming. There is little other explanation for the writing and production decisions made in this adaptation that I can fathom, or speculatively guess at.

Certainly there is no sign of a ghost story motif in this: no sufficient effort is made to establish the normal, or natural, tempo for the world on view, as such inauthentic invasions don't seem weird and unsettling, we are just told that they are by explicit character exclamatory expositional dialogue. Without this sense of creeping weirdness into a hitherto normalcy there is no sense of growing fear, threat, menace for the suffering characters to endure in their mental experiences until the monster is finally made manifest to them and causes their ultimate dred and possibly expiry.

There is however sign aplenty that this has been put together to satisfy production criterias instigated in order to create a morally satisfactory cumulative effect on the audience: cognitive reinforcement of good and bad values. Sunday Schooling by TV drama.

As such it is both dim and dreary.

I rate at 2.5/10 because there were a handful of moments when the actors did enough with the dreck they were playing to hold my interest and suspend my disbelief enough to anticipate what will happen next in a scene. This seemed to me to be an occasional virtue of the actors rather than the writing or direction.