Creepy? This child’s stare would give the King of horror the chills
We’re a demanding lot. Time was, any telly audience would be satisfied by a tale of dark family secrets driving spiteful siblings to murder in a remote farmhouse. Now we want more.
And we get it in the mystery drama 15 Days (C5), when four resentful siblings gather to scatter their mother’s ashes amid the inevitable recriminations over the will.
They bring their own children — including little Mabli, a solemn girl with giant spectacles and a stare that would give horror writer Stephen King the creeps.
Mabli scolds any adult who dares to touch her friend Owen’s toys, guarding the door to his bedroom like a rottweiler.
The worrying thing is, she’s about six and Owen has been dead for 20 years, run over by his own father.
Most of the characters — and there are a lot of them — fit neatly into soap- opera stereotypes. We meet the supercilious control freak Michael (David Caves from Silent Witness) who bullies his wife while having an affair with her sister, and the couple with a stroppy teenage daughter and money worries.
There’s a pair of loved-up newlyweds, too — she’s pregnant and he’s trying not to think about how he drowned his father. Any one of
COOL HEAD OF THE NIGHT: Prince Philip was typically offhand as he described how the Italian navy had the ‘effrontery’ to fire shells at his ship in the war, in Royals On The Frontline (Yesterday channel): ‘It was quite interesting to hear these things whistling over.’
them would fit right into eastenders. But you won’t see Mabli on Albert Square, unless it’s a Halloween special.
She’s more likely to be sneaking out of bed to conduct voodoo sacrifices with plenty of blood and feathers. If there are any cockerels on this farm, they might want to keep a low profile.
The four-part drama, screening every night until Thursday, is based on Welsh channel S4C’s noir thriller, 35 Diwrnod, which translates as 35 Days.
Two of the stars (Geraint Morgan and Mali Tudno Jones, who play brother and sister Gareth and Nia) reprise their roles from the 2014 original.
Fans of last year’s family suspense chiller, Blood — also set in an eerily remote farmhouse, this time in rural Ireland — will recognise the style.
It’s all shot with lots of dramatic lighting and deep shadows, in a house full of oil portraits and fourposter beds.
I’m betting that, by Wednesday, young Mabli will be burning effigies of her cousins while chanting in Latin backwards. But that won’t stop me watching.
Queen Victoria might have been chanting Latin backwards for all we could tell from the recording of her voice on Victoria’s Palace (ITV).
Trevor McDonald assured us that this was a faithful phonographic record of the famously unamused monarch who died in 1901, but unfortunately it was swallowed up by distortion and crackle.
The rest of the technology on this lightweight history show was more effective.
Computer graphics revealed how Buckingham Palace’s grandest state rooms probably looked 150 years ago, with great emphasis on the accuracy of the sets in ITV’s costume spectacular, starring Jenna Coleman.
There were surprises as well — did you know that Marble Arch was originally sited slap-bang in front of the palace, like a huge garden gate?
And a procession of historians served up some juicy royal gossip: ‘Victoria was notorious for being able to put away a nine-course meal in half an hour,’ said one.
The documentary marked Queen Victoria’s 200th birthday this month. But it would have surely have made more sense if we’d seen it before series three of the drama ended on Sunday.