Brendan O’Regan
A spooky BBC drama has Brendan O’Regan is engrossed in “a hot bed of dubious spiritual activity”
I love a good ghost story and BBC does it better than most. Their latest offering is The Living and the Dead, a drama series running on BBC One on Tuesday nights. Colin Morgan is intense as a young 19th-Century psychologist taking a while to realise that strange goings on in his locality have a supernatural basis.
He assumes psychological origins at first when the vicar’s daughter starts acting strangely, but is open to other ideas and in the first episode performs a sort of emergency Baptism when he finds out that the person allegedly possessing the girl was never baptised. And it seems to work.
Fair enough, the plot is ropey – young couple moves into new house, things go bump in the night, man naively reluctant to accept there’s anything spiritual going on… we’ve seen it before many times, but the creepy mood is well created and there’s a fine attention to period detail, with some striking cinematography.
Like the best dramas, it is character driven, and best of all you can care about the characters – flawed individuals trying to do their best in a difficult situation.
In last Tuesday’s episode the focus shifted from the possession of the vicar’s daughter to ghosts of young boys killed in a mining accident, with a loss of focus on the initial story, and I wondered if it wasn’t going to be ghost-of-the-week stuff. If so this rural area must be a hot bed of dubious spiritual activity, as, say, Midsomer attracts more than its fair share of murders!
There was a curious discussion between him and the vicar, with the vicar being the one to dismiss the idea of ghosts, but when they got down in the mine the vicar was the one praying and the psychologist the one questioning God.
Children figure large in the storyline but the show certainly isn’t suitable for children, though any ‘adult content’ is fairly restrained.
I can understand people not taking to programmes like this as there are plenty of genuinely scary things going on in the world at the moment, and the average news bulletin has an unhealthy dose of fear every night.
The killing of the five policemen by a sniper in Dallas was shocking, making for what Audrey Carville, on Sunday Sequence (BBC Radio Ulster) described as ‘an awful week for race relations’. She also featured an insightful and moderate interview on the matter with Prof Kevin Verney of Edge Hill University, worth listening back to.
Last Monday on Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1) we heard from Bishop Kevin Farrell of Dallas who warned about political rhetoric causing divisions. It was good to see reports on last weekend’s news programmes of a powerful interdenominational prayer service with people refusing to let religious difference be a cause of division.
Of course the killings of black suspects by police is troubling as well, but as civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said, on the same news programmes, violence is not the way to deal with this.
Nor, surely, is it the way to deal with what are called ‘fatal foetal abnormalities’ – the more I hear it the more I find that phrase callous and demeaning, particularly when used to promote abortion, demand for which seemed to reach fever pitch last week.
Though the pro-choice side continued to dominate media discussions, pro-life voices got more of a look in, a bit of a fight back perhaps. Senator Ronán Mullen is one of the few politicians to enthusiastically support retention of the Pro-Life (Eighth) Amendment and he made his case on Newstalk’s Breakfast show last Thursday morning, in debate with abortion rights campaigner Cathie Shiels. At least she was frank in admitting that her group wanted much wider abortion access than allowed for in Wallace bill.
On last Friday’s Today With Pat Kenny (Newstalk) Cora Sherlock of the Pro-Life Campaign was outnumbered three to one on the issue.
No doubt Newstalk would defend that by saying the panel was discussing a range of the week’s issues, but it still reeked of unfairness, and it didn’t help that the only text Pat Kenny read out was in favour of a referendum. Sherlock stressed how women can be pressurised into having abortions if ‘choice’ becomes the norm, but I think it is also important to stress how ‘choice’ is offensive when the choice is to harm another.
Pick of the Week
SONGS OF PRAISE
BBC One, Sunday, 5.15pm
Following the referendum result, the show explores how Christians are reacting to Brexit, with uplifting hymns and songs from across Britain.
AM AN GHÁTAIR – DEORA DÉ
TG4, Tuesday, 9.30pm
Stories of bleeding statues in Templemore, Co. Tipperary, in the 1920s.
THE SEARCH
RTÉ 1, Tuesday, 9.35pm
Stories of people leaving Industrial School orphanages on a quest to find their families.