Midwinter of the Spirit
Dir Richard Clark, UK 2015
ITV Studios Home Entertainment, £12.99 (DVD)
I once found myself in Hereford bus station as a strange-looking singledecker hove into view. Instead of the usual destination blind, it carried a raggedy piece of cardboard fastened with string and bearing the legend “Much Marcle” – birthplace of serial killer, rapist and torturer Fred West – the characters becoming increasingly crabbed as they neared the arbitrary cut-off point where the cardboard placard had clearly been torn from a larger sheet. It was amusing and slightly unnerving, conjuring up images of a sort of local Lovecraftian hinterland – Herefordshire’s equivalent of Arkham County – where unspeakable things went on between closely related people living in remote villages and farms.
Phil Rickman’s novels have put this liminal border region between England and Wales, so rich in landscape, lore and legend, on the literary map, mixing ancient supernatural forces with the modern murder mystery to compelling effect. The only surprise is that his Merrily Watkins series has taken this long to reach our TV screens, as the genre-bending proposition of a rural vicar solving bizarre crimes and fighting the forces of evil in a world as immediately recognisable as Morse’s Oxford seems a no-brainer for the medium.
This three-part adaptation, courtesy of Ghostwatch scribe and sometime FT contributor StevenVolk, introduces our heroine as she returns to her rural parish after undergoing training in what’s nowadays known as ‘Deliverance Ministry’ but which most people would understand as exorcism. Straight away, she’s called on to investigate a crucifixion in some nearby woods and attend a dying child molester in the hospital – two strands of supernatural and worldly evil that turn out to be linked in numerous ways as the plot inevitably thickens: we get pagan rites, church desecrations, a fake psychic, an unhinged Canon and rum goingson at Hereford Cathedral.
It’s all highly entertaining, and often quite spooky, if a bit rushed at times. One can’t help but feel that an extra episode would have allowed for a bit more light and shade, a bit more background. I’d have liked to have seen more of Merrily’s day-today vicaring – presumably she’s not
64 always chasing Satanists – to get a better sense of the challenges she faces as a widowed, single-mum, inner-city female priest parachuted into a weird rural parish. And perhaps a bit more humour wouldn’t have gone amiss (when a vicar friend was preparing for her first go at deliverance ministry, her husband helpfully whistled ‘Tubular Bells’ in the background to get her in the mood). It’s a well-wrought piece of telly, though, with an effective script, atmospheric locations and a solid cast. I wasn’t quite convinced by Anna Maxwell Martin’s central performance: while she’s good at showing the all-too-human side of a woman of God in a man’s world (smoking fags and getting a bit sweary), her slightly one-note performance didn’t really get across the faith or the compassion that go with the territory.