TV Zone - (Issue 372)
Written by Paul Mount
Monday, 14 November 2011
TV Zone - By veteran Paul Mount
You might imagine that life at TV Zone Towers is a dizzy whirl of showbiz parties, schmoozing with the stars (“Hi, Brad, hey Angelina, how’s it going?, Hi…er…bloke off ‘Merlin‘”), and lurking around the set of all your top cult TV favourites (and ‘Merlin’). You might imagine that. The reality tends to involve your Zoner sitting about in his jam-jams eating too much cake and drinking various brands of Diet Coke (ironic, considering all the cake) whilst catching up with the frankly scary number of sci-fi/genre shows currently hurtling about British TV screens, often on some non-terrestrial channel I previously didn’t even know existed. This tends to happen just before deadline day incidentally which is how I came to find myself settling down one drizzly Sunday morning to catch up with five episodes of ‘The Fades’, BBC3’s latest supernatural drama (thank you, iPlayer) having been quietly impressed by the first episode on transmission and then having managed to miss all the rest.
‘The Fades’ is absolutely unlike anything else on British TV at the moment and, in all honesty, it’s quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen on TV before. Anyone expecting the sometimes cosy shivers and smiles of ‘Being Human’, BBC3’s other supernatural smash, will have been catapulted from their sofas by a dark, brutal, gruesome and often quite disturbing full-blooded horror series full of ghosts, zombies, cannabilism and a kid who wets the bed.
Written by Jack Thorne, creator of ‘Skins’ for E4, and directed by Tom Shankland and Farren Blackburn (who’s just wrapped this year’s ‘Doctor Who’ Christmas special), ‘The Fades’ joins the likes of ‘Misfits’ (just starting its third series and featuring in this column in the next month or so) as one of the new breed of edgy, in-yer-face fantasy dramas which are worlds away from more traditional fun-for-all-the-family fare like ‘Doctor Who’. But whereas ‘Misfits’ is all about swearing teen super-heroes with a difference it’s not particularly scary because that’s not what it’s supposed to be. ‘The Fades’ though, sets out its stall almost immediately and it’s quite clear that the intention has been to create something genuinely horrific and most likely way out of the comfort zone of most of its intended audience. And this may have turned out to be its downfall…
‘The Fades’ stars Ian de Caestecker as troubled seventeen year-old Paul who has a urine/night-time interface problem (ie he’s the one who wets the bed). He’s plagued by inexplicable apocalyptic dreams and his waking hours offer no respite because he keeps seeing haggard-looking spirits known as the Fades and they don’t look happy. The Fades are invisible to everyone else so it’s clear that Paul is very special indeed (he later sprouts wings and shoots fire from the palms of his hands…oh, and he zips up his sister’s mouth) and his ‘special abilities’ attract the attentions of the Angelics, a ragtag bunch who are trying to track down the Fades who are attaining corporeal form by eating human flesh. Once ‘living’ again they become sentient zombies, aching for the taste of more flesh. The Fades are marshalled by a vengeful and twisted ‘spirit’ named John (Joe Dempsie) who will stop at nothing to destroy Paul and his innocent family before leading the Fades into a battle for dominion over the Earth.
This is bold, daring television and whilst BBC3 - aimed at a very specific ’youth’ demographic - often takes a lot of flak for its programme content (a lot of which does seem to consist of comedies starring Will Mellor and cheap documentary strands about lazy feckless teenagers and thirteen year-old girls pushing prams) it’s to be congratulated for financing and screening something as extreme and off-the-wall (if not off the scale) as ‘The Fades’. When we recall that only this year BBC1 screened ‘Outcasts’, a routine space series about pioneers travelling to another planet, which sent viewers screaming towards any other channel because it was too far-fetched, it’s surprising that ‘The Fades’ exists at all, if not surprising that it’s not likely to make the transition to a mainstream channel any time soon. This is the stuff of the hardcore horror fan and I’m not sure how many of those are out there amongst today’s teens; ‘Being Human’ worked because it took an identifiable flatshare situation and turned it on its head by introducing supernatural characters, albeit funny, likable characters whom the audience could root for and feel some empathy for. ‘The Fades’ makes no such concessions; everyone’s weird here. Paul is a gangly, awkward outsider who spends too much time with his best (only?) friend Mac (Daniel Kaluuya from ‘Psychoville’ and ‘Starburst’ favourite ‘Johnny English Reborn’) jabbering in (slightly overplayed) geekspeak and the Angelics are led by the obsessive Neil (Johnny Harris) who loses an eye in a fight and, towards the end of the series, carries out an unspeakably-shocking atrocity which shatters any sympathy we may have had for him. Elsewhere we have Paul’s snidey sister Anna (the wonderfully-named Lilly Loveless), his odd girlfriend Jay (Sophie Wu) and, in a concurrent storyline, devastated teacher Mark (Tom Ellis) whose wife is missing presumed murdered…until he’s reliably informed that she’s a Fade and she’s watching his every move.
‘The Fades’ is virtually the dictionary definition of a slow-burn series; the first couple of episodes set up the characters and the situation and establishes the unsettling, unearthly mood of the story. But it’s cold, difficult viewing and it’s easy to imagine that even a BBC3 audience might have found it difficult to get a handle on these rather strange people and Jack Thorne’s writing, whilst smart and slick, isn’t especially inclusive and the series demands that the viewer is patient as the answers to the questions which power the first couple of episodes are finally revealed as the series picks up its pace. And by about episode three the series really starts to find its feet as the plot strands start to come together and the story develops a distinct sense of impending doom as the Fades become more and more powerful and numerous and the Angelics become ever more desperate.
‘The Fades’ is audacious British TV, of course, but it has its problems. Paul and Mac are just a little bit too geeky and there are times when their dialogue is just too self-consciously knowing, as if the writer’s trying to impress the audience with his knowledge of recent popular culture. So we have characters discussing their favourite films (Paul gives short shrift to his new girlfriend Jay’s appreciation of the ‘Twilight’ series, dismissing it as ‘Twiglet’) and, in moments of extreme crisis, which movie characters they’d like to be. I found my teeth gritting as every episode started with the obligatory recap (honestly, TV people, some of us can remember what happened last week and where we are in the story) with Mac, to camera, bringing us up to speed and then asking us if we’d seen some mislaid DVD boxset or other before signing off with a tug of his ears and a cheery ‘Nanu nanu.’ Seriously - nanu nanu? Has there been a ‘Mork and Mindy’ revival I’ve not been aware of recently? The acting’s generally assured enough but Kaluuya’s Mac is a bit too cloyingly needy and geeky and Sophie Wu’s barely phoning it in, looking generally disinterested in her role as Jay. But when the acting’s good it literally rushes out of the screen; Harris is brilliant, all spittle and fury as the desperate Neil and Dempsie is swaggeringly-good as the monstrous, ruthless John. Sitcom lightweight Tom Ellis raises his game somewhat as widowed teacher Mark even if his subplot, pretty superfluous to the main plotline at best, fizzles out horribly in the apocalyptic rush of the final episode.
And it’s in the final episode where ‘The Fades’ really comes into its own and shows its worth. With the Fades on the deserted streets hungry for living flesh and the town’s population shipping out fast, an explosive final confrontation between Paul and John sees the Earth move - quite literally - and the final scene sees a potential second season set up as it seems that Paul must atone for daring to tamper with the power of ‘Ascension’ which has seen the Fades banished and, it appears, the cosmic balance disrupted. Oo-er.
Graphic, gory, violent and uncompromising, ‘The Fades’ wasn’t exactly easy, feel good TV but then it was never intended to be. It was clearly intended to be ground-breaking challenging and horrific, demanding a lot from its audience who were, ultimately, repaid in spades for their attentions. Never likely to attract the same sort of mass audience as ‘Being Human’ (The Fades’ pulled in audiences of around 600,000), it was nevertheless an impressive, if flawed, effort and if there’s any money unaccounted for left in the BBC coffers in these cash-strapped times, I’d not object to a few pounds being set aside for a second run where I suspect those flaws could be ironed out and ‘The Fades’ could develop into something really very special indeed. If not, well, I hear Will Mellor’s going cheap these days…
FOND FAREWELLS…
The last few weeks have seen us bidding a fond, if sad ‘adieu’ to a couple of long-serving TV favourites which have both shuffled off into the TV Archives but for rather different reasons. I’m going to pay tribute to Kudos’ ‘Spooks’ (BBC1) even though it’s not really typical ‘Starburst’ fare (even if real-life MI5 agents assure us the show bears no resemblance at all to proper espionage work). ‘Spooks’ burst onto our screen ten years ago when British drama was in one of its most moribund states and to say it was a breath of fresh air would to do it the most terrible (secret) disservice. Fast-paced, explosive, action-packed…this was all the things British drama hadn’t been in years and it was a revelation from the outset. Never afraid to write out lead characters in the most ruthless fashion (episode two of the first series famously saw one agent offed by being thrust into a deep fat fryer face-first before being casually shot in the head), ‘Spooks’ arrived on British TV more or less concurrently with 9/11 and the public’s awareness of and fascination with the security services became more acute than ever before (hence the success of ‘24’ in America) and the show, whilst occasionally fanciful and outlandish, was often remarkably prescient - if never too sensationalist - in its recognition and depiction of modern-day terrorist threats. Always an ensemble show, the real heart of the series was MI5 head honcho Harry Pierce (latterly Sir Harry) played by the brilliant Peter Firth. Pierce, a desk jockey in the show’s early days (Harry being subservient to heart-throb team leaders Matthew McFadyen, Rupert Penry-Jones and most recently Richard Armitage), rightfully took centre stage in this final series and his slow-burn romance with intelligence officer Ruth Evershed (Nicola Walker) ended the only way it was ever likely to. ‘Spooks’ wasn’t always treated with the respect it deserved by the BBC - shunted around the schedules (suicidally pitted against ITV‘s behemoth ‘Downton Abbey‘ this year), series lengths varying from year to year, a slashed budget for this last run which resulted in fewer of the show’s trademark explosive set pieces and action scenes - but ‘Spooks’ ended as air-punchingly brilliantly as any last episode in recent memory with Harry, a broken man, at his desk, answering the phone and announcing his name in that typically brisk, no-nonsense fashion. Life will go on at the fictional Thames House, it seems; such a shame we won’t be around to see it.
And finally, achingly-sad to say farewell too to ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ on CBBC. I’ve written before about the tragedy of the death of Elisabeth Sladen and seeing her here, in these last six episodes, so vibrant and energetic and full of life and yet less than a year away from her death, makes her passing even harder to come to terms with. But these final three stories were a fitting testament to her talent and the brilliance of the spin-off show she so richly deserved. Series four had seen the show growing up, Sarah Jane’s adopted son Luke moving away to University, and her young investigator chums Clyde and Rani maturing into young adults. Series five was clearly redressing the balance, introducing in its first story a new young character, Sky (Sinead Michael) who, in a knowing nod to the show’s pilot episode, is a human construct of a malevolent alien intelligence and who is quickly taken under Sarah Jane’s wing when the evil Metalkind are vanquished. The second story ‘The Curse of Clyde Langer’ is the show at its strongest, with Clyde turned into a figure of hate by the power of an alien totem pole and Elisabeth Sladen giving a stunning performance as a Sarah Jane who now loathes and detests Clyde and can’t bear to even say his name. With its themes of estrangement and homelessness, this is strong, thoughtful stuff for kid’s TV and yet another example of how far the show had come from the mind-controlling fruit juice of its sixty-minute pilot back in 2006. The show ended prematurely in a fairly rambunctious, knockabout fashion with computer thriller ‘The Man Who Never Was’ and, bolted onto the second and final episode, a flashback sequence showing highlights from the series and, acknowledging that Lis may be gone but Sarah Jane’s still out there, defending the world from her attic in Ealing, a simple caption stating “And the story goes on…forever.” Lovely, poignant stuff; with ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ ended by tragic circumstance and the future of ‘Torchwood’ looking distinctly uncertain, the ‘Doctor Who’ TV empire’s looking quite a bit smaller these days and certainly children’s TV is a poorer place without the redoubtable Miss Sarah Jane Smith and the Bannerman road gang fighting the good fight. Thanks for all the memories, Lis…
Coming soon: Terrible… sorry, 'Terra' Nova, Misfits, Alphas, Lost Girl…
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Other articles in TV Zone - By veteran Paul Mount
TV Zone - (Issue 373) 14 December 2011
TV Zone - (Issue 371) 14 October 2011
TV Zone - (Issue 370) 14 September 2011
TV Zone - (Issue 369) 14 August 2011
TV Zone - (Issue 368) 14 July 2011
TV Zone - (Issue 367) 14 June 2011
TV Zone - (issue 366) 04 May 2011
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