Airings

Not long ago we had BBC1’s Apparitions, about a Catholic priest with a penchant for exorcism. We also saw the end late last year of the delightful Colin Morgan’s portrayal of a young Merlin in a BBC1 drama of that name. Now we have Demons.

It seems we can’t do supernatural without the obligatory CGI these days. It doesn’t have to be like that (Apparitions was an exception), and leaving a few things to the viewer’s imagination can often create the best images.

(As a user comments on the Internet Movie Database website, “So much can be achieved without constant special effects. But hey! Now that we can do ’em, someone has to keep the nurds [sic] in work.”)

Cleaning up his act:
Cooke (minus kit) with mop.

And so to Demons. Hmm. Well. Somehow, it just doesn’t work. And that’s a pity, because it stars, as a young Luke Van Helsing, the über-totty Christian Cooke – he of Echo Beach fame (though that, by his own admission in a Pink Paper interview he gave recently, was crap).

It was only Cooke’s presence in Demons (ITV1) that kept me watching for as many episodes as I did. But I’m afraid I just had to forsake it. Life’s too short. Perhaps if he took his kit off more – as he did in Echo Beach – it would have drawn bigger audiences. However, apart from one or two scenes in the first episode (which is what ensured I came back for the second!), the stunning Cooke has remained pretty well clothed.

Drama? What drama?

What of the drama itself? Well, it seems to want to do so much. First, we have to have – though quite why I haven’t been able to work out – the names of characters from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. We get a Mina Harker (Zoë Tapper) – she’s a young blind woman in Demons – who shares Luke’s demon-slaying adventurers. Luke himself is, as we’ve seen, a Van Helsing (although he thinks his name is Rutherford at the start), a descendant of the famous Abraham, no less.

The explanation given by Rupert Galvin – Luke’s godfather, played with a pretty awful American accent by the otherwise excellent Philip Glenister – is that Stoker was guilty of identity theft.

What, with both Mina Harker and Van Helsing?

Cooke minus kit (again!):
a scene with his on-screen dad,
Jason Donovan, from Echo Beach

Then we get too great a similarity, in theme, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but the latter was better done.

Add the odd idiotic monster and the mixture is complete. In Episode 1, for instance, Mackenzie Crook (of The Office fame) played a camp vamp who rejoiced in the name of Gladiolus Thrip. Camp is fine; this, however, just didn’t come off and a creature that is supposed to be of the night, neither dead nor alive, dark in the extreme, is instead a pantomime dame without the generous bosom, rosy cheeks and beauty spot.

Camp vamp:

Mackenzie Crook does Gladiolus Thrip.

Later in the series we meet Mr Tibbs, part man, part rat. And in the second episode we encounter Father Simeon, played by Richard Wilson looking for all the world as if he’d stepped straight off the set of Merlin, where he played Gaius to the lovely Colin Morgan’s Merlin, and forgot to change out of one costume and wig and into another.

Titillating torso

If the Stoker characters have to be used (albeit that they are modern people with the Stoker names), why not unashamedly enter a modern-day version of Stoker’s world (unless he himself is undead, he’s not likely to complain)? Why not refer to Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsing as Luke’s ancestor, as a real person within this world, slaying the fiend back in the nineteenth century, as in the classic story, and have Luke as a genuine descendant, facing similar foes, instead of giving us an ill-matched potpourri of ideas that don’t gel into a believable world?

Never mind. Cooke’s young enough to delight us for a long time yet. Maybe his next series, Trinity, will turn out to be something worth watching for itself as well as for the titillating torso.

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