There was a radical change to the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas for 1977. Gone were the adaptations of classic short stories and in came freshly minted stories in contemporary settings. It would prove to be a short-lived experiment that lasted only two instalments. This first, written by Clive Exton (recently behind 10 Rillington Place (1971), the strange Play for Today offering The Rainbirds (1971), the film version of Doomwatch (1972), Frankie Howerd’s The House in Nightmare Park (1973) and episodes of Survivors (1975-1977)), is the better of the two.

Kate Binchy stars as Katharine Delgado, a middle class housewife in a new country home miles from anywhere with only sulky teenage daughter Verity (Maxine Gordon) and a couple of workmen trying to unseat a large and ancient stone in the garden for company while her husband Peter (Peter Bowles) works long hours. Katharine is slowly unravelling, seeing – or maybe imagining – blood pouring from non-existent wounds. Is she suffering some unexplained medical condition? What is it that Peter hears in the basement late one night? And has all of this anything to do with either the nearby standing stones or the smaller one being ripped out of the ground in the garden?

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Like the earlier adaptations, Stigma taps the beauty and the eeriness of the English countryside, though not as effectively, in this case mining the endless fascination with the many standing stones, often arranged in circles, that dot the landscape. They turned up a number of times in British television fantasy of the 1960s and 70s, most notably in the same year’s Children of the Stones (1977) for example, 1969’s The Owl Service or Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass (1979). That no-one really know what they were really for only adds to their mystique and here they are portals from an ancient past for forces that no-one – and it seems likely Exton may be one of them – really understands. The discovery of a skeleton beneath the stone, apparently stabbed to death by the four rusting knives found around it, discovered as Katharine finally bleeds to death, suggests that some terrible evil from the distant past is reaching out for revenge. Though quite why it targets Katharine isn’t really explained – after all she’s not responsible for disturbing the stone. Why didn’t the ghost/poltergeist/ whatever go after he husband, who asked for it to be removed, or the workmen, who actually did the deed?

Binchy – playing the first female protagonist in the series – is excellent as the increasingly terrified Katharine, unable to stop herself from bleeding to death from no discernible wound. Exton charts her increasingly desperate situation, starting at a point where she’s already getting close to her wits’ end – when we first meet her she’s having to deal with a surly daughter who clearly doesn’t like her very much, a boorish husband that doesn’t care about anything much and a couple of workmen who in the end bring her nothing but tragedy. It’s a decent, quite performance the likes of which one would be unlikely to find in a contemporary remake.

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Stigma lacks the meat of the earlier stories – Exton is no M.R. James or Charles Dickens – and apart from a few brief shots, notably one of Verity in the middle distance dwarfed by the standing stones, lacking in the creepy atmosphere that we’d become used to. The stones themselves are not as well used as the landscapes that had dominated director Lawrence Gordon Clark’s previous episodes and the sense of a very English past interfering with the present is not as well conveyed, ironically, as it was in the period pieces.

This was to the last of Clark’s films for the A Ghost Story for Christmas strand. By the time the next one, The Ice House, was being shown on Christmas Day 1978, he’d jumped ship to the BBC’s rivals, ITV to prepare another James adaptation, Casting the Runes which was broadcast on 24 April 1979. Although there was one more to come, Stigma effectively marked the end of the Ghost Story for Christmas as we knew it.

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