As surely everyone knows these days, ITV churns out populist, formulaic crap 99% of the time. For every Inspector Morse there's been a hundreds of Murder Citys, for every Spitting Image, a thousand The Grimleys. So when you tune in to their latest drama or comedy, chances are you'll be horribly disappointed. But I'd no idea just how disappointed I'd be. For Afterlife sets a new low for ITV.
I missed the first episode, it being an ITV show after all, but watched it this week after hearing positive things about it. If you have been told that the shows of interest too, disown whoever said this to you. They're lying all but retarded idiots, sadly. Conceptually it's disgustingly lazy, being a rip of the countless semi-supernatural shows of late, all of which seem to echo The X-Files formula but in a more serious manner. So we've a Mulder-esque over-earnest lead who believes in ghosts (Lesley Sharpe), and a Scully-esque disbelieving psychologist (Andrew Lincoln) who thinks she's crazy. Of course he's wrong, and she's right. And thus he serves no purpose whatsoever other than to pad out the running time.
I can't comment on the first episode, but the second episode centred around the
It's not just this alone that makes Afterlife such an awful programme however. Lesley Sharpe's a terrible actress, with a monotone voice that'd annoy even the deaf, and she's only able to do drab and depressed. Whenever the script calls upon her to do anything else she fails miserably. Her attempts at crying would embarrass a six year in a school nativity play, and oddly enough she can't run either, looking like a drugged Ostrich when she tries too. Her character's beyond annoying, a mix of cold smugness and infuriating superiority, and she lacks any kind of subtlety too, telling the Mother of the missing child that she's dead within six seconds of speaking to her. Yet amazingly a policeman believes her and arrests the man she believes to be responsible. Thankfully at least his bosses later bollock him for doing something so idiotic.
Sharpe's supposed powers are ill defined as well, but then they need to be as every so often the plot runs out of steam so she has to do something unusual to get it going again. Thus unlike most mediums, she can not only hear and see the dead, but has other supernatural talents - like the ability to throw a bunch of photos in the air, with the only one landing face up being that of the killer. We know he's bad too, because over dramatic music plays whenever he's on screen, plus he gets to turn up on Sharpe's doorstep and deliver lines like "Night night mind the bugs don't bite. Kiss for Daddy" in a vaguely menacing way. Andrew Lincoln, normally bearable when playing the slightly cheeky loser, tries to be serious here, you can tell because he has an over-actorly posh and serious voice, but fails because let's face it, he's only a one note actor at best. Though at least that's better than being a no note actress like Sharpe. And presumably all of the supporting actors were told to act badly so as not to show up the leads. That's the only way I can make sense of their dreary performances.
Ah, and if only it was just all of the above that we had to complain about. What's perhaps even worse though is the dialogue, which tries to be profound, but oh how it fails, it's sixth form college philosophising at best. Lines like Andrew Lincoln's "Hope's a funny thing. Sometimes I think we human beings would be a lot better off without it," and the reply from his ex-wife "Maybe it's one of the things that makes us human" are laboured, overtly patronising, and feel forced in to the script to try to give it depth when it clearly has none. That's just one example of the hundreds of pieces of bad dialogue too. Adrian Lester's "My Super would have a shit fit" and Lesley Sharpe's reply to the question of what evidence does she have that the child's no longer with us - "The evidence of my eyes" and her claim that "I'm the only one who can hear her. The two of us. In amongst the soup and the baked beans" will make you cringe, sigh, and then begin to laugh in disbelief. And that's why this programme deserves your hatred - it takes a terrible event such as the death of a child and makes it ridiculous, it exploits an awful tragedy just to create supposedly gripping prime time television drama. That it's so painfully awfully done only serves to make the whole exercise even more offensive.
A lazy and formulaic concept. Atrocious acting. Bad plotting and dialogue. And the exploitation of child death. Can you think of a worse tv show? I really can't. Many have been terrible. But none so offensive, cold-heartedly manipulative, and terribly produced as this is. The creator and writer of Afterlife is Stephen Volk. All who read this should burn that name in to their memories and never watch anything he writes again. And then contact ITV at http://www.itv.com/page.asp?partid=1215 and let them know just how you feel too. Then hopefully one day soon this talentless fuck will never darken our television screens with his offensively inane drivel ever again.
Alex Finch.
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