An archive of blog entries about UK TV programmes and production.
UK TV
Review: Bedlam 1×1
In the UK: Sundays, 9pm, Sky Living
In the US: Saturdays, BBC America. Some time in 2011
Think of Sky Living (formerly Living TV) and what comes to mind? Largely reality TV shows like Britain’s Next Top Model and daft psychic and ghost-hunting programmes like Most Haunted. So Bedlam is something of a departure for the channel: its first scripted drama.
Not much of a departure though, because this is essentially Most Haunted: The Even More Obviously Fictional Version. Featuring a host of young, pretty actors – and Will Young (yes, the winner of Pop Idol) – Bedlam is set in ‘Bedlam Heights’, a former mental asylum in which the patients were abused, murdered, etc, and which has now been turned into a block of luxury apartments by Hugo Speer (The Full Monty).
Can you see what’s going to go wrong here?
Speer’s daughter Kate (Charlotte Salt) lives in one of the flats with her pals Molly (Ashley Madekwe) and Ryan (Young). All seems to be going well until they find an old ring (no clues there) and Kate’s cousin Jed (Theo James) turns up. See, the thing is, former mental patient Jed can see dead people and it turns out there’s a lot of them at Bedlam Heights…
Cue the artistic, creepy trailer.
