You’ve got to love an actor who knows what he wants to do. Some of them are all mimsy and floaty and, “Oh, just any script that interests me, really. I never know what I’m doing from one year to the next.”
Not Martin Shaw. No sirree.
“Next thing I do, I want to be an EXORCIST,” he said, firmly, to the BBC. “There’s too much law, too much medicine, too many cops.” As a result, he is now the executive producer on this, the resultant exorcist drama, Apparitions.
And who can blame Shaw? We haven’t had a pop-culture exorcist for a while — and they make for an appealing archetype. After all, when a girl gets to watching a man dressed as a priest, holding up a crucifix and resolutely repelling all the forces of Satan, she gets to thinking how useful that ability would be in dealing with people who work in Currys and call-centres, etc. She thinks how fine it would be to marry a person with such powers, and is apt to develop a bit of a crush.
Meanwhile, for Shaw personally, having a pop at an exorcist makes perfect sense. Shaw has, let us not forget, spent the past six years being BBC One’s Judge John Deed. Deed was — what with his self-righteous shouting over any manner of ne’er-do-well-ery — a bit like a very posh, judicial Jeremy Kyle. It would be a pity to let all that invaluable experience in the swishing of black robes, yelling and fighting for the forces of good go to waste. Really, with that sort of CV, Shaw had to take the role of either an exorcist next, or Batman.
So yes. Full steam ahead for a Martin Shaw exorcist drama. And in a moment of topness, in deciding who was to write the series, the BBC put the call in to Joe Ahearne — who, aside from working on Doctor Who and This Life, was the writer and director of the cult 1998 series Ultraviolet. For those who missed it, Ultravioletwas a modern-day vampire drama starring Miles from This Life and the perennially spooky Susannah Harker, which had a genuine, worrying, borderline anxiety- inducing view on moral relativism. And some pretty hot vampires. It was brilliant — even if the modish title sequence made it look, every week, just for a moment, as if you were about to watch a drama about vampires called “Ravioli”.
It has to be said, though, that the first episode of Apparitionsdoesn’t hit the ground running in the same manner as Ultraviolet. There’s a slight judderiness to it — a couple of small but noticeable misfootings in characterisation (the little girl who thinks her father is possessed is sadly unconvincing, in the manner of all British child actors; and you don’t quite understand why, within the first ten minutes, Shaw is risking arrest to search the demon-dad’s house). There are also a few snagging lines of dialogue: “When I come across Satan, should I just let him go about his business?” sounds a bit too 17th century for a priest with a Nokia.
But despite this, Apparitions is pretty hardcore stuff. In the first episode alone, a gay priest gets flayed alive in a sauna and a man possessed by demons prepares to rape his nine-year-old daughter. And that’s nothing. Next week, Shaw finds out that, in fact, this is all the beginning of The End of Days. I know. It never rains but it pours.
Apparitions is odd. For the first episode at least, it doesn’t quite hit the spot while you’re watching it. But the next day, you find yourself thinking about it; worrying about it. Almost as if you were . . . possessed. And needed Shaw to throw some holy water on you next week, while shouting. (Times)
