James Walton

The big chill | 30 June 2016

The writer Ashley Pharoah, co-creator of Eternal Law and the terrible Bonekickers, owed us a good TV drama – and he’s delivered it

It’s sadly possible to imagine that The Living and the Dead was sold to BBC1’s commissioning editors as ‘Poldark meets The Exorcist’. Yet, while that wouldn’t be a completely inaccurate summary, the overall result is a lot more coherent, clever and ambitious than that.

At heart, in fact, Tuesday’s first episode was a nifty twist on another genre: the one where a retired detective/gunslinger/master criminal comes out of retirement for one last job. The programme began in Somerset in 1894, where we met Harriet Denning, an unusually bright 16-year-old, whose intellectual curiosity alarmed her mother but who was encouraged in her reading of Ibsen, Zola and Darwin by her proud father. Such non-repressive behaviour on the part of a Victorian patriarch — especially given that he’s a vicar — felt distinctly refreshing in a TV drama. The trouble is that he might have been wrong. Even before the opening credits, Harriet already appeared to be losing that impressive mind of hers. Otherwise, why all those close-ups of sinister dolls, self-rocking rocking horses and other traditional signifiers of supernatural mischief and/or mental disturbance?

Meanwhile, not far away, the dashing Nathan Appleby had decided to give up his work in the newfangled business of psychology so as to make a go of the failing family estate. And to prove it, even when the vicar asked him to help Harriet, he replied with a stern ‘That work is behind me’ and went back to his scything.

But that was before Harriet showed up one night standing catatonically in his pond, having walked a mile barefoot from her parents’ house. Only the following morning did she offer the explanation that ‘the man told me to, the man who comes to me’. And come to her the man certainly did — because before long Harriet was intermittently speaking in the voice of a middle-aged male, and claiming to be Abel North, a local bad ’un and probable murderer who apparently died some years before.

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