Genuine chills in this fine Friday night horror
There are so many things in the world today to be scared of – giant trevallies and fatbergs to name just two – that for a mere TV series to really give you a fright takes some doing. (BBC One), which began on Friday, is a new six-parter that is unashamedly a ghost story. Its lead character was Matilda Gray (Lydia Wilson), a virtuoso cellist who was just about to give a performance at the Royal Festival Hall when her nice old mum Janice (Joanna Scanlan) appeared at the stage door looking, sounding, and generally acting very weird. She then ran off, Matilda followed her down to a car park at which point her mother pulled out a kitchen knife and slit her own throat.
This, by the by, was Requiem’s second suicide, and it’d only been going 10 minutes. The episode opened with an old man looking into the basement of a big Gothic manor house, from where he was hearing noises, before freaking out, smashing all the mirrors and finally jumping off the roof.
The connection between the gruesome twosome soon became apparent – Matilda’s mother left behind a shoebox full of dog-eared press cuttings about a missing girl, along with some photos of the same big Gothic country mansion. And so Matilda headed off to the spooky house, dragging her pianist and best buddy Hal (Joel Fry) with her, to try to piece the puzzle together.
Written down as a list, Requiem had every horror-flick cliché covered. Things did indeed go bump in the night, inanimate objects flew around of their own accord and there was even some woods at the bottom of the garden that you’d better not go down to today (or you’d be sure of a big surprise).
But those clichés can still be highly effective if judiciously applied, and the makers of Requiem knew exactly what they were doing. The relationship between Matilda and Hal was a masterstroke, not only for being unusual (an accompanist is something different from a bog-standard sidekick) but it also allowed for some necessary levity. Cleverly, for a show about musicians, this was an aural as well as a visual treat. Whatever the monster in the basement turns out to be, it comes with a sound like a tortured cat that is deeply unpleasant yet wasn’t overused. And Requiem used modern digital camera technology to film long scenes in almost total darkness, bringing a new aesthetic to TV horror.
The end result? Requiem was genuinely scary as well as scarily good.
E(ITV, Sunday) is the story of the young Inspector Morse and, as it goes from series to series, each tale is underpinned by a cumulative tension. That tension is to do with ageing: at some point Endeavour has got to become the Inspector Morse of Colin Dexter’s novels and John Thaw’s much-loved portrayal. It’s like looking back through the baby photos when you’re friends with the grown-up already.
This Endeavour, the first of a fifth series, began with Morse (Shaun Evans) having recently been promoted to Detective Sergeant, and it followed that we would be treated to a few more Morse-isms as he rose through the ranks. There’s only the occasional sighting of his vintage Jag as yet, minimal opera and not too many pints of frothy ale being drank, but Evans has plainly studied Thaw’s work. It’s a great performance, offering just enough hints that the two actors are playing the same man while remaining Evans’s own creation. Most onscreen curmudgeons are old; Evans’s Morse is a credible young grump who, at his age, really doesn’t have anything to be grumpy about.
Except, perhaps, the never-ending Oxonian crime wave that Morse stories require. In the opener, Morse was on the trail of a murderer who’d hammered a metal stake into a boxer’s ear and stabbed a history don in the eye. The link was a Fabergé egg from Tsarist Russia that was soon to be auctioned for the benefit of an Oxford college.
While there was interest to be found in the main character and how he is evolving into the finished article, I have to say that the plot here felt leaden. In addition, Roger Allam as Endeavour’s DCI Fred Thursday is a reliably excellent actor with a voice that could launch a thousand ships, so it really rankles when he’s given duff dialogue like, “All that death and suffering… [PAUSE] For what?” and there was plenty more where that came from.
You have to ask, if there hadn’t been Inspector Morse, would Endeavour be worth the endeavour, and the answer is probably no. But Endeavour, as a foreshadowing of things to come, remains just about palatable.