Remember Me - BBC 1 - TV review

Remember Me, which began on BBC 1 this evening, is a three part story of the supernatural written by Gwyneth Hughes and starring Michael Palin as Tom Parfitt and Jodie Comer as a young care worker called Hannah. The first episode seemed to me to strike a successful balance, introducing a number of mostly engaging characters and an intriguing set-up, without making it too clear what was actually going on.

Getting that balance right in a supernatural story that takes the form of a serial is easier said than done. The Intruders overdid the complications in episode one to such an extent that I haven't summoned up the enthusiasm to watch any more of it. The Secret of Crickley Hall was better, but not unduly subtle. Part of the interest here lay in the casting of Palin, an agreeable chap playing an equivocal and rather sinister old man who fakes a fall at home in order to move into a care home. Jodie Comer was also very good as the young carer who took a shine to him - even after a woman falls to her death after entering Tom's room in the care home.

A firmly realised setting is, I think, a big asset in a ghost story, and Hughes did very well to ground the action in a gritty Yorkshire setting. The contrast with the surreal goings-on in the storyline was thus made all the more effective. The care home is a converted mill - of the kind in which my grandmother, a Yorkshirewoman herself, worked many, many years ago - and there are numerous references to Scarborough, one of my favourite resorts. And the folk tune "Scarborough Fair" plays a spooky part in the mystery, as does a mysterious photograph of a young boy..

A credible background, and characters we can identify with, help viewers (or readers) to overcome their reservations about any potential silliness in a ghost story. Hughes managed to keep me interested from start to finish, and even to distract me from revising my draft novel. Well, any excuse will do, I suppose, but I don't mean to damn Remember Me with faint praise. It was very watchable, and I plan to watch next week as well.

Shetland - BBC TV review

Shetland,the new BBC TV crime drama which started tonight, is an adaptation of the work of one of my oldest friends in crime writing, Ann Cleeves, so it was a particular pleasure to watch its transition to the small screen. When I first learned that the role of Jimmy Perez, the cop who takes centre stage, was to be played by Douglas Henshall, I was rather surprised, as he does not look anything like my idea of Jimmy, whose heritage is Spanish. But he's a very good actor, as his performances in very different roles in The Secret of Crickley Hall and Doors Open illustrate, and he makes a very likeable Jimmy.

Another interesting aspect of the adaptation is that the books began with the award-winning Raven Black, whereas the first story to be televised was the final novel of what was originally planned to be a quartet, Red Bones. For plot reasons, there have therefore had to be significant changes to the presentation of Jimmy's personal life, but I felt that, in this first episode, these worked pretty well. The story involves a murder close to an archaeological dig, which as a number of writers, including Ann, Agatha Christie and Kate Ellis have shown, is an eminently suitable setting for a murder mystery.

A great strength of the books, of course, is the location. I'm tempted to dub Ann the Queen of Rural Crime, and Shetland really is a tremendous setting. She's often urged me to visit the place to see for myself and I'd certainly like to do that one of these days. In the meantime, I thought the programme presented Shetland very attractively, and (despite the body count) this show should do wonders for the local tourist trade..

An immediate question is: how does this series compare to the ITV series of Ann's books about Vera Stanhope, the chaotic but appealing Geordie who is played by the admirable Brenda Blethyn? On the evidence of this first episode, I'm tempted to suggest that Shetland is likely to be even more successful, given that the setting is unfamiliar, fascinating and atmospheric - even more so than the North East countryside, where Vera is set. We'll see in due course, but in the meantime I look forward to watching the second and concluding episode of Red Bones..

The Secret of Crickley Hall - tv review (episode 3)

The Secret of Crickley Hall reached a suitably melodramatic climax this evening, as the third and final episode of the ghost story adapted from James Herbert's novel drew together the strands of its two story-lines, one from 1943, one contemporary. This has been a very popular show - yesterday a fellow writer whose judgment I respect was telling me how much she'd enjoyed it, and I've noted that my review of the first episode has already entered the list of the top ten most viewed of all the blog posts I've written. And since I've written over 1500 so far, that's quite something.

Much of the strength of the show came from the quality of the acting rather than the scariness of the story. When David Warner, playing (for once) a good guy, met his old adversary, played by Donald Sumpter, it was a pleasure to watch two highly accomplished veteran actors at work. Suranne Jones and Tom Ellis were good as the bereaved couple who made the mistake of taking a break from their ordinary lives at a place as sinister as Crickley Hall. And Douglas Henshall was such a nasty chap as the deranged Augustus Cribben that it will be fascinating to see how he copes with the very different role of Jimmy Perez in the forthcoming series based on Ann Cleeves' books, Shetland.

I wondered how the scriptwriter, Joe Ahearne, would manage to produce a "happy ending" suitable for the Sunday evening light entertainment slot without making the whole thing unacceptably twee. By and large, I think he managed to achieve the objective. That said, there were one or two elements that didn't quite work for me. For instance, the character of Cribben's dodgy sister wasn't clearly developed, and although there was an interesting glimpse of the (by now, very aged) sister in the present day that was pleasingly macabre, I'd have liked to know more about what she'd got up to since the 1940s.

I've read some very negative reviews of the show, including a rather witty if withering put-down of the early family scenes in episode one ("Alfred Hitchcock doing Outnumbered"). All the same, I'm glad I stayed with it. It doesn't bear comparison with, say, The Innocents, which is still definitely unsettling 50 years on, but it was well-fashioned light entertainment.

The Secret of Crickley Hall - review

The Secret of Crickley Hall, based on a book by James Herbert, began on BBC One this evening, and I thought I'd give it a go, even though I've never read a Herbert novel. That's largely because I tend to associate him with rather graphic horror, but press coverage of the show suggests that the book on which this adaptation (by Joe Ahearne) is based relies more on the suggestion of evil than its vivid portrayal. And this was borne out when I watched episode one.

The starting point of the story is the disappearance of a young boy from a play area when his mother (Suranne Jones, from Scott and Bailey) falls asleep. The loss of a child is one of the most heartbreaking experiences imaginable, and even in a fictional context needs to be handled with a degree of sensitivity, which on the whole I thought the script and cast managed to achieve. Eleven months later, the boy still hasn't been found and she is still in denial. Her husband (Tom Ellis) persuades her and their two daughters to move to the north for a couple of months, for a change of scene around the anniversary of the disappearance.

Given the circumstances, their choice for a getaway is very unwise indeed - a remote spot which rejoices in the name of Devil's Cleave. And they move in to a spooky old stone mansion for good measure! Even worse, it tuns out that one of the neighbours is played by the splendid David Warner, a veteran of so many scary movies that it will be a great plot twist if he turns out to be one of the good guys (he seems to be at present, but it's early days).

Needless to add, spooky things soon start to happen at the house, and there seem to be parallels with a mysterious sequence of events in the 1940s, when the house was a school for orphans run by a brother and sister with distinctly weird personalities and an undue fondness for enforcing strict discipline. The brother (Douglas Henshall) is called Augustus Cribben, which really speaks volumes...

It's very difficult with this sort of material to avoid cliche, and The Secret of Crickley Hall exuberantly embraced most of the conventions of the ghost story. I didn't think that was a problem for Sunday night light entertainment, and I enjoyed the show enough to want to keep watching next week.