Odd but gripping: BBC1’s The Pale Horse reviewed

Not much was clear in the opening scenes of The Pale Horse (BBC1, Sunday), which even by current TV standards were admirably committed to confusing us with a series of baffling fragments. One thing that did seem apparent, though, was that Mark Easterbrook (Rufus Sewell) wasn’t having much luck with the ladies. In one fragment, he cradled the corpse of his new wife who’d just electrocuted herself in the bath. A few fragments later — some of them featuring an old woman lying in bed with her hair falling out — he woke up in a Soho starlet’s flat to find a rat dead in the sink and the starlet dead in the bed.

By then, mind you, he’d already married again: this time to a woman who on the face of it is a perfect early-1960s wife, her clothes, hair and vol-au-vents all immaculate. Nonetheless, her tendency to scream loudly and attack the upholstery with a bread knife when she’s alone suggests that a certain brittleness may lurk beneath.

And Mark’s troubles don’t end there. Shortly after the starlet’s death, the balding old woman was found dead too, and in her shoe was a list of names that contained his — and if most of the people on it hadn’t died already, they soon would. While the deaths appeared to be natural, the coincidence was too much for both the enigmatic Inspector Lejeune (a nicely understated performance by Sean Pertwee) and the even more enigmatic Zachariah Osborne (a weirdly hammy performance by Bertie Carvel). Unlike everybody else — including the viewers — Osborne thinks he knows what’s going on: namely that three witches in the Surrey village of Much Deeping are summoning demons to kill people to order.