rather than the horror of visceral excess and abjection." Clark noted in a 2014 interview that he tried to make the second adaptation, A Warning to the Curious as "essentially, a silent film, with the tension building slowly throughout the visual images". After the success of the first two low-budget adaptations which had been largely independently produced by Clark, the stories came under the wing of the BBC's Drama Department, with a new producer, Rosemary Hill, and an increased budget. Adaptation The adaptations, although remaining true to the spirit of M.R. James, make alterations to suit the small screen - for example, A Warning to the Curious avoids the convoluted plot structure of M. R. James's original, opting for a more linear construction and reducing the number of narrators. In addition the central character, Paxton, is changed from a young fair-haired innocent who stumbles across the treasure to a middle-aged character driven by poverty to seek the treasure and acting in full awareness of what he is doing. After the first two adaptations, both by Clark, the tales were adapted by a number of playwrights and screenwriters. For The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, Clark recalls John Bowen's script "took some liberties with the story—which made it for the better I think...It's really quite a funny story until it gets nasty, although the threat is always there. James has a mordant sense of humour, and it's good to translate that into cinematic terms when you can. I'd always wanted to do a medium scene, and John came up with a beauty." Clark is less complimentary of the adaptation of The Ash Tree, which he felt didn't make Mistress Mothersole an effective villain, as a result of both his and adaptor David Rudkin's sympathy for witch trial victims; "We know so much about the hysteria of the witch trials and the ignorance and downright evil that fueled them that it was well-nigh impossible to portray her as James intended. Although, even he makes her a complicated character, hinting that she was popular with local farmers and the pagan fertility aspects that this implies. Frankly, I don't think the script quite did justice to the story, and maybe someone else should have a go at it." In his screenplay for The Signalman Andrew Davies adds scenes of the traveller's nightmare-plagued nights at an inn, and reinforces the ambiguity of the traveller-narrator by restructuring