On the brink of delivering something special: Sky’s The Midwich Cuckoos reviewed

A youngish couple leave London and drive off excitedly to make a fresh start in more rural surroundings. They demonstrate their happiness by laughing all the way to their new town, where a cheery sign on the outskirts reads: ‘Welcome to Midwich’. So what could possibly go wrong?

In fact, even for viewers unfamiliar with John Wyndham’s famously spooky 1957 novel, from which Sky Max’s modern-day version of The Midwich Cuckoos has been adapted, it’s clear that something soon will. After all, a pre-credit sequence, set five years later, had shown the same couple cowering in fear before their five-year-old daughter. For now, though, while they marvelled at the idyllic views, we were efficiently introduced to their neighbours, before Thursday’s first episode went about its main business of increasingly unsettling us.

In my last column I reviewed Conversations with Friends, of which the phrase ‘slow burn’ has been much used in its traditional sense of ‘a bit boring’. Here, in a rare twist, the slow burn works precisely as it’s meant to: by quietly but insistently cranking up a feeling of anxiety.

So it was that the weirdness began in an understated, even slightly hoary way, with people’s lights flickering on and off. But fortunately worse was to come when mobile phones lost their signal, Midwich became electronically cut off from the outside world and one by one, with varying degrees of theatricality, the townsfolk collapsed unconscious to the ground.

There were, mind you, two characters who escaped this fate by the simple means of not being there at the time – and, as luck would have it, they were played by the biggest names in the cast. Dr Susannah Zellaby (Keeley Hawes), a child psychologist, arrived back from London to find Midwich cordoned off, leaving her in a frenzy about the troubled 23-year-old daughter who lives with her.