An exceptionally creepy visit to the spirit world
Ten minutes into Midwinter of the Spirit (ITV), already gripped by its unusual blend of crime drama and the supernatural, I was thinking it’s a wonder that no one has adapted Phil Rickman’s books for television before now. He’s hardly a household name but ever since 1998 his wonderfully original series of novels featuring Merrily Watkins, an Anglican vicar distinguished by being not only a widowed single mother but also a “deliverance minister” (or, in crude terms, an exorcist), have been favourites of both the crime and horror cognoscenti.
In this surprisingly faithful adaptation, by Stephen Volk, it was easy to see why. For one thing
Midwinter of the Spirit managed to be exceptionally creepy without ever venturing beyond the bounds of the credible, let alone (apart from an illjudged and overcooked opening sequence) into the gory.
Merrily Watkins (Anna Maxwell Martin) proved, despite her intriguing job title, to be an appealingly ordinary heroine forced to confront the sorts of evils regularly encountered in other cop dramas, but coming at it from a wholly different perspective – that of a woman of faith.
Yet we could not be further from the whimsical realms of Father Brown, or ITV’s other clerical sleuthing drama, the slow-paced Grantchester. This was drama to get the heart properly beating. We first met Merrily being cautioned by her mentor Huw Owen (David Threlfall) to always look for the rational explanation first. But Merrily, newly appointed and wholly inexperienced, soon found herself out of her depth when called in by police following the discovery of a corpse surrounded by ritual objects in a forest. This, plus the discovery that her predecessor in the job was suffering a major breakdown, and a deeply disturbing last-rites encounter with a man described as “pure evil” by hospital staff, slowly and surely built the edginess up to something not far short of nail-biting.
Indeed there were one or two shocks that the late Wes Craven might have been proud of. Not least because so much of the creepiness was delivered via the exceptionally clever sound design. And it was all the more effective for the apparently mundane, small-town, semi-rural setting. Merrily’s daughter Jane (Sally Messham) was a powder keg of unmet adolescent need. Her bishop (Nicholas Pinnock) was an entertainingly right-on politician. Everything was just waiting to go terribly, terrifyingly wrong.
It hadn’t quite got to that point by the end of the first hour. But like all the best suspense drama, you knew it could only be a matter of time. And that returning for more next week would likely pay off with some truly spine-tingling dividends.
Three episodes in and Doctor
Foster (BBC One) is proving to be absorbing and frustrating in equal measure. Absorbing because this drama of a woman who uncovers her husband’s infidelity but can’t quite bring herself to give him up (at least not yet) is a refreshingly different take on the world’s oldest story. It also has the good fortune of having Suranne Jones in the title role of Gemma Foster, an intelligent, independent-minded GP and mother who’s quite capable of a betrayal or two herself as and when it suits her purposes.
Jones’s ability to layer her performance with just enough vulnerability to keep viewers on side has helped surmount quite a few of the plot’s less convincing moments – as when, early on, she threatened to falsify medical records in order to get some matrimonial spying done. Or the moment when, last week, having finally worked up to accusing her husband Simon (Bertie Carvel) of having an affair, she simply accepted his denials despite having an arsenal full of evidence to the contrary.
Which is where the frustration comes in. Because the tests of plausibility seem to get tougher with every episode. As here when Gemma blithely sacrificed her own fidelity to a sleazebag accountant simply to get access to her husband’s financial records. Then, having discovered that he had plundered everything they jointly owned, simply kept it to herself and put it all to one side again when his mother, a tad too conveniently, passed away.
Which left us back at much the same place we’ve been at the end of every episode – scratching our heads over the failure of this drama to move on. It’s as if the necessity to facilitate a five-part run condemns us all to a kind of matrimonial groundhog day, where every week the same script is enacted in a slightly different way, with our heroine ending up more compromised every time.
Midwinter of the Spirit Doctor Foster