A new Mark Gatiss show is fast becoming as essential to a proper Christmas as a family argument. As ever on Christmas Eve, we will enjoy his MR James adaptation, this year of The Mezzotint on BBC Two. And Gatiss is also back to enliven the bucket of mediocrity that is known as family viewing. This is all good news – no one has a better understanding that the best way to engross young minds – minds of any age, in fact – is to freak them out.

Gatiss’s The Amazing Mr Blunden (Sky Max) is a remake of a 1972 Lionel Jeffries children’s film that was itself an adaptation of Antonia Barber’s 1969 novel The Ghosts. The plot was as brambly as the provenance – a young widow (Vinette Robinson) with two children was visited by a mysterious family solicitor, Mr Blunden (Simon Callow). He persuaded her – and she didn’t need much persuading to escape from her humdrum life – to act as caretaker for a supposedly haunted mansion.

When they arrived, the siblings, Lucy and Jamie (Tsion Habte and Jason Rennie, both excellent) – found a pair of ghost children (India Fowler and Xavier Wilkins as Sara and Georgie Latimer), who it soon emerged had travelled from the past with a vital message: they were going to be murdered by a wicked couple (played by Gatiss and Tamsin Greig) and needed urgent help. With a magic potion and Mr Blunden’s assistance Jamie and Lucy were transported back to 1821 to try and fix the future.

Still following? Well, quite. It was one of those plots best left unexamined, but that was easy to do given the speed with which things hared along. Gatiss’s adaptation assumed our compliance as well as our familiarity with time travel and horror tropes from The Turn of the Screw to Back to the Future, and then it just barrelled from scene to scene with a beguiling mix of panto and scares.