Penny Dreadful

Penny Dreadful, Sky Atlantic's new huge-budget, high-concept TV drama began last week.  It's dripping with high production values, but at the same time it's a strange mix of things.

First, it reminds us of Alan Moore.  Like Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it mixes various iconic stories and characters into a steampunk sort of setting.  While League had Alan Quartermain, Tom Sawyer and Captain Nemo, Penny has Frankenstein, but also overlaps with Dorian Grey and Mina Harker from Dracula.

Second, it reminds us of Ripping Yarns.  Ripping Yarns deliberately set out to debunk this sort of tosh (particularly in the episode The Curse of The Claw), and also loved getting cameos from famous friends.

Within these confines it's pretty good, and it's great to see Timothy Dalton in such a meaty role, but as with a lot of the recent Sky stuff, it's not as good as it thinks it is.  Yes, it's suspenseful...  but one person's 'nail-biting suspense' is another person's 'get on with it', and more often than not we fall into the second camp.

The Thirteenth Tale

The novel may have been a bestseller in 2006, but we'd neither of us heard of it, so we waited in vain for a haunting, or something even vaguely creepy to happen, but this was very much a cosy-slipper affair - familiar gothic/psychological thriller territory - and not much more than an ok way to spend 90 minutes of post-Christmas torpor.

Olivia Colman reprises her blunt, out of her depth role, here as biographer Margaret Lea, who visits ailing writer Vida Winter (Vanessa Redgrave with startling Titian tresses) in her country pile to hear the titular 13th tale.  This turns out to involve another country pile nearby, the crumbling Angelfield, sibling incest, insanity, suicide, murder and red-haired twin girls who reminded us disturbingly of those in 'The Shining'.  Perhaps the novel is more artfully constructed, but the television adaptation could have been the result of throwing du Maurier, the Brontes, Collins et al into a pot and seeing what was cooked up.  Yes, it was written by Christopher Hampton, but... he remains best known for something he adapted over 25 years ago.  1950s Yorkshire, we suspect, was unlikely to be a place of total isolation for these characters for years on end.  Who'd have thought that 'Heartbeat' could compare favourably in the reality stakes?  Margaret has previously written a biography of the Brontes, but doesn't seem to recognise Yorkshire, unless Hampton couldn't think of a subtler way to signpost the Moors to us.

The twist in the tale is not particularly satisfying, and instead throws up more questions, like a 'Midsomer Murders' story in overdrive, and the wholly unnecessary hint of romance for Margaret with the doctor (Steven Mackintosh) at the end just brings the whole thing down to the level of chick-lit with a kink.  Bit of a waste of a talented cast.  Speaking of which, we're hoping Emily Beecham gets to play someone sane and Tom Goodman-Hill someone other than a faithless rotter in the near future, for their sakes.