Being Human – Page 2 – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

Being Human: Series 4, Episode 3–The Graveyard Shift

“Sometimes I think the only demons worse than him must be the ones he’s fleeing from.”

After a thoughtful, character building piece in last week’s Being Human, the action (and the convoluted plot) were back with a bang in this week’s episode, The Graveyard Shift. There was a lot going on in Jamie Mathieson’s script – I’d say perhaps too much for one episode, resulting in a slam bang piece that felt like a chapter of a story rather than a story in itself.

Not that there wasn’t plenty to enjoy. Amidst all the plot advancement – Eve’s destiny, the vampire prophecies, the Old Ones heading for Wales in a boat – there was plenty of the character based humour the show seems to be recovering with its new cast. In particular, we learnt a lot this week about Hal, the ultra-repressed, OCD-ridden vampire who refers to his supernatural status as “my condition”. After last week’s cliffhanger, in which Fergus learned of Hal’s return, we got an opening flashback very much in the mould of those we used to see for Mitchell, showing his past as a Big Bad, slaughtering all and sundry with Fergus. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, massively reminiscent of the flashbacks to Angel and Spike’s historical killing sprees in Buffy.

At this point, I think the show needs to be a little bit careful. Up till now, the writers have been at pains to distinguish Hal from Mitchell (though both characters’ resemblance to Angel has never been shied away from). The flashback to 1855 was nicely done, with Fergus and Hal (gratuitously shirtless, not that I minded) covered in blood having slaughtered the inhabitants of a big country house. But Mitchell too was a former Big Bad, revered among the vampire community for his previous life as an unrepentant killer, as frequently shown in flashbacks just like this. As we learn from Fergus, Hal’s past as a vampire Old One is arguably way more prestigious than Mitchell’s. But the similarity was there, and I think the show’s going to have to be careful not to make Hal – in some ways – seem like a carbon copy of his predecessor.

Still, Hal in the present is very much a different vampire to Mitchell. Socially awkward where Mitchell was easy going and blokish, this week saw him forging a more friendly relationship with Tom. The tension is still there, of course – initially, Tom’s carrying stakes around just in case, while Hal almost turns him over to Fergus and the gang. But the episode quite skilfully built the beginning of a believable friendship between the two; not quite on the level of Mitchell and George’s easy mateyness, but by the end of the show, you could see them getting there.

This started by having the aloof Hal having to get a job, in order to pay for the baby stuff that Annie is currently having to spectrally steal from Aldi. In a week which has seen much debate about the UK government’s Workfare (read ‘slave labour’) scheme, with the Work and Pensions Secretary decrying objectors as ‘job snobs’, this was curiously timely. Initially, it seemed like Hal thought counter work in the same cafe as Tom was beneath him; later, though, as they grew closer, a Jaws-style pissing contest over who’d had the worst jobs revealed that Hal had done some pretty grim stuff to earn a living.

Nonetheless, Hal seemed to find the job rather distasteful at first, with his glacier-speed table wiping and lettuce chopping. It was only when he and Tom began to build up that camaraderie you tend to have with your co-workers that he lightened up a it. We got some nicely humorous business with Goth-ish wannabe writer Michaela, who amusingly tried to freak the boys out with her ‘edginess’ (mostly comprising terrible poems and drawings). She resisted the boys’ competition to see who could get her number because they weren’t ‘edgy’ enough – something that would come back to haunt her later.

Michaela, along with vampire recorder Regus, provided much of the broad comedy this week. How funny you found this depended on your tolerance for a character who was a little too broad and comical to be realistic – for me, anyway. Laura Patch put in a good comedy performance, but Being Human has never been that kind of comedy. It was too much like caricature rather than character to be believable.

By contrast, Mark Williams, returning as Regus, pitched the humour of his character just right. It’s nice to see that even a vampire can be a nerd and a loser (“my lunch fought back. I mean, who carries a crowbar to walk the dog?”). Williams played him as genuinely weary of 400 years of being a nobody, thrust into the spotlight by his interpretation of the mysterious prophecy.

He also developed a sweet but creepy rapport with Annie, who was this week struggling to accept Tom and Hal as being more than just lodgers. It’s good that the new trio haven’t just fallen straight into the pattern established when the show began. It’s always traumatic when a beloved flatmate moves out and is replaced by someone you don’t know, and for Annie that’s even harder as both of her ex-flatmates are now dead.

Annie spent a lot of the episode advancing the Big Plot, firstly in a genuinely tense confrontation with Fergus and then in mountains of exposition with Regus. As the oldest hand in the show, Lenora Critchlow has the confidence to pull this off while the boys get all the action, but I’d just as soon see some return to the dark, powerful Annie we’ve occasionally seen before.

Perhaps that will come to pass by the end of this series, but for now, she seems largely stuck with relationship building and comic moments. There was quite a good one of the latter, as Regus blackmailed her into telepathically sharing her memory of her first sexual encounter – only to discover that, being from her point of view, he was actually going to experience what it felt like to have sex with ‘Dave’ (“Don’t worry, I don’t remember it lasting very long”). Annie’s always been the show’s real moral heart, steering George and Mitchell back to the straight and narrow when necessary, and now she seems to have become a den mother in addition. All very well, but I’d like to see her take more of a role in some of the action again.

Said action erupted as Fergus and a gang of vampire heavies turned up to storm the cafe, and there was much shouting, hissing, and brandishing of stakes. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Michaela got caught up with Hal and Tom, only to end up with her throat slashed when Fergus and his heavies crashed into the B&B. Inevitably, the lonely, creepy Regus brought her back as a vampire – this made me groan, but I was relieved that the new happy couple headed off for happier shores. It was a little contrived, but I think that might be my dislike of Michaela as a character colouring my opinion. At least the script got in some not too subtle digs at the vampire-worshipping fangirls. Pointing out Regus’ Twilight T shirt, Michaela asked, “are you taking the piss?”, only to receive the inevitable reply, “well, you started it.”

Still, an actual vampire battle in the B&B was a welcome bit of excitement in a show that has had so much happen between seasons. I was genuinely surprised to see Fergus offed so quickly; Anthony Flanagan has made him a rather good villain, and I expected him to be around a bit longer. There was no sign of Cutler this week either, fisticuffs plainly not being his thing. Still, I believe that makes him the only vampire villain left not in a Hoover bag at this point.

And Hal nailing his colours to the mast after initially convincing Fergus that he was back to his old ways was a superb – and necessary – bit of drama. Up till that point, like Annie, he was undecided whether the flatmates were his actual friends. This was the moment when he decided, and as a consequence convinced them too. I’m very much enjoying Damien Molony as Hal, and hope the show survives its cast change to see a bit more of him.

By the end, then, of a tumultuous episode, we were back with Hal and Tom slouching on the sofa watching TV just as Mitchell and George used to. The point that “it’s similar but different” was made amusingly but unsubtly, as the boys rejected watching “something about conmen” in favour of Antiques Roadshow. Still, as Annie sat down to join them, it felt like something of an equilibrium had been forged with the new trio. In many ways, the show could have ended right there – but no, we still have the Prophecy to deal with, along with a boatload of vampire Old Ones and a ghost from the future intent on killing herself as a child. Still, on this evidence, our new gang of heroes may have bonded well enough to deal with those things.

Being Human: Series 4, Episode 2–Being Human 1955

Annie: “Things have changed a lot recently.”
Pearl: “That’s a pity. Over 55 years and I’ve never had to change my lineup.”

OK, this is the episode that’s convinced me I want to stay with this show (though judging by my Facebook friends, I may be in a minority). After the sturm und drang of last week’s Big Plot shenanigans, this week Being Human concentrated – quite rightly I think – on establishing the new characters and their place in the show. Despite the loss of George and Mitchell still being very keenly felt, this was a real return to the blend of comedy and horror that made the show so much fun in the first place. It’s not the show it was, to be sure. But it felt, unlike last week, like a promising new direction.

Lisa McGee’s script was rather excellent; full of quotable lines, it had me by turn laughing my head off and then gasping at the drama. All right, I think the comedy was most to the fore, but it was used to inform the drama (and vice versa) in precisely the way the show used to before it got so hung up on its own mythos.

Oh, the mythos is still there, and we’re obviously going to see some developments this year with the threat of vampire domination and their ongoing war with humanity and the werewolves. I was glad to see that both Fergus and Cutler survived last week’s massacre at the groan-makingly named ‘Stoker Import and Export’ building (though bafflingly they’re still headquartered there).

Of the two, Fergus is the more obvious baddie. Like last week, Anthony Flanagan invested him with genuine menace beneath an apparent bonhomie, and he’s very much a trad vampire with his first response to everything being to kill and feed – “We need fists and fangs”. But charismatic though he is, Cutler is the more interesting of the pair. A ‘vampire of the times’, we first encounter him using homeless people as a ‘focus group’ for his werewolf transformation footage propaganda. Fergus’ first reaction is to immediately kill all the humans (“we missed lunch”), and then more tellingly, compare Cutler to a certain political figure – “we don’t need a vampire Peter Mendelssohn”. Cutler’s withering putdown to this – “Did you mean ‘Mandelson’, or are you calling me a 19th century German composer?” – was gold, and I’m hoping their bickering double act will be a running thing.

Fergus and Cutler aside, we also saw Future Eve (if indeed the ghost from the future is her), who was directing the plot by sending the ailing Leo, together with Hal and Pearl, to see Baby Eve in her capacity as Warchild and Saviour. I’m still not sure about this aspect of the plot, and may have to watch last week’s again – is the ghost from the future really Eve? If so, her mission to kill the infant version of herself, while noble, is a time paradox more head scratching than anything in the Terminator movies.

But these Big Plot aspects were fairly incidental to the episode’s USP, which was, plainly, to set up the new household. It’s being done in a nicely gradual way;we’re already getting used to Tom as the new resident werewolf, and with this in train, here comes new vampire Hal. Only glimpsed last week, this week Damien Molony got a large slice of the action to establish this new bloodsucker as a very different vampire from John Mitchell. He’s far more introverted, with his archaic suit and clipped 1950s English accent (though I’m pretty sure I detected traces of Molony’s real Irish twang once or twice).

He also has an endearing tendency to OCD, with his strange superstitions and rituals. He never stops at petrol stations on the left hand side of the road because it’s bad luck – which must cause problems on dual carriageways, considering we drive on the left in this country. He also has a daily ritual of setting up complex domino chains, but never actually knocks them down, preferring to then carefully put them away.

As he explains, this is a method taught to him by Leo for controlling his primal urges; I like that. For as we saw in an electric confrontation between him, Tom and a slimy pawn shop owner, he could be very dangerous indeed. That scene, with Tom’s initial loathing of the stuffed wolf head leading to the owner pulling a shotgun on him, felt like the writers and the actor really setting the stall out for Hal as a character.

Molony was chilling as he calmly explained what killing was like, how easy and exhilarating it was, and how hard it was to live with afterwards. You got a real sense of how many times he’d learnt this himself. As the shopkeeper said, “you’re either a man of God, or you’re speaking from experience.” Molony’s regretful, faraway look as he replied, “I’m not a man of God.” was perfect, and it was a good one liner the likes of which the show used to do so well. The whole scene reminded me of nothing so much as a scene in Doctor Who story The Happiness Patrol, in which the Doctor, held at gunpoint, calmly and firmly talks his would-be executioners into putting down their guns. I wonder whether the resemblance was intentional?

But we also got Hal’s housemates Leo (werewolf) and Pearl (ghost) turning up with him, in a nicely timed comic bit after Tom had declared that Baby Eve wasn’t going to be suddenly visited by three wise men proclaiming her the Messiah. It had ben pretty well-publicised that the show’s new lineup was going back to the original mix – one vampire, one werewolf, one ghost, so plainly they weren’t going to stay around long. As it turned out though, the resolution of their storyline was every bit as affecting as the characters we’d known since the show began.

As much as the writing, this was down to the actors involved. Tamla Kari as Pearl had a nice interplay with Annie from the outset, with her bitching about the B & B’s decor, not to mention her smug assertion that she’d managed to make a vampire/werewolf/ghost household last for decades while Annie had barely managed a few years. And it was a brilliant, laugh-out-loud moment, in keeping with the show’s traditions, that the one snipe Annie just couldn’t take was when Pearl criticised her tea-making skills!

Good though Kari was, Louis Mahoney as Leo was again the best of the new crew. He was both funny and heartbreaking as the dying werewolf, with his assertion that he once saw Louis Armstrong – “though it could have been Shirley Bassey. I was really drunk” – and his obvious tenderness for his supernatural companions. I must say though, after this and his turn in Doctor Who episode Blink, I do wish someone would give this talented actor something more to do than dying emotively in bed.

All that said, the ultimate resolution to his and Pearl’s plot was a little predictable; they’d always loved each other, and having worked this out at the end of his life, could both move on through their doors, together. It was sweet, but signposted as soon as Leo sent Tom off to buy that mysterious ring.

In the same way that Hal is very different from Mitchell, Tom is clearly nothing like George, and again that’s a good thing. Theirs is obviously going to be a fractious relationship, nothing like the best mates that Mitchell and George were from the very beginning of the series, which is perfectly in keeping with their wounded and mistrustful natures. Hal may be best friends with another werewolf, but he still can’t touch Tom without interposing a handkerchief between their hands; and Tom never even came to trust Mitchell, so as far as he’s concerned, all vampires are still the enemy.

This all came to a head as Hal, alone and upset, tried to fall off the wagon by feeding off the nasty pawn shop owner. As he and Tom pointed a shotgun and a stake at each other, it was down to Annie to make an uneasy peace, and set the scene for that final shot of all three of them on the sofa, uneasy allies but housemates at least.

Ah, Annie. As the last one standing of the lineup that fans came to love, Lenora Critchlow has a heavy load to bear this series. On the evidence of this episode, she’s more than up to the task. Although an ensemble piece, Annie really dominated the action, with her usual mix of comedy and pathos. She got all the best laughs, from her mothering of Tom – “no stakes in my shrubbery!” – to her cobbled together ‘ceremony’ in an attempt to heal Leo, in which she randomly spouted every bit of Latin gobbledegook she could remember – “carpe diem, veni, vidi, vici, Dolce, Gabbana…”

But she also got some of the best moments of pathos. Hal saw straight through her cheery exterior – “Your mask. It’s almost as good as mine.” Then there were her tears as she tried to stop Tom and Hal killing each other. She’s lost her two best friends, and despite her cheeriness, is far from dealing with it well. She’s the same old Annie, but there’s something sadly ironic that out of the three housemates who started, it’s only the dead one who’s still around.

So, the new lineup is complete. They’re not mates yet, not like the old gang; Tom is very much like a teenage son to Annie, who’s also relishing being mum to Eve. Tom and Hal seem to have reached an uneasy peace, but I’m sure it’ll take a while before they even trust each other. Still, for all the show’s ever growing mythos and Big Plots, it feels like we’re back to its original format – three supernatural beings sharing a house, trying to deal with their own monstrous natures and ‘ be human’. In a way, the character change could even be a good thing; it felt, last year, like they’d gone as far as they could with Mitchell and perhaps George too. This way, we have a new gang to deal with the same problems in different ways. However much you loved the original cast, that’s got to be a good thing – and on the strength of this episode, for me, it is.

Being Human: Series 4, Episode 1–Eve of the War

“I don’t know what I’m for any more.”

Changing the lead cast of an established, popular TV series is always a risky business. Look at what happened with The X Files after the departure of David Duchovny, or The Dukes of Hazzard’s one, disastrous season without John Schneider and Tom Wopat. On the other hand, done well, it can be no handicap; MASH survived the loss of Wayne Rogers, McLean Stevenson and Larry Linville, and Doctor Who and James Bond change their lead actors on a regular basis.

The cast changes for BBC3’s Being Human have been well-publicised – a mistake in my opinion, but a logical approach in these days of internet rumour, gossip and spoilers. From being a cultish, word of mouth modest success for a lesser BBC channel, Being Human has become a massive, popular hit with an international following, so any developments are going to be big news. It was well-known that Aidan Turner, tortured vampire hero Mitchell, wouldn’t be returning, as he’s busy with The Hobbit. As the final episode of the last series saw him turning to dust after a mercy staking by best friend George, the show’s fans were already uneasy at dealing with the loss of, arguably, the most popular character in the show.

But the show was never just about Mitchell, and even then I thought that its talented creator Toby Whithouse could work around the loss of one of the original three lead characters. However, we then learned that Russell Tovey, as werewolf George, was off too, albeit with a brief reappearance. And it was announced that Sinead Keenan, whose role as George’s girlfriend Nina had been rather divisive for the show’s fans, wasn’t coming back at all.

With that leaving ghostly Annie as the only original character standing, I must admit even I was starting to think that the show might have had its day. But I’m a great admirer of Toby Whithouse’s writing, so I was prepared to give the new-look Being Human a try. I wanted to be convinced. And after one episode, I have to say that I’m not, yet. But I’m not unconvinced either.

Because far from being a slam bang introduction to the new setup, this first episode of series 4 was actually something of a slow burner. There was plenty of action, true; but by the end of the story, newly introduced vampire Hal hadn’t even got to Barry, let alone met his soon-to-be housemates. It was fairly obvious that we’d be seeing more of last year’s newly introduced werewolf Tom, and he was very much in evidence, but firstly we had to deal with what had happened since we last saw our heroes, declaring to vampire Old One Wyndham that he’d got a fight on his hands.

In a typically tricksy move, Whithouse opened the episode unexpectedly in a flash forward to a nightmare 2037, with vampires overrunning the planet. This was visualised economically by director Philip John, with a few exterior shots of burning London leading to a sequence in an underground Resistance HQ, where crucifix laden freedom fighters were listening to the fall of New York via shortwave radio. As their unseen operative was overpowered, his voice was replaced by a sneering, English-accented vampire declaring, “the Earth belongs to the vampires.” – a near quote from the very end of the first disc of Jeff Wayne’s musical War of the Worlds. The one called, like this episode, “Eve of the War”.

Of course, that clever title was more than a reference to a cult 1978 rock album; as the episode progressed, it became clear that the young woman leading the Resistance was actually George and Nina’s grown up daughter, named Eve by George with his dying breath.

Ah, George. That’s where I thought it was perhaps unwise to let it be commonly known before the series started that Russell Tovey was leaving. As a result, it was fairly obvious that it would be early on in the series, an impression reinforced by his placement right at the back of the much circulated publicity shot of the cast this year. This meant that his eventual, heroic demise in this episode came as no particular surprise, whereas if we hadn’t known Tovey was leaving it might have been a genuine shock.

George, it transpired, had been busy between series. He’d killed Wyndham (I’m guessing because of more casting problems; a shame, because Lee Ingleby’s sneering, arrogant Old One had looked like a promising new villain). In retaliation, the vampires had killed his beloved Nina, beating her to death with baseball bats. While this set George up nicely to be the traumatised, grief-wracked hermit we saw here, it was again a little too obvious a result of casting problems. Again, had we not known Sinead Keenan was leaving the show, this could have come as an unexpected shock.

Still, not everyone is as familiar as me with the difficulties of cast retention in a long running TV show, or necessarily pays attention to the behind-the-scenes gossip on the likes of Digital Spy. It’s fair to say that, without that insider knowledge, these revelations would work pretty well, and anyone who’d managed to avoid the backstage gossip must have had a very different experience to me.

This episode was less concerned with getting the new ensemble together post-haste than establishing the plot threads for this year. Recurring flash forwards to 2037 established that George and Nina’s daughter has a Big Destiny in the coming fight; meanwhile, a nest of vampires in Barry were preparing for the arrival of the Old Ones, who promised to bring an old-fashioned conquest of fire and the sword to our shores.

We were introduced to Wyndham’s ‘replacement’, Griffin, another Old One who was placed high in the local police force. Alex Jennings did well as the character, a vampire very much in the traditional mould with typical arrogance and contempt for humanity (and werewolves). But I must say, the character came across as little more than a thin shadow of previous vampire baddies, Herrick in particular; and I wasn’t altogether heartbroken at his fairly quick demise. If the show’s going to continue, it shouldn’t be repeating itself.

Much more interesting was the hip, modern vampire Cutler, who I suspect is going to be the real main baddie this series. Cutler was disdainful of the Old Ones archaic plans for conquest – “The humans would soon have an army raised. On Twitter.” Instead, he proposed an alternative that seemed scarily realistic in these days of manufactured media scapegoats like, say, disabled people on benefits. Give the vampire a new context, was his proposition, by showing humanity something even scarier.

It soon became clear that the “even scarier” something was going to be werewolves, as Cutler used his mobile phone to film the transformations of the trapped George and Tom. Andrew Gower as Cutler is a very different vampire from the likes of Herrick, Wyndham or Griffin, and this storyline looks like it could be interesting.

With all this going on, our new vampire ‘good guy’ had to be established too. So we also intercut with new boy Hal, introduced in a barber shop getting a haircut from his aging werewolf flatmate Leo. It was great to see venerable old Louis Mahoney as Leo; many of us geeks remember him well from classic Doctor Who, not to mention a heart wrenching guest spot in 2007’s Blink. Leo made the point that it must be impossible to cut Superman’s hair, presumably an allusion to similar problems with vampires; principally, that they can’t be seen in mirrors, as we were amusingly shown. But this did make me think – how, then, do they shave? We know they grow stubble, Mitchell was scarcely without it. Perhaps Hal, at least, can get Leo to shave him…

Damien Molony, as Hal, is physically a little too similar to Mitchell for my liking – as I said, change should be more than repetition. But the character is already nicely distinct from Mitchell’s hedonistic indulgence / tortured self-loathing persona. Hal is assured, quiet, and apparently far, far older than Mitchell was. There are hints that he could be much, much more violent too, and only his friendship with Leo had been holding him back.

It seemed a little contrived that Southend played host to another vampire/werewolf/ghost household, as we were introduced to Hal and Leo’s other flatmate, the ghostly Pearl. But that aside, their relationship was well-realised and (presumably intentionally) reminded me nostalgically of what Being Human was like when it started. The trouble with that, though, is that it made me reflect on how much more enjoyable it was before the encroachment of Big Storylines about Conflicting Supernatural Forces that Control the Destiny of the World. Not that this isn’t well enough done; but there are already plenty of shows doing that. The original appeal of Being Human was in placing supernatural beings in the most ordinary of settings. Get them caught up in a battle for mankind’s destiny, and you’re in more familiar – and less interesting – territory.

Still, Whithouse threw us some fun, interesting guest characters as if to make up for this familiarity. Darren Evans was a standout as motormouth vampire thrall and eternal loser Dewi; effortlessly funny and sympathetic, I was glad to see him spared staking by the episode’s end. Maybe we’ll see him again, but it seems unlikely that he’ll have much of a part to play in this year’s Big Story.

Unlike the ubiquitous Mark Williams, who played an integral part as ‘vampire recorder’ Regus. It was a nicely comical turn with moments of gravitas and drama; pretty much what you’d expect from the actor who played Arthur Weasley in the Harry Potter movies. Regus was instrumental in avoiding Griffin’s intended sacrifice of baby Eve, playing for time with some amusing business about rituals, robes and incantations (which were a random jumble of commonly known Latin phrases). All because he’d discovered, via a parchment of human skin complete with nipples, that Eve had a part to play in a Big Prophecy. Nicely enough done, but wasn’t that the plot behind about half of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Regus managed to stave off Eve’s execution long enough for George to force a halfway house of his usual transformation, which was obviously not going to end well. He killed most of the vampires (though noticeably not Cutler), but he was obviously not coming back from this mangled form. So we got a not entirely unexpected touching death scene. As George died, his ghost appeared – together with his door to the afterlife – and he bade farewell, off to join his beloved Nina. Sadly, this was less moving than Mitchell’s death last year; partly, as I say, because it was half expected, but also because it seemed a little contrived. If George was so motivated to protect his daughter and continue the war against the vampires, it seems unlikely that he’d so willingly go to his death, even if it was to be with Nina. He had far too much unfinished business on Earth for that to be entirely believable.

With all this going on, Annie hadn’t a great deal to do this week – a shame, as her understated niceness and hinted-at power were always at least as interesting as Mitchell and George’s self-flagellation. Nonetheless, Lenora Critchlow was as good as ever, and those hints about her power and destiny were still coming. As usual, she was a mixture of understated scattiness and real humanity. She was distraught at her failure to keep Eve out of the hands of the vampires, but had also come up with an amusing term for her teleportation power – doing a Rentaghost.

“That’s just stupid,” commented genuinely nasty vampire cop Fergus when he suddenly, startlingly revealed that he could see her. Yes, it is, and that’s sort of the point; of all the characters, Annie is the one who’s managed to retain the most of her human ordinariness, in spite of everything. She’s also, now, the show’s only constant, its only link to what it was. I don’t envy Lenora Critchlow the task of being longtime fans’ only anchor to the show they’d come to love.

Overall then, a pretty packed episode that nonetheless did little to establish the show’s new status quo. That’s maybe as it should be; a new status quo perhaps shouldn’t be set up too quickly for a show as established as this. It felt transitional rather than satisfying in itself, and set up a wealth of new storylines. We already knew we liked Tom (and it’s nice to see Michael Socha get a regular cult TV role to compete with his lookalike sister Lauren from Misfits). Hal looks to be interesting, and I’m glad we’ve got a new take on the vampires’ plans for world domination.

But as the episode ended with future Eve arranging her own death, then stepping through her door with the announcement that she was heading off to the past to “kill that baby” and prevent the nightmare from happening, we added time paradoxes to an already complicated mythology. With our glimpse at Hal, Leo and Pearl’s household, I found myself longing somewhat for the days when Being Human was a simpler series, without the Buffy-style mythos. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed this and will continue to watch, but I’ve yet to be convinced that the show hasn’t drifted too far from the concept I originally came to love.

The Fades–he sees dead people

“Why do people assume death is fair? It’s totally random – just like life.”

Dead birds are falling from the skies. In the dark night streets, a woman is attacked by a weird grey skeletal figure with yellow eyes. A teenage boy awakes from nightmares of the end of the world, wetting his bed, and sees grey cadaverous shades of the dead everywhere he looks. The recently dead roam a forest, light blaring from their torsos, seeking one of the few places left to ascend since man invented concrete.

Welcome to the world of The Fades, trailered so cryptically and effectively on BBC3 recently. “That looks cool, “ I remember thinking of the hyperdramatic but undetailed trailers, set my Tivo to record it and promptly forgot it existed. Yesterday I found my recording, watched it, and realised that this has the potential to actually be rather interesting.

Much has been made of this as a new ‘cult’ youth drama, much in the vein of Misfits and actually from the same channel that produced the sleeper hit Being Human. The Fades certainly does have this kind of potential, but it’s aiming at a far younger ‘youth’ audience than either of those shows. While the heroes of Misfits are young, they’re clearly older than school age; and the vampires and werewolves of Being Human must be pushing thirty (or far older if they’re vampires, whatever age they look). By contrast, The Fades has a hero who’s still in the sixth form, presumably between 17 and 18 years of age. The result is that, with its supernatural weirdness and teenage hero, this feels like nothing so much as one of those classic spooky children’s dramas that both BBC and ITV did so well in the 70s and 80s, updated to include swearing, sex references and some genuine horror.

That post-watershed slot might sadly lose it some of the teenage viewers it might otherwise have got; but in these days of Sky Plus and iPlayer, I doubt that. The fact that what seems ostensibly like a teenage show has so much in it that could be deemed ‘adult’ is presumably down to the writer. Jack Thorne is a playwright who cut his TV writing teeth on Skins, another show that tries to show a realistic portrait of British youth, then graduated onto working with Shane Meadows on the excellent This is England 86.

Those influences show; while 80s teenage dramas were all about gritty portrayals of joblessness (hello, Tucker’s Luck), and Skins is all about hedonistic fun laced with social reality, The Fades brings precisely those approaches to a typically freaky, Children’s BBC-like tale. Nominal hero Paul (Iain de Caestecker) is a believable and likeable teenage nerd; witness his hilarious attempts to smoke in a vain attempt to impress the friend of his sister he has such an obvious crush on. Or his convincingly irritating family – his mum smirks at his frustrated assertion that he’s “trying to be a man”, and his sister (Lily Loveless, worlds away from the lesbian earth mother type she played in, yes, Skins) is a constant source of patronising embarrassment.

Again as in classic children’s spook shows, Paul is accompanied by a wisecracking best friend whose primary function is to be the comic relief. Mac (played brilliantly by Daniel Kaluuya out of, guess what, Skins) is a horror fanatic whose pop culture musings on Nightmare on Elm Street and The Sixth Sense, delivered in a marvellously deadpan way, counterpoint a real horror story happening to his best mate that he can’t even see.

As in many classic children’s spook shows, our heroes become involved while messing about. An unwilling Paul has been dragged into an abandoned underground shopping mall by Mac, desperate to find ‘”weird objects” for a horror film he wants to make. Tumbling down an unforeseen escalator, Paul finds himself in the middle of a mysterious confrontation between gun toting nutter Neil (Johnny Harris, previously terrifying as Lol’s rapey stepdad in This is England 86) and the terrifying skeletal figure we saw attacking Natalie Dormer in the pre-credits sequence. Dormer is somehow involved; her character, Sarah, is already dead by this point. But she’s got top billing, she played Anne Boleyn in The Tudors, and anyway this is the sort of show where death isn’t really a handicap to further appearances.

Like any sensible teenage nerd, Paul is terrified and runs away. But he can’t escape, as he begins to suffer the same scary dream visions Sarah used to have – visions of the end of the world, with him as a lone survivor in a corpsescape where ashes rain down thick and fast. From here it just gets madder and madder; Neil turns up unannounced in Paul’s bedroom to act as a sort of Obi Wan Kenobi mentor, as Paul begins to see the shades of the dead on street corners. Some of the dead, Neil explains, can’t ‘ascend’, and linger on Earth; this makes them act “shitty”. They disintegrate into ashes if a living person ‘passes through’ them; we see this happen as Paul stumbles through one in in an underground subway, and she crumbles into precisely the kind of ashes that have been haunting his dreams.

Paul, it seems, has some kind of ‘purpose’; perhaps he’s the Muad’Dib. Later, Neil shows him hordes of the dead trying to ascend, but it looks like Sarah’s just missed the boat. She can still talk, it seems – for now. But only Neil and Paul will be able to see her. But she’s not the one they have to worry about; that scary skeletal grey thing that killed her – and nearly sucked out Neil’s eye with its green tongue – is “something new” that has the potential to end the world. It’s already killed not just Sarah, but Neil’s other sidekick – a welcome return for This Life’s Daniela Nardini, as a pistol-packing, faith healing Scottish vicar, and I hope she’s not dead for good!

All of this is great stuff in itself, though as of part one, who knows what it can all mean? It’s reminiscent of so many classic children’s spook dramas, from King of the Castle through Moondial to Century Falls. But what makes it even better is the Skins-like sense of realism about what it’s like to be a teenager, that presumably gave it its post-watershed slot. Aside from the swearing, and sex references (when Paul starts telling Mac about his dreams, Mac automatically leaps to the conclusion that they’re of the wet variety), there is plenty of wince-making accuracy to Paul’s position as the school’s introverted nerd. “Nobody even notices us,”comments the more excitable Mac, shortly before a slightly comic bit of business ends up with them hiding in a cubicle of the girls’ toilet while a girl does her business next door. “That’s probably the most sexual thing that’s ever happened to me,” notes Mac. Elsewhere, Paul is in therapy because of his bedwetting, but is understandably unkeen to reveal what’s been happening to his therapist, and he has a massive, possibly requited crush on his sister’s best friend, much to his sister’s malicious amusement.

This blend of classy supernatural drama with teenage realism makes The Fades like the sort of drama I would have killed to have seen on Children’s BBC when I was a teenager. It’s all very well having your hero as a teenage boy but if those central teenage boy things like sexual frustration, swearing and wet dreams don’t get mentioned, how much can you truly believe in the character? This has all that in spades, plus some genuinely witty dialogue, taut direction and scary special effects. It’s only part one of the first series, so who knows how good it’ll be, but I thoroughly enjoyed this, and if there’s any justice, BBC3 will have another Being Human-style hit on its hands. Not sure yet if I’ll blog on this episode by episode, but if the next one is as good, I very probably will.

The Shock of the New

This week, I have been mostly surrounded by sex.

No, I’m not living in some hedonistic fantasy of nonstop orgies – but my television is. At least that’s what it seems like, as the new TV season gets underway with the return of some old favourites and some distinctly dubious new ones.

To start with, historical rumpy pumpy fest The Tudors is back for its final season. In the mists of time, when this purportedly “85% accurate” portrayal of Henry VIII’s court first started, I theorised that it would have to end when the historical figures in it stopped looking photogenic. Not so – in its increasingly tenuous relationship with actual history, the series has taken the approach of, basically, letting the characters not age at all.

Henry by now should be grossly overweight and diseased; in the show he still looks like, well, Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Which is pretty good for a bloke in the 16th century who’s over 50 years old. Granted, they’ve let Jonathan grow his hair a bit longer and have a slightly bushier beard, but that’s it as far as aging goes. And as to the gross obesity, this Henry still appears to go to the Tudor equivalent of the gym every day, judging by his still frequent sex scenes.

The aforementioned sex is now with wife number 5, Catherine Howard. As portrayed by Tamzin Merchant, Catherine, it seems, was some kind of a giggling imbecile. All right, I know she really was only 17 years old, but she can’t have been this dense, surely? Meanwhile, she’s been getting flirty looks from pretty young courtier Thomas Culpeper (hobbies: rape and murder). This already doesn’t look like it’s going to end well – and since we’ve got one more wife to cram in by the end of the season, even if you don’t know the real facts you can probably work out that it’s not if Catherine’s going to end up on the block, it’s when.

Meanwhile, the Seymour clan is now entirely represented by ex cast members of Hollyoaks – namely Max Brown and Andy McNair as Edward and Thomas Seymour. Henry Cavill, gamely sporting a bigger beard than Henry’s, is still around as Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. But for my money, the cheesy drama lacks something cast wise compared with previous years when we had the likes of Sam Neill, Jeremy Northam, Peter O’Toole and Max von Sydow hamming it up as caricatures of real historical figures. Still, it remains watchable, and will hopefully remain close enough to real history for Henry to actually die on schedule – rather than, say, living on to steal a Nazi Enigma machine for Winston Churchill.

Fortunately for fans of realism, Skins was back too. Oh, all right, not actual realism – the show’s defenders refer to it being a “hyper-real” portrait of contemporary teenage life. Nonetheless, in the past it’s had endearing characters and veered unstably from genuinely moving drama to ill-considered base comedy. But it’s always been watchable, and the gimmick of changing the entire cast every two years – when the teenagers finish their A Levels and move off into the real world – has kept it pretty fresh.

So, this year, we get to meet teenage gang number 3 – and a pretty likeable bunch they are on first impressions. I’m sure they’ll end up having just as much naughty fun as the previous gangs, but in a week of naughtiness, this was a surprisingly low key season opener. Eschewing the full on shagging, drug use and, er, bottom tattoos of previous cast introductions, this first episode focussed mainly on androgynous misfit Franky Fitzgerald, engagingly incarnated by Dakota Blue Richards out of that dull Philip Pullman film. Franky has just moved to Bristol after a traumatic time in Oxford; unwisely, she makes an enemy of the nastiest girl in school, and soon enough unflattering Facebook pictures are popping up all over the walls. Franky doesn’t like this, so she’s off to have some fun with her gun…

The new guys…

It’s actually nice that it looks like this season’s going to focus a bit more on the misfits rather than the implausibly good-looking, anarchic heroes of previous casts – remember Nicholas Hoult’s Tony, or Jack O’Connell’s Cook? There’s an oddball guy who spouts pretentious nonsense at Franky while she’s trying to concentrate on shooting things, and he’s nice to look at but on limited evidence not the best of actors. But this first episode mostly served to introduce Franky, who eventually ended up doing a bit of moonlit swimming with fellow misfits Rich, Alo and Grace. Rich is an old-fashioned metalhead – I didn’t know there were any of those left – who I look forward to seeing a bit more of, while Alo is an engaging, if distinctly unattractive redhead boy who seems to live in a van with some weed and a stack of porn. Grace was less of a misfit, but is obviously going to be faced with the dilemma of choosing between the cool girls and the oddballs she actually likes.

As a season opener, it’s not going to grab viewers like the previous ones did – the very first episode in particular springs to mind, which had droolworthy shots of Nicholas Hoult in his underpants, copious drug usage, a house trashing party and ultimately a stolen Mercedes sliding into a Bristol lake. But I already like this new gang more than the second cast, who never engaged me as much as the first. With parental/teacher guest appearances already from the likes of Gordon Kennedy and John Sessions, this year looks promising.

But if you’re aching with nostalgia for the original characters and that very first episode, you can have a look at MTV’s virtual shot for shot remake of it, relocated to “somewhere on the North American continent”. Oh all right, it’s Vancouver again, but as usual they’re pretending it’s somewhere in the United States.

Actually, the American Skins is a little hard to fathom – as it seems to have pretty much just recycled the script of the British one, the reasons for remaking it seem sketchy at best. Still, I remember thinking the same about the American Queer as Folk, until it ran out of British episodes to remake and became an entity of its own – at that point it became a genuinely good drama, and maybe this will too, when it finds its own identity.

Spot the difference – Brits (left), Americans (right).

It hasn’t yet though, and for anyone familiar with the British version, it’s hard to shake your memories of the ‘real’ cast. Tony is now the somewhat less likeable James Newman, Sid (called Stanley in this version) is played by shaggy haired Daniel Flaherty, who lacks Mike Bailey’s gauche charm, and worst of all Maxxie has been replaced by a lesbian cheerleader, Tea, who has implausibly retained most of the same lines.

That last change is symptomatic of the apparently watered down approach of the US version – is it because even progressive American teenagers find a gay woman less threatening than a gay man? And the swearing’s been watered down too – there were two uses of the word ‘fuck’, but each was bleeped (although I gather some networks leave the dialogue uncensored).

Because we’re so used to seeing slews of light drama shows from the US featuring groups of angst-ridden, implausibly good-looking teenagers – the very thing the original Skins was trying to be the antithesis of – what this ends up feeling like is a slightly more risque version of The OC, with worse weather. But it’s still too near the knuckle for US moral guardians the Parents’ Television Council (a group who make Mary Whitehouse look like Linda Lovelace). As soon as the first episode was finished (and quite possibly without actually watching it), they were attacking MTV for the exploitative nature of the drama, and actually tried to file charges of child pornography with the Department of Justice. Which should help the ratings no end, I imagine. Heaven knows what they’d have made of the British version.

And Heaven knows what they’d make of Channel 4’s new advice/documentary show, The Joy of Teen Sex. Shakily walking a tightrope between information and exploitation, this purports to be an investigation into what British teenagers are really doing sexually, interspersed with practical sexual advice from the likes of James Corden’s sister. So, this week, we got an expose of the practice of “vagazzling” (sticking fake jewellery around one’s shaven vagina, for reasons that are hard to fathom), some eye watering close up photos of sexually transmitted diseases (to encourage the use of contraception, naturally), and a queue of sexually dysfunctional kids seeking advice.

A girl and her mother dropped in for an encounter session to try and curb the girl’s promiscuity, which of course ended in much crying and hugging. Meanwhile, a teenage drag queen tried to conquer his fear of being the receiver of anal sex, leading to very anatomically detailed descriptions of how exactly that works – though for some reason, nobody asked if he’d just considered being a top instead. And an inexperienced lesbian had some questions about the best ways to pleasure another girl.

As sage advice was given out, and the teenagers looked suitably appreciative, said advice was shown in reconstruction by various (far better looking) actors. Anyone getting their jollies from this, however, would soon be put off when the next close up of a disease popped up – this week, a very close look at a visibly uncomfortable young man with a bump in his scrotum.

It’s hard to know what to make of The Joy of Teen Sex. Is it information, or titillation? It seems to have the best intentions, but this kind of show always attracts viewers for quite the wrong reasons. And it’s made with the kind of earnest, patronising tone that TV producers always seem to come up with when trying to get “down with the kids”. With only four episodes, it’s unlikely to be around long enough for anyone to take too much offence. I expect somebody will, though.

Still, one show that wasn’t reeking with hormones this week was the return of BBC3’s sublime Being Human. Well, unless said hormones were the result of masses of violence being perpetrated by vampires or werewolves.

Being Human has, like Misfits, now been saddled with the burden of being a cult hit, with all the expectations that that comes with. So the third season has a lot of work to do, particularly to try and recapture the nice balance of humour and horror that the first season had and the second season rather lost.

It’s hard to say, from the first episode, whether it has. A move from Bristol to Barry Island has certainly changed the feel of the show’s locations, and the gang’s new digs – an old B & B – seem like a down at heel version of Angel’s Hyperion Hotel. And there was plenty of darkness in the subplot of a group of insalubrious vampires (led by a bleach haired and rather terrifying Paul Kaye) kidnapping werewolves for gladiatorial fights with humans. Oddly, they were defeated by stern werewolf patriarch Robson Green and his son – played by This Is England’s Michael Socha, who looks disconcertingly like a male version of his sister Lauren, who plays Kelly in Misfits.

Spot the difference 2 – Michael (left), Lauren (right)

But there was fun to be had, as George, looking for an unobtrusive forest glade in which to transform into a wolf, inadvertently got himself arrested for dogging (oddly appropriate, that). The presence of Torchwood’s Kai Owen as the genial swinger in charge of the whole thing led to a certain amount of confusion as to which cult show I was actually watching, but the subplot led to a funny resolution as Nina turned up to extricate George from the cells before he transformed and ripped Kai to shreds. “He’s got a medical condition”, she stammered, trying to resist her own transformation and generally looking as mental as she claimed George to be. Apparently somewhat unperceptive, the cops took her at her word.

But the heart of this season opener was Mitchell’s quest into the afterlife to retrieve Annie, condemned to limbo at the end of the last season. This ended up as a sort of quest for redemption, as mysterious spirit Lia (a sublime Lacey Turner) took Mitchell on an extended tour of some of his greatest hits of wrongdoing since he became a vampire.

I’m not sure that continually exploring the mythos of the show does it any favours – the tantalising hints as to the nature of the afterlife in previous episodes are better left for the viewer to imagine, rather than being actually shown to us. And Mitchell’s homicidal past might also be best left to the imagination – nothing visual is likely to live up to what we’ve imagined.

Be that as it may, though, Annie’s back and the gang is back together. And Mitchell’s trip left us with some intriguing hints as to where the show’s going this year – it looks like he’s going to end up romantically linked with Annie ( I’m finding it hard to keep track of whether she’s corporeal enough to touch things, but she can still make tea). And there’s obviously some vampire/werewolf hostilities on the horizon. Could be good, and hopefully better than the similarly themed Underworld.

With all that sex and violence filling the small screen, the return of Top Gear actually seemed to inject some sanity into the week. Sanity in the sense of dropping a VW Beetle out of a plane from a mile up, to see if a Porsche 911 GT can beat it to the impact point from a mile away on the ground. It was business as usual for Jeremy, Richard and James, although James had the unusual duty of test driving a very fast car – in this case the new V8 Ariel Atom. Top Gear has become as comfortably familiar as a pair of old slippers, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

With such a glut of new shows, it looks like I’m going to be spending more time in watching the telly for the next couple of months – hopefully I’ll get to write on this blog a bit more frequently! In the mean time, if you’re after yet more sex, apparently Channel 5 have adopted the not at all gimmicky approach of asking former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to investigate the world of pornography (presumably not on expenses). The mind boggles…

How teenage girls are ruining vampires for the rest of us

“The blood is the life, Mr Renfield.” – Dracula, 1931

“This is the skin of a killer.” – Edward Cullen, Twilight

“It’s like a whole big sucking thing.” – Buffy Summers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

With hordes of simpering teenage girls dragging their reluctant boyfriends (assuming they have any) to the latest film derived from Stephenie Meyer’s anaemic angst-fest Twilight: Eclipse, I think it’s time to remind ourselves that vampires used to be scary. I remember as a kid being terrified even of Christopher Lee in Hammer’s interminable Dracula series; he had red eyes, fearsome pointed fangs, and bewitched his victims into subjugation before drinking their blood and turning them into walking, thirsting corpses like him. All right, granted he mainly used his powers on a succession of Victorian ladies who were a smidgen too old to be playing the damsel in distress, but it made a huge impression on the 9 year old me, and my nightmares were often haunted by visions of Lee’s blood-dripping fangs as he burst into my room at night intent on slaking his unholy thirst.

Later, I and my horror-loving contemporaries had our childhoods scarred by, of all things, a vampire television show – Tobe Hooper’s 1979 adaptation of Stephen King’s classic ‘Salem’s Lot. Ferocious Nosferatu Mr Barlow made far less impression than the unspeakably creepy floating little boy scratching to be let in at his brother’s window before draining the life from him. Unlike the Gothic campery of Lugosi’s and even Lee’s Count Dracula, these were vampires living in the real world who cared not if you were a middle aged lady in a Victorian nightdress; everyone was meat and drink to them, even little boys like us.

And now what do we have? The simpering, emasculated Cullen clan, toothless, bloodless and sexually neutered, brought to us courtesy of a starstruck Mormon intent on spreading the message of romance via sexual abstinence. Edward Cullen might be the dream of millions of contemporary teenage girls, but a proper vampire he is not. The Twilight “saga” is the end result of an ever-diminishing spiral of vampire worship that appears to dominate the current reading lists of vapid teenage girls with a hint of old-fashioned goth and absolutely no sense of humour. They’re everywhere; Vampire Academy, The Vampire Diaries, and even the actually rather good True Blood are the best representations of vampires around us right now. No longer monstrous, erotically charged, walking dead men intent on draining you dry until you’re like them, the vampire of 2010 is an insipid sub-Byronic hero who, like Pinocchio, desperately wants to be human. And probably looks like he should be in one of the emo bands who provide the near-identical soundtracks for shows that are basically Dawson’s Creek with tastefully trimmed fangs.

So what changed? How did we get from the menace of Count Dracula to the whimpering, neutered high school stalker that is Edward Cullen? Well, sad to say, there are two rather talented people to blame, though I’m sure neither envisioned the end result of their innovative tinkering with a long established mythology.

The first is Anne Rice. Rice’s 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire revolutionised the genre of vampire fiction, and it’s never been the same since. For the first time, the vampire wasn’t an unknowable, nightmarish monster that had to be destroyed for the good of humanity; he was a person, trapped by his own predatory nature, with regrets and feelings like our own. Even if those feelings were mostly self-pity characterised by endless Romantic moaning like a sort of low rent Coleridge. Louis de Pointe du Lac was the first vampire we were meant to sympathise with – even if many of us had been cheering the vampires along even when they were the bad guys.

The effect of Rice’s novel on the genre was immediate and seismic, and suddenly even good old Vlad Dracula wasn’t just a monster, but a misunderstood romantic. Dan Curtis’ TV adaptation of Dracula – produced the same year and starring Jack Palance – was among the first to use the by now well-worn plot device of Mina Harker being some sort of reincarnation of Dracula’s lost love. It doesn’t really work in Curtis’ version, principally because Jack Palance has a total of two facial expressions, but it became established with variations like John Badham’s 1979 stage play adaptation and even Francis Ford Coppola’s sumptuous and otherwise very faithful 1992 film, reverentially entitled Bram Stoker’s Dracula lest we think it was written by Jackie Collins.

That’s not to say that romance had never been present in the noble count’s soul before; the very first adaptation, FW Murnau’s Nosferatu, sees the legally distinct Graf Orlok trapped by his insatiable desire for Mrs Harker, vaporising in the first rays of the morning sun. The wellspring of almost all movie vampire lore, Nosferatu was the first piece to show vampires being killed by sunlight – an Achilles heel now so firmly established, it’s easy to forget that Stoker’s novel had the villain walking around quite happily in the daytime, albeit with his power somewhat diminished.

Tinkering with the myth is fine – every vampire story has changed the creatures’ characteristics to suit its own plot. I can hardly hold it against Twilight that its vampires can move around in the daylight – though I do hold it against it that if caught in direct sunlight they look ‘magical and beautiful’. But Graf Orlok, while he may have been a romantic (or just extremely frustrated) was never going to set any lonely girl’s heart alight. He looked like a shaved rat, with his bat ears, elongated incisors and bald head.

Rice’s Louis, on the other hand, was like all of her characters – dead, but impossibly good-looking. The fact wasn’t lost on Neil Jordan when he made his rather po-faced film adaptation, casting Brad Pitt as the longlasting moaner for whom death is just an excuse to mope. Louis, naturally, gets away in the end of the novel, and a sequel seems forthcoming. And sequels there were, though it took Rice several years to work up the confidence to write one. But once writing, she seemed totally unable to stop, so that now it seems even the most minor characters from the original novel have another devoted entirely to them.

The most important of these, though, and the one that set the dynamic for conflict in every anthropomorphised vampire story since, was the subject of her very first sequel – Lestat de Lioncourt, otherwise known as The Vampire Lestat. Fun-loving, blackly humourous and utterly amoral, Lestat was everything whinging Louis was not. Having an absolute ball being undead, thrilling to the hunt and considering humans lesser beings put on the plant solely for sport, he was the very essence of the villainous vampires of the past – but now the story was being told from his point of view. Revelling in what I suppose you’d have to call joie de mort, Lestat was the polar opposite of Louis, and yet despite their frequent conflicts, nothing could quite tear them apart. They were drenched in the sort of doomed homoerotic subtext previously reserved for the incumbents of Tennessee Williams plays – and together, they set the template for how vampire stories would go from thereon in.

So – Louis and Lestat. One hates being undead, the other can’t get enough of it. They hate each other and they love each other. So far,so kinky, and horror literature seized on the concept, heightening the always present sensuality of the vampire and turning what used to be a sexual subtext into just text. SP Somtow’s excellent Vampire Junction simultaneously sexualised and castrated – literally – his vampire protagonist, while Poppy Z Brite’s more-Southern-gothic-than Anne Rice Lost Souls? has the logical progression of a vampire teenager having a homosexual relationship with his own beautiful, immortal father.

But horror literature – Stephen King and James Herbert aside – is rather a niche market, especially when it gets that kinky. The likes of Somtow and Brite took Rice’s template to an extreme, but it would take more than that to make it popular. It would take… well, let’s see, a long-running hit television series with mass appeal, smart writing and a groundbreaking mix of everyday drama and comedy with fantasy and horror. Step forward, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Yes, the other person primarily to blame for the glut of squeeing fangirl vampire romance – quite unintentionally – is the very talented Joss Whedon. Buffy was a surprise sleeper hit, taking Rice’s ‘mournful, brooding vampire’ template and adding a new ingredient – a totally empowered, if often shallow and vacuous, girl heroine, who was no mere damsel in distress. Buffy Summers was, basically, a superhero vampire hunter, like Marvel Comics’ Blade. But unlike Blade, she liked to flirt with the dark side, and here was where the ‘brooding, melancholy vampire’ came in. Angel was an undead creature cursed with a soul to make him regret and torture himself over all the blood he’d spilled – Rice’s Louis, almost to the life (or death).

But there was no Lestat to balance him out. That balance was redressed as early as season two, as we met William the Bloody – forever to be known as Spike. Spike was almost exactly like Lestat, even down to the (dyed) blond hair. But filtered with a modern sensibility reminiscent of Lestat’s rebirth as a rock star; Spike was deliberately reminiscent of a 1970s British punk, despite his 19th century origins and distinctly wobbly accent. Apparently defeated at the end of the season, Spike was too perfect a balance to abandon, and he returned the very next year then became a regular the year after that. Unrepentant but controlled by a chip in his head, you could rely on Spike for a sneering putdown or a bit of the old ultraviolence – providing it wasn’t against humans, or the chip would give him a blinding headache. The difference between Spike and Angel was that Angel didn’t want to be a monster but had to fight against it, while Spike wanted to and couldn’t.

And the difference between Rice and Whedon was a sense of humour, the one thing lacking in the overly earnest, angsty drivel of the Twilight series. Almost from the start, the pomposity of Rice’s vampire archetypes was constantly punctured by witty dialogue and the insightful characterisation of Joss Whedon. Angel’s brooding moods were constantly mocked, at first by the other characters and eventually by Angel himself – by the time he got his own spin off series, he’d admitted to a fondness for Barry Manilow and at one point got turned into a felt muppet, none of which undercut the believability of the character. Spike, on the other hand, was artificially neutered but lost none of the menace, even when he fell for Buffy. And the show got distinctly darker when she not only reciprocated his advances, but broke his cold heart by admitting she only wanted him for sex.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a constantly evolving, emotionally complex and surprisingly relevant piece of fantasy television. It perhaps dragged on two seasons too long, though even those last two seasons had gems like Once More With Feeling – a musical episode that actually addressed character motivation through song – and Normal Again, which posits the (unresolved) idea that the whole series is a dream Buffy’s been having while incarcerated in a mental institution. But after seven years Whedon called it a day, and Buffy came to a dignified end. Then the network pulled the carpet out from spinoff show Angel, and that came to a more abrupt, but still heroic, conclusion. And popular vampires retreated back into the aether – or perhaps the coffin.

But Buffy, by dint of the nature of its central character, had created a surprising new fanbase for vampire stories – teenage girls. Girls wanted to be like Buffy Summers – and while some wanted nothing more than the kickass superpowers, still more, it seemed, wanted a doomed, Byronic romance with a mopey immortal tortured by his own demonic nature. Books started to appear. LJ Smith’s Vampire Diaries series, written in the early 90s, was resurrected (pun intended) and extended, while Richelle Mead gave an unwilling world the Vampire Academy series, and Charlaine Harris weighed in with the rather better Sookie Stackhouse series, adapted for TV as True Blood. All of these, you’ll note, are written by women, generally women of an age to have been teenage viewers of Buffy. But the one that caught the imaginations of more emo-loving, self-harming teenage girls than any other was Stephenie Meyer’s dreary Twilight series – the ultimate extension to the trend of defanging the vampire to make him a safe plaything for teenage girls who wanted something a little bit more Byronic than the singer from Dashboard Confessional.

And the true nature of that defanging is to emasculate the vampire. Traditionally, vampires have been steeped in sensuality, if not outright sexuality. Stoker’s Dracula scandalised late Victorian society for its (at the time) overtly sexual tone, with the vampire protagonist playing on the repressed sexual desires of the two main female characters. Rice’s Louis and Lestat shagged like satyrs, Louis with his usual doomed, nihilistic air and Lestat with full on lust. Even rat faced old Graf Orlok in Nosferatu basically dies because he can’t resist the lure of getting his leg over.

But such things are not for Stephenie Meyer (and why can’t she spell her forename properly?). A devout Mormon, she’s been accused of writing, with Twilight, “abstinence porn”. She, conversely, claims that it’s better to show romance without sex. Why, she argues, does romance always have to equate with sex, especially graphic sex in literature? That’s actually a fair point – if you’re writing about people. But vampires aren’t people, and a heightened sexuality has been intrinsic to the legend for centuries. Take way their sexuality, and you might as well take way the fact that they drink your blood.

And in fact, Meyer does that too. Her vampire heroes, the Cullens, are as abstinent from blood drinking as they are from shagging. That’s hardly surprising, as the one is a crudely written metaphor for the other in Meyer’s world. The Cullens have to exert tremendous self control to keep from drinking blood, as once they’ve started it’s almost impossible to stop. But just in case you didn’t get the profoundly obvious metaphor, simpering hero Edward Cullen literally refuses to have sex with passive heroine Bella – a shame, as her lust for him is the only positive thing she does that contradicts the 19th century damsel in distress stereotype. In fact, Bella seems to spend 90 per cent of her time having to be rescued, if not by Edward then by thwarted would be beau and werewolf Jacob Black.

But neither man wants to have sex with her. Oh no, that would send out the wrong message to the teenagers of America. Although the net result of their refusal, coupled with their tendencies (in the films) to stand around looking buff with their shirts off, is a presumably unintentional homoerotic tension that borders on the hilarious. Presumably there’s slash fiction out there in which Edward and Jacob finally consummate their feverish lust for each other – God knows, it’s probably better written than the actual Twilight novels.

So is this the final end for the vampire? From a terrifying walking corpse that wants to kill you and drink your blood to a toothless plaything for pale girls who don’t like to go out much and have a problem getting boyfriends? There are still shreds of hope. True Blood, the TV adaptation of the Sookie Stackhouse series, is a marvellously full-blooded and overblown Southern Gothic melodrama that makes Anne Rice look like Enid Blyton. It still follows the basic Buffy formula of an empowered heroine (Sookie is a telepathic waitress!) caught between a mopey brooding vampire (Bill Compton) and a sexy blond bad boy vampire (Eric Northman). But it’s set in a fascinating world where vampires and humans uneasily coexist, and written in a style like Tennessee Williams without the restraint. Not to mention that it features massively gratuitous amounts of sex, violence, swearing and drug abuse; the dark side of Twilight, it probably gives Stephenie Meyer palpitations just thinking about it. And like Buffy, it has a sense of humour – the cardinal sin of the Twilight series is that it takes everything about itself so bloody seriously.

And while we’re on humour, us Brits have waded in with Toby Whithouse’s excellent Being Human, from BBC3. The comic/dramatic tale of a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost sharing a flat in Bristol and trying to fit into normal society, it’s produced some genuinely chilling portrayals of vampirism mixed with moments of pathos and laugh out loud humour. Mitchell is another vampire trying to be human; but he keeps failing. He’s genuinely funny when out with his mates in the pub, or trying to hold down in a menial job in a hospital; but when he gets really dark, as he does in series one when caught in a vampire civil war or series two when he’s out for revenge, he is one of the most chilling vampires you’ll have seen for ages.

And the kinkier, more niche aspects of horror literature are fighting a rearguard action against the nauseating spectacle of the Twilight series. This is often better demonstrated in the world of comics, where Steve Niles gave us the excellent (and extremely violent) 30 Days of Night (coincidentally adapted into a film directed by David Slade, who has just given us the latest Twilight movie).

So hopefully, this faddish adoption of a monster by insipid doe-eyed teenage emo girls is just a passing thing. The vampire’s been in the doldrums before, and always risen from the coffin again. All we need is to get the fangirls sexually interested in some other classic monster. I suggest they try going on a date with a flesh eating zombie…