John Walker's Electronic House

The first series of Being Human (BBC 3) made the same mistake in every episode. The tale of a ghost, vampire and werewolf sharing a house began each episode in the manner of the trite sitcom that brief description suggests. Oh, the wacky adventures they must have! But as each hour-long story progressed, it became darker and darker, finishing with a dramatic cliffhanger that ensured you’d watch the next. And yet somehow by the next week it would have reset back to its kooky sitcom cheeriness, constantly betraying its own potential.

The final episode was different. (Spoilers follow.) Enough threads needed to be brought together that writer/creator Toby Whithouse was forced to begin with drama and stay there, and it was a dramatically better programme. Optimistically, the first episode of the second series managed the same.

It’s now the tale of a ghost, a vampire and two werewolves who live together, but it knew to be dark, threatening and often deeply cruel from the beginning. With the danger of the first series resolved, new threats needed to be introduced, and if the episode was particularly weak anywhere, it was here. Between watching Nina coping with her lycanthropy, Annie attempting to adjust to her slightly more corporeal form, George coming to terms with his having killed a man, and Mitchell’s malaise at realising he was no longer, well, under threat (“You’re a piece of deadly furniture.”), we’re suddenly faced with cutaways to some evil wizard’s castle. Well, an evil Christian’s laboratory. Being able to see what he’s up to, before he’s even been introduced to the characters, the story, anything, feels exactly like every bad cartoon. So we see him performing evil experiments on a werewolf, and it feels like we’re snooping on something that’s none of our business. By the time he is connected to the rest of the show, in the final scene, he’s even more ludicrous, shuffling around their empty house melodramatically quoting Old Testament references from the King James Bible to no one at all. Sigh.

There are other problems too. Russell Tovey playing werewolf George seems like he’s being given direction by someone who’s stumbled in from a 1970s sitcom about trousers falling down while vicars come for tea. He seems to be a perfectly good actor – his furious delivery of “FUCK YOU” in Nina’s face is probably the most effective moment in the episode – but for some reason most of the time he seems to be doing a lame impression of Lee Evans, stammering and jabbering idiotically when a scene calls for calm and severity. This was catastrophic in series one, this Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em tedium ruining vast swathes of episodes. It’s more contained here, but sadly still appearing too often. Fortunately most of his scenes are tempered by Sinead Keenan’s Nina, who is just magnificent. (She was one of the few highlights of the most recent Doctor Who finale, as one of the completely pointless cactus people, but still completely engaging with about three lines and four tons of green make up.) She has a skill for facial expressions that had me watch her deliver lines three or four times in a row, just to enjoy the dexterity of the performance one more time.

Lenora Crichlow took ghost Annie on an interesting journey in the first series. She was the (deliberately) nauseating cheery one, whose story turned increasingly dark as she was forced to accept the awful circumstances of her own death. (A plotline that would have been hugely better if the so-called twist hadn’t been so glaringly apparent from the first episode as her moustache-twirling evil ex glowered menacingly into any camera he could find.) She seems to have been slightly reset here, back to optimism bordering on simple stupidity, and I guess that’s fine really. Her sobbing after a night of watching Nina’s suffering as a wolf justified any nonsense that was to come, and she delivered the best gag of the episode absolutely brilliantly:

George: Have you ever worked in a pub before?

Annie: No! But I’ve watched the Apprentice, and in the current job market there is less emphasis on experience, because at the end of the day… it is just about giving a hundred and ten percent.

Followed by an excellent exit, stage left.

Which brings up the other important point: Whithouse is a funny guy, and here having the jokes interspersed throughout makes them far more effective. Rather than wondering why there wasn’t a laugh track for half of each episode, so unrelentingly were they delivered before it was time to get gloomy, the humour emerges more naturally from the situations they’re in. (I’m very interested to see what he does with his episode of Doctor Who in a few months.)

I really hope the “everything’s okay again” ending doesn’t mean we’ll be back into that same state next week. It needs to stay dark, because that’s what it’s good at. It seems that none of the actors bar Sinead Keenan shine when trying to deliver jokes, but everything finds its groove when it’s all going horribly wrong. Although I’m not convinced Mr Bible Basher is quite the enemy to offer us much threat. We’ll see.