I have a fraught relationship with vampires. They’re always better in my imagination than they are on the page or on the screen. Granted, Nosferatu with his spindly shadowy fingers is the creepiest monster who ever lived, but hardly shaggable. Bela Lugosi looks like he’d be fun over a glass of burgundy but he’s far too camp. Marc Warren as Dracula in the BBC’s syphilitic reworking of Bram Stoker’s novel was my favourite so far, but even he was a bit too, um, dead. I’m not even going to talk about Twilight.
So Mitchell, the Celtic, leather-jacketed vampire from Being Human, the BBC3 series about a vampire, werewolf and ghost who all live together, has been an extremely pleasant revelation. The first series has just finished a second run on BBC3 and is now out on DVD, while the BBC has announced it has commissioned a new series.
This is a major endorsement from the BBC, who thinks nothing of shelving popular quality programmes (Pulling) and keeping repetitive, adolescent trash (Three Pints..). They should be proud. It’s the best thing on TV by a long way.
The three protagonists, a female ghost still in love with her boyfriend, a bookish but sweet werewolf and the Byronic Mitchell, live together in an ordinary rented house in Bristol. The only things that set them apart from their neighbours are, well, very little really.
Annie the ghost can’t eat or drink and be seen by everyone, but apart from that is a typical early twenties girl with boy problems. Mitchell is struggling with a shadowy vampire organisation and doesn’t die, but otherwise is just a nice guy who’s a bit of a hit with the ladies. George is a werewolf who has to teach himself not to kill but when he’s not in the woods being naked and dangerous, is thoughtful and well adjusted.
So where does the drama come from? A bit like recent Swedish film Let the Right One In, Being Human is all about what it would be like if vampires and the like were actually really real. In my opinion Let the Right One In went too far with its gritty realism, the stringing up and bleeding of victims, minimalist screenplay and unlikely adolescent romance. Being Human has a much less bleak and therefore more believable idea of reality.
I sometimes wonder how much this has to do with BBC3’s limited budget. Without any money for CGI or even prosthetics (George’s ‘changes’ are generally seen in silhouette) there can be no otherworldly monsters to fight, no gory scenes of werewolf monstrosities, no ghostly tricks, no glimpses of parallel universes or even much blood - just a flat in Bristol and some internal struggles with monsterhood.
While Being Human is classified as comedy drama I actually see it more as a drama with some light touches, but it is these touches that save from falling over under its own too-high concept. Annie, for example, attempts to haunt her ex-boyfriend with pathetic results, George uses his ‘on the turn’ wolfishness to give his girlfriend a good seeing to and Mitchell uses the black-eye vampire trick to scare off some school bullies.
But the real joy of the series is the characterisation. These are outsiders with ‘special’ challenges and the tension comes from their encounters with people from the ‘normal’ world. In series one we’ve had lost-soul Lauren, the doomed-vampire result of a one-night-stand with Mitchell, Gilbert the early eighties muso ghost sent to help out Annie and Tully, the creepy, stalkerish werewolf who created George and wants to take over his life.
The script, written by Toby Whitehouse, rings with truth, grounding its mythic concept in something charming and everyday. I don’t know if the title is an allusion to this aspect of the series but if it is, good. Keep being human.
Image: Mitchell, George and Annie in Being Human, via BBC online