03 | August | 2019

Here’s something that I remember, but just barely. It’s an ITV drama – possibly supernatural or Sci Fi inflected – which starred Lesley Grantham in one of his post-Eastenders roles. I’m slightly tredidatious, since there’s only the first three episodes on this tape, and the last episode’s tape isn’t scheduled to come up until October, so I hope it’s memorable.

Before the first episode, there’s the end of a Clive James TV show with a clip of Dennis Waterman and John Thaw doing a song and dance.

Then, episode one of The Uninvited. It opens fairly well, with a man driving away from a Nuclear Power facility, whose car goes a bit mad, and uncontrollable (not the greatest stuntwork in the world, lots of it faked by editing) until it crashes.

Dishy photographer Steve Blake (Douglas Hodge) witnesses the crash, and sees the driver. Next day, he visits the driver’s widow to pay his respects.

He’s rather surprised to see that the man he thought he saw in the car, but unharmed. He thinks it was probably a car thief.

Caroline Lee Johnson off of Chef plays the pathologist, unable to explain why the car was completely consumed in the blaze

Blake wants to dig into the mystery, so he goes to see an old girlfriend, Joanna Ball (Sylvestra Le Touzel) to dig into the story.

Her computer crashes, and security turn up complaining that Blake doesn’t have security access. But we see that policeman Leslie Grantham was monitoring their access, and terminated it.

Then they go to an Internet Cafe (such a new and exciting thing) and find a link to an old coastal village, Sweet Hope, which fell into the sea a few years ago. When they leave the cafe, a police car screeches to a halt outside, two police officers bundle into the cafe and drag out a couple of the patrons.

The same policemen dealing with the car crash were involved, as they led all the villagers from Sweet Hope to safety – Philip Gates (Grantham) being one of them.

The local librarian, Melissa, also has her suspicions – which Blake takes seriously because she was married to Philip Gates. She’s played by Lia Williams.

Blake (and Melissa) think someone is somehow replacing people in positions of power. He thinks it’s the government, she thinks it’s aliens. He dives into the sea where the village fell into the sea, and discovers a lot of corpses, despite all the villagers having survived (and all gone on to influential positions in business and government).

And it all explodes too.

In part 2, Blake gives Melissa a ring he found on one of the corpses. Melissa visits an old woman, the mother of one of the survivors. She has Alzheimers, so she’s not very helpful, but Melissa thinks she was trying to tell her something.

Blake visits Zentex software, a firm run by one of the Sweet Hope survivors, as a tip-off from Joanna. He takes part in their recruitment, which involves an automated test, and some monitoring. Everyone there seems to be a bit culty.

Blake and Melissa return to the old woman, who says something cryptic about ‘Helping you on your way’.

At Zentex, Blake meets another man who’s interested in what Zentex is doing – they try to hack the system to learn the secrets. This show is very vague on what the software actually does – as if just saying ‘software’ is enough to explain what it is and how it’s used.

Blake learns that the information about Zentex wasn’t sent to him by Joanna. So someone at Zentex wanted him to go there, which would explain why nobody’s stopping him from investigating. His friend does some more hacking.

One of the Zentex security guards gets a bit ahead of himself, and grabs Blake and superhacker, and before the actual security can stop them, superhacker falls from a height.

Meanwhile, the daughter of the old woman is worried she’s been talking too much, so she gives her mother something to stop her talking. This turns out to be a mistake, as while her mother starts coughing up blood and her eyes start glowing, so does her daughter, and Blake is with the head of Zentex and Philip Gates, who also start doing the blood thing.

There’s a good cliffhanger, as Blake drives past another flaming car wreck – this time it’s Melissa Gates’ car.

In part 3, Blake finds Melissa alive and unhurt – and she’s on the phone reporting that her car has been stolen. This drives a bit of a wedge between them, because he obviously thinks she might have been replaced, and she’s cross he doesn’t trust her. Was the crash staged by the bad guys to drive them apart?

At what looks like an inquest into the death of the old lady (that was quick if she only died that night) her daughter suddenly starts having a nosebleed while giving evidence. This is happening while a man has died in an ambulance, and Philip Gates has also been stricken by a nosebleed. Clearly, all the Sweet Hope people and others are linked, and when one of them dies it affects all of them.

Caroline Lee Johnson is back as the pathologist Sarah Armstrong. She does the autopsy on the man who died in the ambulance. There’s some impressive autopsy makeup effects – surprisingly graphic for a show this sedate. The body isn’t behaving normally – the temperature rose during the autopsy.

She contacts Blake and Melissa with her concerns, and they start working out that the conspiracy seems to centre around an effort to set up nuclear weapons in the Arctic. They find a scientist who’s likely to be the next target for a takeover – it’s Dr Ryall played by Oliver Ford Davies. “A communications blackout can mean only one thing. Invasion.” No, wait, that’s him in the Phantom Menace.

There’s a scene where some of the body-snatched people are watching a news report. It’s very Village of the Damned.

Ryall gets stuck on a level crossing – a scene that’s straight out of A Very British Coup. There’s an impressive shot where the train is really close to hitting the car as some workmen just get Ryall out in time. It’s a simple split screen shot, as they cut away from the crash and all we hear is the sound effect, so they clearly couldn’t stretch to a train crash.

Sarah Armstrong works out that the reason the man in the ambulance died was because he was given saline in the ambulance. Melissa asks for some, and sets up a meeting with her ex husband, and injects him with the saline, leaving him writhing on the floor.

Blake and Ryall go on a live TV programme to blow the conspiracy wide open. But Blake is rather blindsided when Dr Ryall denies everything, and says Blake’s story is all nonsense.

If that weren’t bad enough, a bomb explodes at Sizewell Nuclear Power Plant, leading to a massive fire. The show is unclear about the scale of the damage, though. But look who’s there to coordinate the emergency services – it’s Gates, alive and well.

I have to say, I’m enjoying this series, but it’s not… brilliant. It all feels very ITV – I know that makes me a bit of a snob. The writing is a bit pedestrian, and the performances are all a bit bland. The plot is fine, and production is fine, but it’s just not quite sparking. ‘Fine’ really does sum this up. But I do want to see the end, now. I hope I haven’t forgotten all this by October.

After the third episode, there’s an episode of News at Ten featuring William Hague saying that he won’t expel cabinet members for having affairs, coverage of the Louise Woodward ‘shaken baby murder’ case, Mrs Thatcher doesn’t like British Airways new tail designs and The Queen dropped some papers.

After the news and weather, and Local news, there’s the start of a talk show, Thursday Night Live which leads with a discussion on ‘wife swapping’. Perhaps I’m just uptight, but the idea makes me shudder.

The tape ends during this programme.

In the ad breaks, there’s an ad for a Siemens mobile phone – the first with a colour screen, apparently – but it seems like they’re trying to get us to change the way we pronounce Siemens. I’ve always pronounced it with a hard ‘S’ but Tom Conti on the voice-over is pronouncing it like a ‘Z’. I don’t think it ztuck.