They had four web cams set up in various parts of the spooky old building.

People were invited to phone in and tell what they saw.

I saw corners of rooms and lengths of corridor.

Other people saw:

a dark figure in a cloak
children playing
two men fighting in a doorway
a wandering column of smoke
a hovering face

And so on and on.

Are these people suggestible?
Are they bonkers?
Are they having a laugh?
Am I missing something?

Remember Michael Praed?

First he was Robin Hood in the dippy-hippy Robin of Sherwood; then he was Prince Michael of Moldavia in a couple of well-beloved episodes of Dynasty.

He was devastatingly beautiful and his Robin was a whole lot better than Jason Connery's.

He was going to be big.

Then something must have happened. Or, perhaps, more accurately, something didn't happen.

Anyway, these days he appears in odd episodes of the British soaps and has a steady gig doing voice-over for the BBC's history/archaeology show Timewatch.

Last night on Timewatch he was telling us about a bunch of decapitated skeletons that have been unearthed in a Roman cemetery in York. An unprecedented find. It seems likely they're the victims of a purge of the palace old guard conducted by the Emperor Caracalla after the death of his father Septimius Severus.

Thrilling. Thanks to Dio Cassius we know some of their names. Archaeology rarely gets this personal.

Setimius Severus was a dude. A North African who campaigned against the Scots and made York the capital of the Empire. He died there and his funeral was like nothing Britain had ever seen.

So how do you pronounce Severus? The Rowling crowd say "sever", but Praed and his experts were all saying "severe".

Septimius Severe-us? It sounds all wrong to me.

Jonathan Miller's Alice in Wonderland was first transmitted by the BBC in 1966. I was 15 at the time.

And fell head over heels in love with the rather snooty miss who plays Alice. Ach, all that lovely, lovely Victorian hair!

Then, as happens with TV movies, it disappeared from view.

Now I own my own copy. Wicked!

It's every bit as gorgeous as I remember. It's the blissed-out hippy movie to end all blissed-out hippie movies. The drugginess! The melancholia! The costumes! The sitar riffs! The hair!

Did I mention the hair?

And Peter Sellers is in it.

And John Gielgud gets to sing the Lobster Quadrille while prancing along the sea shore with Malcolm Muggeridge (Formerly famous media person and scourge of the permissive society.)

Far out, man!

I've always thought Miller could have been one of the great film directors if only he'd bothered to put his mind to it.

Everyone came to a bad end except Pullo.

I knew that something like that was going to happen to poor, old ,uptight Vorenus.

I knew that something like that (indeed, something exactly like that) was going to happen to Caesar.

But I was not expecting Pullo to walk off into the sunlit Campagna hand in hand with his favourite girl.

Pullo is a brute with untold killings and at least four atrocious murders to his (dis)credit, but I love him dearly. He is so blithe. So good-natured. I want him to settle down on a farm with the lovely Irene and raise chickens (or pigs or whatever it is that Roman farmers raise)and die at last, full of years and honour and with so many grandchildren and great-grandchildren in attendance that there's not room for them all around the bed.

The arena sequence made the arena sequences in Gladiator look like they'd been scripted by Richard Curtis. That decapitation- o my!

The shadow of Shakespeare lay black and Stygian over the last half hour. The writer avoided the horrors of the Burton-Taylor Cleopatra with its ghastly Shakespearian paraphrases but the Man was present even in his absence. I was waiting for "et tu Brute" and when it didn't come I felt a little cheated. But the killing was grand- a scuffle in a butcher's shop. And the politics, with Brutus  the pansy-arsed tool of a rightwing cabal , were so real and dirty it hurt.

Will we see more of James Purefoy's Antony in the sequel? Please, please, please!

And now we have to wait until 2007 to find out what happens next.

The thing about the Two Ronnies is there's no edge. Just a blokey, saloon bar naughtiness. I quite like Barker's wordplay and Corbett's shaggy dog stories but I come away from one of their shows feeling like I've been ingesting too much carbon dioxide.

Barker was a potentially great comic actor who squandered his talent on middle of the road sketch shows and progressively weaker sit-coms- in the last of which he played a short-sighted old git who is continually bumping into things and mistaking the mustard for the marmalade. He could have been a memorable Falstaff (it was offered him by Peter Hall) but he backed away. This combination in him of poor taste and lack of ambition depresses me.

No way are the Ronnies the equals of Morecambe and Wise- the rival double-act of their generation. Morecambe was a great zany, an anarch, and though his scripts were safe enough, his antics- like Groucho Marx's- rip through the illusions of dignity and manners and caste. Anyone brave enough to go on stage with him wound up looking like a twit.

Or even a twat.

There's nothing like that with the Ronnies. They concluded this year's Christmas compendium of greatest hits with a lamentable skit on Alice in Wonderland- which featured the self-satisfied Ronnies, dressed as a succession of Wonderland characters, singing coyly bawdy lyrics to tired old show tunes. The mismatch in quality between Carroll's imagination and the imagination of Barker (who was probably the author of most of the stupid songs) was embarrassing. You don't spoof Carroll- he's the cleverest, darkest, twistiest, most wildly imaginative humorist in the English language. Go up against him with your stale jokes about drinking and shagging and you wind up looking vulgar and stupid and coarse.

Like a pigeon shitting on a Stradivarius.

I know Barker's recently dead and de mortuis etc- but I'm sick of the chorus of praise, praise and more praise. Yeah, he was handy with a pun, yeah, he was good in Porridge, but he never cut loose, he never took risks, he never did anything (on Telly anyway) that wasn't middle-brow. I look at his career and think, what a fearful waste.

BBC 4 gave us a short history of the ghost story last night. They started with The descent of Inanna and wound up with Robert Aickman- and all in half an hour- whee!

But they got it right. At least I thought they did. They paused on Sheridan le Fanu and M.R. James and Aickman- and that's as it should be. These are the masters. And they didn't bother with the Turn of the Screw (which I consider over-rated.) I'd have liked a nod in the direction of Margaret Oliphant, but you can't have everything and there were an awful lot of Victorian and early 20th century writers who knocked out a ghost story or two.

Ooh, and Jackie, you'd have liked this- they fished out a clip of Algernon Blackwood talking to camera in 1951- and he was everything you could have wished- long-nosed and gaunt with an avuncular twinkle in his eye.

I'm crazy for ghost stories. Here's my personal top ten.

An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street- Sheridan le Fanu
The Signalman- Charles Dickens
The Library Window- Margaret Oliphant
Thrawn Janet- Robert Louis Stevenson
Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance- M.R. James
The Room in the Tower- E.F. Benson
The Dog Hervey- Rudyard Kipling
The Wendigo- Algernon Blackwood
Seaton's Aunt- Walter de la Mare
The Houses of the Russians- Robert Aickman

The BBC is running a series of Shakespeare retreads. The first was a version of Much Ado set in a TV news-room- with Beatrice and Benedick as news-readers and Hero as a weather-girl. I'd have been interested if it was only the setting that had been modernised, but none of these new versions keep Shakespeare's language- and without the language you haven't got Shakespeare. His plots- most of them borrowed from history books or the pulp fiction of his day- are the least thing about him. So what's the point?

I feel something similar about the current dramatization of Bleak House. The gimmick is that it's being done as if it were soap opera- in speedy half hour chunks. I watched an episode to get the flavour- and can report that Gillian Anderson is looking lovely. There's an honourable tradition of doing Dickens on TV- I remember a 1950s Oliver Twist so violent that my dad went and stood in front of the screen to shield my infant eyes from corruption- but the publicity and reviews for this particular version have narked me. We're being told that Dickens himself would have been writing soaps if he were alive today- even that this version improves on the original; Well, "cobblers" to both those suppositions. This version is fun (I suppose) but- as with the Shakespeare- all it really gives us is Dickens's plot- and no-one reads Dickens for his plots.

Shakespeare and Dickens are writers- the two greatest writers in English. What matters about them is the words. The choice of words, the way they're put together. The poetry, the jokes. That's where the magic is. Consider the opening of Bleak House (the fog thing)- that great kedgeree of brilliant descriptive writing, surreal wit and angry satire- and try getting the same effect in a TV studio with dry ice and yellow spot-lights. Can't be done. The new "Shakespeare" plays and the new "Dickens" dramatization may (lets give them the benefit of the doubt) be fine bits of work in their own right, but anyone who supposes they're getting the full Shakespeare and Dickens experience from them is being short changed.

The new Channel More4 (or Mofo as I think they'd like us to call it) kicked off last night with a brilliant comedy drama about the Blair government. It was lotsa fun and Bernard Hill (Theoden in LOTR) was amazingly good as former Home Secretary David Blunkett.

But does satire change anything? Has a government ever been brought down by it?
Britain has a robust tradition of political satire going back to the 18th century and in all that time we haven't had a single revolution. Instead of hanging politicians from lamp posts we point the finger at them and snigger.

So satire acts as a safety valve, protecting those in power.

Star Trek just ended with the last ever episode of Enterprise. You'd think it would have been a major media event and it wasn't. All of us true Trekkers stopped caring a long time ago. Maybe the franchise will be revived and maybe it won't.

There was a shoot out with a bunch of ugly aliens, some character I was supposed to care about but didn't blew himself up in an act of heroic self sacrifice (like a suicide bomber) and Archer got to hug the sexy Vulcan. There was a bang, there was a whimper and now Berman and Bragga are going away to have a long, long think.

Enterprise has been crap. In fact all of Trek has been crap since the point, about three quarters of the way though DS9, when they switched from cool storylines about post-colonialism and theocracy to uncool story lines about explosions.

I had been hoping this last episode might pull out a few stops and contain glances backwards (forwards?) to the glory days. And it did. It shoehorned Riker and Troi into the action. I winced when Riker was made to say he was a big fan of Captain Archer's but- never mind- it was good to see them.

How well they're both looking!

Agatha Christie fools me every time. I've studied her methods in film after film (I can't bear the books, but my idea of a relaxing evening is to settle in with a Poirot dramatization) and I never spot the killer in advance.

She's the master of misdirection. All the evidence is there, but somehow she contrives for you not to spot it. She's awesome.

It's become a tradition (ever since Murder on the Orient Express) that Christie dramatizations should be packed with stars and polished to a high shine. The Poirot series (with the incomparable David Suchet) was worth watching simply for the production values. Everything gleamed, everything from the houses to the ashtrays was Art Deco. Mmmmm.

Last night was an oddity. The Pale Horse is late Christie and there's no Poirot, no Miss Marple and it's set contemporaneously in the Sixties. The film was as meticulous in its recreation of that era as tradition demands- with authentic clothes and cars and haircuts, conversational references to "angry young men", posters for Lolita and the Rolling Stones on bedsit walls and the Kinks on the soundtrack. It's odd to see a period one has lived through treated as if it were a remote historical epoch. It made me feel old to the point of ghostliness.

And Gollum was in it- Andy Serkis I mean- as a strange, nerdy, young policeman with an even stranger head of hair. He easily stole the show from the nominal hero. What a talent he is!