Apparitions
BBC 1
Picture Book
BBC 4
WE LIVE in anxious times. Dark, irrational forces are bound to emerge, tempting us to superstition and paranoia. Social crises have always been good news for horror fiction fans, throwing up monsters for us to blame ever since the days of the French Revolution and the birth of the gothic novel. The Great Depression, to which our current economic straits are increasingly being compared, gave us the first of the classic horror films with Dracula and Frankenstein in the early 1930s. So it’s no great surprise that nasty stuff has already started to creep back onto our television screens, in the shape of overcooked dramas such as Apparitions.
As a lifelong horror fan, I wish I could enjoy this fruity serving of phantasmagoria. But Catholic priests battling demonic possession has always smacked of religious propaganda to me, which rather spoils my fun. If The Exorcist made you queasy and The Da Vinci Code made you laugh, you’d better have a box of Kleenex and a vomit bowl handy before you watch this one. Here we have Martin Shaw, of all people, dancing the Vatican rag for our entertainment. Banish the cosy memory of Shaw playing George Gently and Judge John Deed from your mind. Yes, he’s a maverick again, but one who’s in the business of devil worship and exorcism. Richard Dawkins isn’t going to like it one bit.
I dimly recall describing the BBC’s recent paranormal archaeology drama Bonekickers as “the ripest pile of steaming tripe the BBC has broadcast in quite a while”. I take it all back. Bonekickers was an Open University learning module compared to Apparitions. How about a demonically-possessed father threatening to rape his small daughter, a child conceived in the bushes during Princess Diana’s funeral? A man who weeps tears of blood when reciting the Lord’s Prayer? A gay trainee priest, miraculously cured of leprosy by Mother Teresa, who is skinned alive in a sauna bath? Demons who prey on cocky atheists and growl at us in Albanian? Sometimes I wonder if Opus Dei has infiltrated the BBC as well as the Labour Party.
If you need someone to stroke your head and whisper soothing maternal words after that little lot, you could do worse than the nostalgic Picture Book series on BBC 4.
Starting with pictures-only tomes for babies (although oddly omitting the earliest rag books which even I can recall), we have cantered through the most famous illustrated fiction for kids from Victorian times to the present day. You can pick your favourites from Tenniel’s fascinating images for Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh and EH Sheppard, the moody cross-hatching of Edward Ardizzone or the Raymond Briggs world of Father Christmas and Fungus The Bogeyman. You might spot a trend toward visual simplification and abstraction and away from the intricate and mysterious line drawings of the past. Adults seem to prefer this, but I’m not convinced that children really do.
Helen Chappell
About The Author
