Get a Life

Spent most of the Bank Holiday weekend re-watching Ultraviolet (no, not this - which looked crap - but the short-lived television series... no, the UK original, not the US remake - though that would be interesting to see).

I did though have a few bevvies with old friends Steve and Graham - quite difficult to meet up now, what with Graham buying house with his girlfiend in Leicestershire and Steve married with two kid's, both under two. 'Twas a grand time: talked mostly bollocks and drank a few, though it goes without saying...

I also watched Severance which was bloody good fun, directed by Chris Smith who burst onto the UK horror scene with the rather poor Creep. Smith has definitely improved as a director, and I hope he continues to do so, and if you're a fan of Dog Soldiers then it's well worth watching.

Anyway, back to Ultraviolet. If you missed it (which I did, thank you very much S4C) you missed a treat. Quite possibly the best genre show made in the 90s, which in hindsight isn't that great an achievement. But it was a superb piece of telefantasy, and even now - almost ten years after the fact - it is still a superb show; a vampire series that eschews the conventions of the genre, yet subverts them to create something entirely new and fresh.

The word "vampire" is not even mentioned once - they're either called "Code 5" or "leeches"; despite being a television series, it has a very definite cinematic feel; the writer/director Joe Ahearne thinks big, and is ably assisted by some superb photography (the various shots of London at sunset have never looked so good).

Ahearne went onto direct several episodes of the first series of Doctor Who - including my favourite, Father's Day, which was superb. It was the last series's loss that he either chose not to return or wasn't asked...

Anyway, back to UV: with a sterling cast, from the then hot-property in TV-land Jack Davenport (now to be seen upon the high seas in Pirates of the Carribean and it's sequels, to the moderately well-known Susannah Harker and the unknown Idris Elba and Philip Quast, the series was played entirely straight, though there was humour but it came from the characters and situation, not a joke shoe-horned in to get some cheap laughs.

Ahearne's writing, though, was exemplorary: intelligent, real; the series looked and sounded like a high profile television cop drama (much like Cracker and Prime Suspect) but the supernatural element just raised the bar slightly, and it's still relatively rare for the same person to write and direct in television, especially UK-TV.

Any supernatural show, though, needs a decent musical score, and this too is where UV, erm, scores: Sue Hewitt's minimalist, but incredibly evocative themes helps create just the right atmosphere, which culuminated in the fifth episode where... well, you'll have to just watch it! A great scene that only lasts a minute or two but is extremely well-acted and filmed.

Overall, if you're a fan of great, well-made genre television then buy the dvd now - and at only a tenner, can you afford not to?

I've also discovered that Beasts has been released on dvd - being slightly too young to remember it from original transmission, I have read much about this chiling series from the pen of Nigel Kneale, and again from what I've read and heard, it does sound a worthy purchase.