UK TV

Let’s face it, vampires are silly. Yes, they are. They so are. Unless you’re stuck in some perpetual Twilight of gothdom/Emodom, the whole “vampiredom is cool/mysterious/sexy/dark/a great way to live” should have been replaced in your psyche by vampiredom is “sad/ridiculous/obvious metaphor for oral sex and venereal diseases” years ago.

To be fair, in part, that’s because of the daftness of general TV depictions of vampires, which should have put you off them altogether. The vampires on Buffy very quickly became laughable and Angel very rapidly became self-parody. The Marc Warren Dracula adaptation was awful, and no matter how good the 1970s BBC adaptation with Louis Jourdan was, his flapping his way up a wall like an overladen man on a spacehopper was enough to cause hysterics – and not the frightened kind – in any viewer.

But it needn’t be so. As Being Human in the UK and to a lesser extent True Blood in the US recently showed, you can do vampires convincingly in this day and age if you do them right.

Ten years ago, Channel 4 did the first – and possibly the best – of the modern vampire stories. Starring Jack Davenport, Susannah Harker and Idris Elba of The Wire, Ultraviolet managed to bring science, intelligence, moral ambiguity, decent characters and all the hallmarks of modern storytelling to the vampire story – all without saying the word ‘vampire’ once.

Although it’s been repeated and issued on DVD, it’s hard to get now (although you can watch every episode on YouTube) as it’s been deleted, so it’s officially a Lost Gem. Here’s a shiny fan-produced trailer for you, albeit one with a very bad choice in soundtrack:

Continue reading “Lost Gems: Ultraviolet”