Andrew Bullock wishes there were less rational explanations …
Giving me chills?
On Sunday evening, BBC2 were showing The Thirteenth Tale, which I missed when it was first broadcast at christmas. I’m a bit of a traitor when it comes to British TV. And I’m terribly un-patriotic about the BBC! I think our country make excellent news, sports, panel shows, documentaries and reality TV, but we are a bit “blah” when it comes to making comedy, drama and soaps. Our longest running soaps are getting tired in my opinion, and aside from anything Dawn French/Jennifer Saunders have done, I am yet to lol at a British sitcom. So I tend to steer clear of things like Sunday night BBC one-off TV films.
“It started off promisingly – Olivia Colman on a train, looking strained”
However, the buzz words were all there. “Chilling” is a term that always catches my attention, so I watched. I liked it; I didn’t love it. It started off promisingly – Olivia Colman on a train, looking strained, arriving in a isolated Yorkshire town, taken in a car through the moors, the sky looking very grey and oppressive against the green countryside. Eventually she arrives at a gothic house, which looks about as inviting as a morgue. Inside is dying novelist Vanessa Redgrave who has hired Colman to be her biographer. She has a tale to tell – her last tale. The truth.
Good so far. In fact, it reminded me a little of a modern day variation of The Woman In Black – a superb British novel-turned-play-turned-movie, all of which are excellent adaptations. Set in the early 20th Century, the story begins with a lawyer who travels up to the north-east coast of England by train, so that he can be taken to the old house of a deceased spinster and sort out her finances. Cue series of mysterious events and sightings of ghostly women. The Thirteenth Tale seemed to be of the same ilk when Colman’s character kept hearing strange noises from the garden in the middle of the night. As Redgrave’s character recounts her childhood story, we are taken back to her youth, when she lived in the house round the corner with her twin sister and a series of characters who come and go to look after them, but don’t stick around for very long. This is where we begin hearing of ghosts loitering around the old house.
It was good. But there seemed to be a rational explanation for the creepiness, and that’s where I roll my eyes a bit. That’s more the fault of the original writer, I suppose. Still, there is just something that they get wrong at the BBC drama department. In a nutshell, they’re not daring enough. I suppose they’re too busy trying not to offend the license payer and are more concerned with casting “Strictly”…
Andrew’s blog can be read at drewjbullock.wordpress.com
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