Spooky saga a winning ghoul
WE saw real horror on TV last week: Joe Hart’s goal-keeping… Lateysha’s meltdown, “Christine” Coker’s heart attack…
All far more unsettling than The Living and the Dead.
This snail-paced drama started like a creepier Poldark – Poldarker perhaps.
It’s 1894 and Victorian shrink Nathan leaves London to take over the family farm with Charlotte, his photographer wife.
The Somerset yokels sing songs, knock back cider brandy and enjoy lusty knee-tremblers up against trees. It’s like Glastonbury with ploughing.
But there’s something nasty in the vicarage. Harriet, the Rev’s teenage daughter, gets possessed by the spirit of local murderer Abel North and the show becomes Cider With Ghostie…or so we’re meant to think.
Bad Harriet feeds a duckling to pigs, stands gormlessly in ponds and speaks in the voices of the dead: Nathan’s first wife, his son and then evil Abel, who sounds surprisingly like Donald Duck (Aw, phooey).
To the pioneering psychologist, she’s just an everyday schizophrenic going through puberty with a gift for mimicry that would put Rory Bremner to shame.
Things hot up when Harriet tries to drown randy housemaid Gwen (tsk, it’s not a good ducking that she needs...)
Before Nathan realises baptism will drive out the ghastly ghoulie, Harriet tries to snog him by his wife’s grave, and we hear a plane overhead.
A lazy error, I thought, until he gazes up at its vapour trail. That was Email me at: garry.bushell@ dailystar.co.uk or write c/o Daily Star Sunday, 10 Lower Thames Street, London EC3R 6EN far too blatant to be a continuity cock-up. Later he sees an odd light in the next room coming from a modern woman’s iPad…as previously drawn by his son. These deliberate time-slip elements are intriguing. Especially as writer Ashley Pharaoh also gave us Life On Mars. Ghouls aside, the big threat to the farm-workers’ lives come from Charlotte’s newfangled mechanical plough. “It’ll take our jobs as it’s already taken my pride,” said ploughman John, before topping himself beneath it. Charlotte is also far feistier than Victorian women were meant to be. If you play join-the-dots with her freckles it probably spells liberated. There’s a ghost of a chance this spooky saga will come good. THE England rugby team…Amelle Berrabah, right, Celeb MasterChef… Messages Home: Lost Films of the British Army. THE England football team…Roy Hodgson, left… Glenn Hoddle… Most Haunted – as gormless as it is ghost-less. ON MasterChef, Gregg told smiley Sugababe Amelle her veg was “sympathetically cooked”. Eh? Did she tell the broccoli “Sorry for the stir-fry, guys; it hurts like buggery but I feel your pain…”?
With clumps of her rice bouncing like rubber balls and Laila Morse garnishing her prawn cocktail with a carrot top, Simon Webbe would’ve had to do something spectacularly daft to get the boot.
Cue the Jacob’s crackers…whoops. ONE an ancient voice of terrifying doom…the other a character on The Living and the Dead. KATE Quilton found that red wine can boost the memory if you drink 13 bottles a day. In a related story, Carla Connor now has total recall. Tsk, and they say we drink to forget. WALFORD’s favourite dogs 1) Wellard 2) Little Willie 3) Roxy Mitchell… ELLIE Goulding’s voice. Lateysha’s descent into babbling lunacy. Jonathan Ross using Thronecast to moan about the Referendum. Petulant luvvies. Football pundits making excuses for England’s dismal showing.